Road to Ubar Pa - Nicholas Clapp [12]
As the Lodestar was struck by the first light of dawn, the pilot looked down, expecting to see the dark waters of the Arabian Sea. Instead he saw, from horizon to horizon, the sand sea of the Rub' al-Khali. The plane's crew scrambled to get a fix on their position and calculate their fuel reserves. They were well aware of the many World War II aircraft that had gone missing in the desert, a fate brought home as they flew over the wreckage of two Italian planes that had attempted long-distance strikes on the oil fields of eastern Arabia.
The Lodestar was lucky. Shooting the sun, the pilot got his bearings. They had just enough fuel to make it to an RAF base in the emirate of Sharjah.
On their heading to Sharjah, the plane's crew looked ahead to see a bowl-shaped mesa rising from the dunes. Seen from above, the bowl sheltered walls, towers ... a city, a lost city! The aviators plotted its position. It would be easy to find: the ruin-crowned mesa was within sight of a known desert landmark, the palms of the well of Lihan.
Stationed at the RAF's Sharjah base, an airman by the name of Raymond O'Shea was entranced by the report filed by the pilot of the errant Lodestar. O'Shea had a two-week leave coming up, enough time for him and his mates to requisition a four-wheel-drive truck and travel overland to the site he believed to be "Qidan, the lost city of the people of'Ad."18 The people of'Ad, I knew, were the people of Ubar. Qidan, then, would be none other than Ubar. It fit. The site was in the area that had cruelly disappointed Harry St. John Philby. Had Philby given up too readily?
Crossing the desert by truck and then by camel, O'Shea found his way to Qidan with relative ease. It was, he claimed, an impressive place. The city's four-foot-thick walls enclosed acres of ruined buildings, and two forty-foot watchtowers were still standing. And there the search for Ubar might have ended. Describing a site difficult for anyone else to check out, O'Shea might have been lionized by the Royal Geographic Society for finding the lost city. But he made a mistake. In the account he wrote of his exploits, The Sand Kings of Oman, he featured a photograph of what he claimed was Qidan.
To archaeologists, the structures in O'Shea's photograph were timeworn but not ancient. To James Morris, a travel writer who had sojourned in Muscat and Oman, the structures were all too familiar; he had passed them many times. Morris wrote, "I realized with a start that Mr. O'Shea's illustration of his legendary city, which I had studied with respectful interest, indisputably showed our well-known road into Muscat. There is something almost Oriental about the glorious effrontery of the Irish."19
In all fairness to Mr. O'Shea, there may have been some truth to his story. It may be that he simply got carried away promoting it and couldn't resist the temptation to caption a photograph of Muscat as "Qidan." His mysterious mesa might well have been a desert outpost dating to the 1700s or even earlier.20
A few years after World War II, a dispute over drums of liquid rubber latex gave rise to a last devil-may-care attempt to find Ubar. The search was led by Wendell Phillips, a young American who had initially gone to Arabia to excavate Ma'rib, a site in Yemen he believed to be the royal city of the queen of Sheba. Phillips cut quite a figure. His signature costume included a checkered Arab kaffiyeh wrapped about his head, aviator sunglasses, a pearl-handled Colt .45 in a tooled leather holster slung low around his waist, and cowboy boots. He didn't object when reporters called him "Phillips of Arabia." Though only in his twenties, with modest academic credentials (a B.A. in paleontology from Berkeley), he managed to assemble an impressive staff of experts for a head-on assault on the antiquities of southern Arabia.
At Ma'rib, Phillips's team started