Road to Ubar Pa - Nicholas Clapp [121]
4. the world's first skyscrapers. Some of Shibam's skyscrapers date to as early as the 900s. Well before then, as revealed by recent archaeology, pre-Islamic buildings in the Hadramaut rose as high as seven stories. (See Jacques Seigne, "Le Chateau Royal de Shabwa: Architecture, Techniques de Construction et Restitutions," Syria 68 [1991].)
5. "You camel men, go..." and "O Khon, no girl in Khon...," cited in R. B. Serjeant, "Hud and Other Pre-Islamic Prophets of Hadramawt," Le Museon 57 (1954), p. 25.
6. "God curse you, infidel woman," Serjeant, "Hud and Other Pre-Islamic Prophets," p. 29; "invoke peace on all the prophets...," Harold Ingrams, Arabia and the Isles (London: John Murray, 1942), p. 215.
7. "As I went in, I saw...," Faris, Antiquities of South Arabia, pp. 79–80. For another version of this, see al-Kisai's tale of the prophet Hud in Chapter 7, page 87.
8. "So sacred that a stick...," Ingrams, Arabia arid the Isles, p. 216.
9. a sulfurous portal to the underworld. The account of one al-Qazwini in 1250 tells us: "The bit of earth most hated by Allah is Wadi Barhut, in which there is a well filled with evil-smelling, black water, wherein go the souls of the unbelievers." He also cites a Hadrami belief that "whenever we notice a foul smell in the neighborhood of Barhut, then, later on, we are informed of the death of one of the most prominent among the unbelievers" (Ferdinand Wustenfeld, ed., 'Adjaib al-Makhluqat, vol. 1 [Gottingen, 1849], p. 198).
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