Road to Ubar Pa - Nicholas Clapp [113]
17. Had he sought Ubar...? Years later, I listened as one of Thesiger's bedouin companions, Sultan Najran, relived the journey. I learned that Thesiger, indeed, had looked for—and found—the road to Ubar, but at the cost of draining his party's waterskins dry. His party was lucky to make it back alive.
18. "Qidan, the lost city...," O'Shea, Sand Kings of Oman, p. 1.
19. "I realized with a start...," James Morris, Sultan in Oman (London: Century Travellers, 1986), p. 121. Morris's book is a wry and immensely entertaining portrait of the world of Sa'id ibn Taimur, the sultan who had once retained Bertram Thomas as his wazir.
20. His mysterious mesa might well have been a desert outpost ... The site of "Qidan" could in reality be Muscalet, a settlement that appears on maps from the 1600s into the 1800s. Or it could indeed be ancient, the "Rhabana Regia" of Ptolemy's venerable map of Arabia. In an image taken by the high-resolution Large Format Camera aboard the space shuttle Challenger, O'Shea's mesa is where he said it was and has linear features that could well be man-made.
21. Mahram Bilqis. Mahram in Arabic means holy platform or sanctuary, and Bilqis is a traditional proper name for the queen of Sheba. In Yemen today, if you shout "Bilqis," half the little girls within earshot come running.
22. "almost trampled over the rest of us..." This and the following three quotes are from Wendell Phillips, Qataban and Sheba (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955), pp. 225, 264, and 307.
23. "When I enquired if he knew..." This and the following quotes are from Wendell Phillips, Unknown Oman (London: Longman, 1966), pp. 222–23, 223–24, and 229.
24. "It was California Charlie..." Charlie McCollum, the fellow who spotted the Ubar road, was a Phillips sidekick. I managed to track him down in California; he confirmed that the road was as wide as a ten-lane freeway.
25. He shouted "This is Ubar!" Phillips's bittersweet jest does not appear in his Unknown Oman. It was related to me by one of his guides, Muhammad ibn Tuffel.
26. and prospered in the oil business. As a gesture of courtesy, the desert sheiks offered Phillips their homes, their possessions, anything he wished. He responded, no, no, they were too kind. All he asked was that they sign an option for the oil rights to their tribal lands. Brokering these options, Phillips became the world's leading private oil concessionaire—and his desert friends prospered as well.
3. Arabia Felix
1. "He is crazed with the spell...," from "Arabia," Walter de la Mare, Collected Poems, vol. 1 (New York: Henry Holt, 1920), p. 135.
2. none had really done his homework. Freya Stark, a hardy solo traveler of the 1930s, was apparently the only one to comb ancient accounts. But she never took Ubar seriously and never went looking for the city, even though her friend the sultan of Qatn "told me in the serenity of faith that everyone in Hadramaut places it between Hadramaut and Oman" (where Thomas, Thesiger, and Phillips encountered the Ubar road). Freya Stark, The Southern Gates of Arabia (Los Angeles: J. P. Tarcher, 1983), p. 181.
3. the land was uncharted. Reliable maps of Arabia were a long time coming. As late as World War I, when the Arab revolt was brewing, British cartographers had no knowledge of the location of Medina, at the time the peninsula's largest city. And the map that Bertram Thomas drew for his book Arabia Felix would be the best available for close to forty years.
4. "the way they cut their hair...," Aubrey de Selincourt, trans., Herodotus: The Histories (New York: Penguin Books, 1985), p. 206.
5. where Alexander never set foot. Alexander the Great considered adding Arabia to his conquests, but he died in Babylon in 323 B.C. on the eve of his planned campaign. The fact that he wanted to invade the peninsula—and even make it his royal abode—is evidence that something in Arabia was of great value.
6. "The inhabitants