Road to Ubar Pa - Nicholas Clapp [117]
8. Here was a living link ... The Shahra also speak of al-Ahqaf, the Koran's location of our lost city. They consider al-Ahqaf to be not only the sands beyond their mountains (which we believed), but the mountains themselves. This made sense, for whoever built Ubar would have also held sway over the incense groves of the Dhofar Mountains.
13. The Vale of Remembrance
1. triliths were memorials ... It's doubtful that triliths marked actual burials, for some were set on exposed bedrock, where interment would have been impossible. A more reasonable explanation would be that they honored dead laid to rest elsewhere, as in the cave of the skulls we had visited.
2. "Whenever a traveler stopped...," Nabih Amin Faris, trans., The Book of Idols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952), pp. 28–29.
3. "the secret of God in the universe...," Ali Shari'ati, Hajj (Tehran: Laleh-Baktiar, 1988), p. 48.
4. "went so far as to pay divine worship...," George Sale, trans., "Preliminary Discourse," The Koran (London: Thomas Tegg & Son, 1838), p. 15.
14. The Empty Quarter
1. "This wilderness ... stretches away...," S. B. Miles, The Countries and Tribes of the Persian Gulf (London: Frank Cass, 1919), p. 386.
2. Ron guessed that the satellites ... We later learned that the satellite navigation system had been more or less shut down for realignment—precisely when we planned to rely on it for our journey into the Rub' al-Khali.
3. "Only a fool will brave the desert sun ...," O'Shea, Sand Kings of Oman, p. 187.
4. The first half dozen he threw ... "AFR" is an informal archaeological designation for worthless: "A" stands for "another," and "R" for "rock."
5. "a creature of night to signify the days...," cited in John Gray, Near Eastern Mythology (New York: Peter Bedrick Books, 1982), P. 37
16. City of Towers
1. "Arrogant and unjust were the men of'Ad..." and the following quotes are from Dawood, Koran, pp. 159, 25, 113, 129, and 138.
2. Our Christmas tree. Out of deference to our Islamic host country, we had anticipated a low-key Christmas and brought with us but a single tape. To our surprise, the Omanis loved the holiday. When we drove to the coast to collect Juris students, it was to the strains (on the radio, in the hotel, everywhere) of familiar carols. We heartily sang along with "We Three Kings of Orient are...," for we were in that very Orient, the land of frankincense and myrrh.
3. It might have been used ... to process frankincense. How frankincense was processed is unclear. Its crystals may have been compacted for shipment, or a refining process may have enhanced its aroma. From the historian Pliny we do know that frankincense was processed at the far end of the Incense Road. He writes: "At Alexandria ... where the frankincense is worked up for sale, good heavens! no vigilance is sufficient to guard the factories. A seal is put upon the workmen's aprons, they have to wear a mask or a net with a close mesh on their heads, and they are stripped naked before they are allowed to leave work" (Bostock and Riley, Natural History of Pliny, 3:127).
4. Where were the columns? After the expedition I discovered that in pre-Islamic poetry (the literature closest to the era of Ubar) the word for pillar is not imad but dawwar. Appearing only once in the Koran, the word imad appears to be a southern Babylonian loan word derived from a root meaning "to make stand, to erect"—and can describe anything from tent poles to pillars to towers.
5. a sprawling oasis. Mabrook recalled that as late as the 1920s, his grandfather remembered a dense "forest" of brush and dwarf trees in the outlying area known as Hailat Shisur. And in the 1930s Bertram Thomas wrote, "I have heard that in the surrounding desert plain are still to be seen shadowed furrowings as though once it had known the plough" (Thomas, Arabia Felix, p. 137).
6. a six-pointed star. Was our chess king's star a star of David? I later learned that the six-pointed star, though linked to Judaism from the 1500s on, may have been