Road to Ubar Pa - Nicholas Clapp [11]
In England, T. E. Lawrence wasn't so sure. Lawrence's life had come to a strange pass. Assuming the name of T. E. Shaw, he had sought anonymity and obscurity among the rhododendrons of Dorset. Living in semiretirement in his Cloud Cottage, he sought to distance himself from his role as leader of World War I's celebrated Arab revolt. He felt that when all was said and done, he had betrayed the Arabs. He lamented his "mantle of fraud in the east," yet he considered returning to Arabia. The mantle "might be fraud or it might be farce: No one should say I could not play it."14
If he revisited the scene of his exploits, Lawrence indicated, it might well be to search for archaeological remains in the Rub' al-Khali. His friend Bertram Thomas had proven that this forbidden region could be penetrated and had brought back evidence that an "Atlantis of the Sands"—Ubar—lay hidden in its heart. Lawrence told an acquaintance, "I am convinced that the remains of an ancient Arab civilization are to be found in that desert. I have been told by the Arabs that the ruined castles of the great King 'Ad, son of Kin'ad, have been seen in the region of Wabar. There is always some substance to these Arab tales."15
Lawrence was certainly the most likely candidate to take up the search for Ubar. An erudite Arabist, he was also a trained archaeologist with field experience in Syria. He had a deep, near-mystical feeling for Arabian lore; indeed, the white-robed, blond figure known to the tribes as "al-Aurens" ("Lawrence") had become part of it. They would surely welcome his return.
In the early morning of April 2, 1935, was Lawrence thinking about how he had betrayed his Arab friends and followers? Was he dreaming of castles in the sand? Or was he simply caught up in the thrill of speeding down a deserted Dorset lane on his powerful Morris motorcycle? Suddenly, just ahead, two boys dodged onto the road. Lawrence swerved, lost control, and crashed. He hung on in a coma for a few days, then died. In Arabia the tribes would never again take up the cry of "al-Aurens! al-Aurens!"
A few years later, the world was caught up in another great war, and in its course Arabist-adventurer Wilfred Thesiger was dispatched to southern Arabia by the British Foreign Service. His mission was to find the desert breeding sites of the locusts that periodically swarmed out of the peninsula and destroyed the crops of Africa. This task, he found, provided a ready excuse to explore and write about the desert wilderness of the Dhofar region of Oman. His evocative, austere book, Arabian Sands, opens with the lines: "A cloud gathers, the rain falls, men live; the cloud disperses without rain, and men and animals die."
But, Thesiger readily acknowledged, "this cruel land can cast a spell that no temperate clime can match." At first Ubar didn't appear to be part of that spell; the spell "this cruel land can cast" had more to do with the privations of long, torturous marches with the bedouin, privations he seemed, a bit perversely, to enjoy. In Arabian Sands, Thesiger mentioned Ubar only in passing, as the sort of thing the bedouin argued about over their campfires.16
Thesiger said nothing of actually looking for Ubar. Yet a map included with his 1946 report to the Royal Geographic Society tells a different story. The routes of his major desert journeys are marked with dotted lines, one of which traces a journey that he wrote not a word about. Through waterless terrain, this dotted line takes him north to latitude 18°45'N, longitude 52°30'E, the very position where, twenty years before, Bertram Thomas had encountered his road to Ubar. Thesiger apparently ventured no further, instead retreating the way he had come. Had he sought Ubar but been forced to turn back, perhaps for lack of water? It appeared so. 17
While Thesiger and his bedouin companions continued to roam Dhofar, yet another quest for Ubar began. On a moonless night in 1945, over the crackle of his campfire, Thesiger just might have heard a Royal Air Force Lodestar winging overhead. The