Road to Ubar Pa - Nicholas Clapp [14]
What a saga! The quest for Ubar had an Arabian Nights flair to it, a tumble of interwoven tales penned by scholars and scoundrels. And Ubar—if it existed at all—was still out there, undiscovered, a phantom city approached by a road that vanished in the dunes.
It was a city of dreams, or at least daydreams. Driving around Los Angeles, I would occasionally realize, with a start, that I no longer knew where I was; my mind, with increasing frequency, was lost in the sands. I would find myself puzzling over how to traverse the dunes. Maybe camels were the best after all. Or maybe specially designed vehicles. I ordered a catalogue from Johnnie's Speed and Chrome, an outfit that produced customized "sandrail" buggies that on a 45-degree slip face of dune could come to a full stop, then restart and climb on. The secret was the tires: huge, inflated with a minimum of air. They could run over you without leaving even a bruise. But then, I realized, these balloon tires would be quickly shredded by the Rub' al-Khali's intermittent flinty plains. And fine red sand would quickly clog the sandrail's exposed carburetors. Nevertheless...
We had decided to use the sandrails after all. And so far, so good. We had changed tires—from hard to soft, then back again—more than a dozen times, and now we were beyond where Wendell Phillips had given up and turned back. The dunes were enormous, but we raced up and over them with surprising ease. Then the wind picked up. We were in for a major sandstorm...
Where was I? Somewhere in Los Angeles, of course, but where? It was only when I looked in my rear-view mirror that I spied, two blocks back, the Denny's where I should have turned right.
Ubar ... The sandstorm had passed, and we weren't at all sure where we were. We had strayed from the tracks of the Ubar road. Hoping to pick them up, we headed north and slightly west. We passed a small round boulder that seemed out of place in the dunes. We shifted into reverse and backed up. Turning the rock over, we found it scratched with ancient graffiti. Similar stones lay ahead, as did a great red dune. We scanned it with our binoculars and spied a fragment of masonry breaking free of its sands. Racing ahead, we discovered it to be part of a buried structure of finely cut stone. Carefully we removed a few blocks and entered a long, dark passage. It was clogged with sand, yet we could follow it deep into the dune. Our flashlights played across inscriptions. With A Dictionary of Old South Arabic (purchased at Hyman and Sons), we began to make sense of the elegant chiseled lettering...
No harm in dreaming.
3. Arabia Felix
He is crazed with the spell of far Arabia,
they have stolen his wits away.
The words of a poem by Walter de la Mare buzzed through my mind.1 And it occurred to me: daydreaming of far Arabia aside, there was something very real I, as an amateur, could do to further the search for Ubar. Though prior seekers could not be faulted for their daring, it appeared that none had really done his homework. No one had taken the time—or perhaps had the opportunity—to see what, if anything, lay behind the campfire stories of the Rub' al-Khali bedouin.2
Given Kay's and my situation at the time (no contacts, modest means), this was about the only thing I could really contribute to the search for the lost city. The resources were certainly at hand: the nearby UCLA University Research Library alone had 60,000 volumes on the beliefs and lands of Islam. I could seek Ubar, not in the sands of far-off Arabia but in new and old accounts and documents. Was Ubar a real place? Or was it a mirage, a city that never was, a place that existed only in the realm of myth?
To begin with, was Ubar on any maps? For as long as I can remember, I've loved maps. As a kid, in my imagination I journeyed across them to distant isles and buried treasure. Now, presumably a grown-up,