Road to Ubar Pa - Nicholas Clapp [112]
4. "The Arabs were an ignorant, savage and barbarous people...," J. Olney, A Practical System of Modern Geography (New York: Robertson, Pratt, 1835), p. 201.
1. Unicorns
1. "one horn in the middle of his forehead...," T. H. White, The Book of Beasts: Being a translation from the Latin Bestiary of the Twelfth Century (London: Jonathan Cape, 1954), pp. 20–21.
2. The Sands of Their Desire
1. "right foul folk and cruel...," John Mandeville, Mandeville's Travels, vol. 1 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1953), p. 47; "The people generally are addicted...," William Lithgow, The Totall discourse of the Rare Adventures and Painefull Peregrenations of a Long Nineteene Years Traveyles from Scotland to the Most Famous Kingdoms in Europe, Asia and Africa (1612; reprint, Glasgow: J. MacLenose, 1906), p. 262.
2. "dashed down the mountain...," John Lloyd Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petraea and the Holy Land, vol. 2 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1837), p. 12.
3. he was a simple "Jewish Jesuit." What a piece of work was Gifford Palgrave. During his years with the Jesuits, he assumed the names of Michel Sohail, Michael X. Cohen, and Seleem Abou Mahmood el Eys. In Arabia, while still insisting he was a "Jewish Jesuit," he allowed that he had been "invested for the nonce with the character and duties of an Imam, and as such conducted the customary congregational worship." (Palgrave, "The Mahometan Revival," in Essays on Eastern Questions [London: Macmillan, 1872], p. 126.) In his later years, he was enamored of Shintoism.
4. "Nothing but an airship can do it," David Garnett, ed., The Letters of T. E. Lawrence (London: Jonathan Cape, 1964), p. 663.
5. '"Why aren't you married, O Wazir?'...," Bertram Thomas, Alarms and Excursions in Arabia (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1931), p. 119.
6. Harry St. John Philby. If the name Philby seems familiar, it is probably because of Harry's son, Kim, the well-known KGB mole. With a craftiness that may have run in the family, in the 1950s Kim Philby infiltrated not only Britain's Secret Intelligence Service but, as a liaison officer, the CIA.
7. "the sands of my desire," Bertram Thomas, Arabia Felix: Across the "Empty Quarter" of Arabia (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1932), p. 149; "the bride of my constant desire," Harry St. John Philby, The Empty Quarter (New York: Henry Holt, 1933), p. xxi.
8. "Tomorrow, the news of my disappearance..." This and the following quotes are from Thomas, Arabia Felix, pp. 1, 2, 42, 131, 136, 149.
9. with an accuracy that is amazing. For decades Bertram Thomas's map would be the only reliable guide to the Dhofar region of Oman. When we began looking for Ubar from space, I superimposed portions of Thomas's map on satellite images and found that he was never more than a kilometer or two off in plotting his route.
10. "Our morning start was sluggish...," Thomas, Arabia Felix, pp. 160–61.
11. "'Twas I that learn'd him in the archer's art...," Zayn Bilkadi, "The Wabar Meteorite," Aramco World Magazine 37, no. 6 (Nov.–Dec. 1986), p. 28.
12. "the finest thing in Arabian exploration...," T. E. Lawrence, foreword to Thomas, Arabia Felix, pp. xix, xvii.
13. "Here then the words of 'Ad ..." This and the following quotes are from Philby, Empty Quarter, pp. 165–66.
14. "mantle of fraud in the east...," T. E. Lawrence, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1936), p. 503.
15. "I am convinced that the remains...," Raymond O'Shea, The Sand Kings of Oman (London: Methuen, 1947), pp. 180–81.
16. "A cloud gathers..." and "this cruel land can cast a spell...," Wilfred Thesiger, Arabian Sands (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1959), p. xvii. Thesiger describes (p. 219) a typical Ubar discussion: "According to Sadr ... the lost city of'Ad [was] under the sands of Jaihman. Muhammad was, however, convinced that this city, one of the two mentioned in the Koran as having been destroyed by God for arrogance, was buried in the sands