Road to Ubar Pa - Nicholas Clapp [13]
The local sheik, who provided laborers for the excavation, was puzzled. What could explain the priest's elation? He reasoned that it must have something to do with treasure; only treasure could make a man so happy. As the good Jesuit's latex squeezes seemed a particular source of joy, the sheik began demanding—and receiving—duplicate copies of each new inscription.
But contemplating his latex squeezes brought the sheik neither happiness nor wealth. Tiring of rows of incomprehensible letters, he fixed on the idea of the latex itself. Though he couldn't quite understand why, latex equaled treasure, and it was only right that he should have his share of the expedition's remaining fifty-five-gallon drums of the liquid rubber. Phillips resisted. The sheik was furious. Things got ugly. A tense cable from Ma'rib read: "JAMME NOW HELD VIRTUAL PRISONER MARIB STOP Q A DI ZEID INAN DEMANDS JAMMES RUBBER LATEX COPIES OF INSCRIPTIONS STOP ALL ARCHAEOLOGICAL SPECI MENS LOCKED UP STOP GOVERNOR HOLDS KEY STOP FEAR SITUATION GETTING OUT OF HAND." Even though Father Jamme said "his latex squeezes meant more to him than life itself," the Phillips expedition elected to pack up and flee across the desert.
Escaping by boat from Yemen, Wendell Phillips could have headed home, but instead he followed the coast of the Arabian Sea east to the Dhofar region of Oman and, among other enterprises, took up the search for Ubar. At the wheel of a stake truck borrowed from the wali of Dhofar, Phillips made his way to the edge of the Rub' al-Khali. Passing a lone bedouin, he asked directions: "When I enquired if he knew the location of Ubar he shouted into my ear faqat ash-shaitan ya'rif, 'Only the devil knows.' I shouted back wallahi sahih, 'True, by God.'"23
Phillips suspected the bedouin might be right, for, hard as he looked, the great road reported by Bertram Thomas was nowhere to be found. In danger of running out of gas, he and his crew gave up. In their retreat they fortunately chose a different way than they had come.
Regretfully we had turned back, heading east just south of the great dunes, when suddenly Charlie exclaimed, "There are the tracks!" It was California Charlie, not my desert-bred guide, who located these rows of parallel tracks incised deep in the hard surface and covered with glazed pebbles.24 I counted eighty-four tracks running side by side. They had every appearance of being very old and must have represented a time when there were countless camel caravans in transit through this uninhabited region of today.
Exploring the ancient caravan route would have to wait for two and a half years. In 1955, Phillips returned with an armada of Dodge Power Wagons and followed the road a good twenty miles. He lost it in the sands that had drifted over it, then found it again. The Power Wagons bogged down. The caravan route led away into a no man's land of impassable dunes, six hundred feet high. With a melodramatic flourish, Phillips recounted: "From here on I knew we were through, for there is no barrier so great as billowing immeasurable sands stretching like a vast ocean as far as the eye could see in cruel and sublime grandeur."
But Phillips wasn't quite through, at least according to one of his bedouin guides. He apparently fixed on a particular red dune and proclaimed (for no apparent reason) that Ubar was under it. He shouted, "This is Ubar!" and, quick-drawing his pearl-handled revolver, emptied it in the air.25
When he returned to America,