Road to Ubar Pa - Nicholas Clapp [24]
As a late-night project, I compiled a cast of characters and genealogy for Ubar. Whereas the Koran mentioned only King Shaddad and the prophet Hud, my tale came to have more than thirty interrelated players. There were forebears of King Shaddad dating back to Noah. There was the sage Luqman ibn 'Ad, a pair of dancing girls known as "the Two Locusts," and the woman Mahdad, the first victim of the havoc of the city's final days. My genealogy even had a column for "nisnases," weird, monkeylike creatures said to have taken over and haunted the ruins of Iram/Ubar after the place was divinely demolished. They dated back to a common ancestor, one al-Nisnas ibn (son of) Omain ibn Aalik ibn Yelmah ibn Lawez ibn Sam.
With no other way to seek Ubar, here I was plotting a family tree of creatures described as having one eye, one arm, and one leg!
Myth's path, I knew, was uncertain and abounding in slippery slopes. But give the myth of Iram/Ubar credit for staying power. Though the tale achieved its peak of popularity in the 1100s and 1200s A.D., it was still very much a part of Arabian culture when outsiders penetrated the peninsula. In the early 1800s Johann Burckhardt wrote of the region of al-Ahqaf: "According to the tradition of the Arabs, this desolate region was once a terrestrial paradise, where dwelt a race of giants, who, for their impiety, were swallowed up by a deluge of sand." In 1860 Colonel L. Du Couret, a wanderer through Arabia, recorded the venerable story of how, deaf to the prophet Hud's message, "the 'Adites continued to abandon themselves to the practice of an idolatry the most besotted." 10
Could a story so long-lived, so rich and complex, be based on nothing? Yes, it could, given its cheerful embrace of nisnases and the like. But, myth, it's widely believed, nearly always springs from something—a place, a person, an event—that once was as real as a hometown, an ancient king or prophet, or a wrenching disaster.
In the late spring of 1985, I called Ron Blom at JPL. Even though the search from space was on indefinite hold, I felt he would be interested in the Ubar-Iram link. It had produced new clues: evidence of the city's existence dating to the dawn of Arabic literature, a location in the al-Ahqaf region, and the possibility that the city had come to a violent end between the time of Ptolemy's map and its mention in pre-Islamic poetry, between 150 and 350 A.D.
"Funny you should call," Ron said, "because I've got something for you. You might want to stop by."
Later that week I did. The "DARE TO BE STUPI'D!" Post-It still stood watch over his computer. Certainly done that, I thought, as I showed Ron my schematic, rather outlandish Ubar genealogy. In exchange, he picked up a manila envelope. "Down the hall," he said, gesturing, and led the way to a dark, windowless room. He switched on a large light box, then from the envelope matter-of-factly produced a black-and-white transparency.
"Can't see much on this one. Transmission efficiency was way down, only about two percent. This line over here looks to be a pipeline..."
He placed a second transparency on the light box, just below the first. "Better resolution on this one. See the dunes here?"
I also saw that the transparency had a printed notation: "JPL DATA TAKE 96.1." We were looking at the results of the space shuttle Challenger's flight over Arabia! Ron smiled and explained that really these weren't supposed to exist. But somehow, in the chaos of the ill-starred radar mission, they had been downloaded to the TDRS satellite, from there to Maryland's Goddard Space Center, and finally to JPL.
"How about this? The radar's behaving now."
The image was of the edge of the Rub' al-Khali, where its sea of dunes gave way to gravel plain. It clearly mapped the heart of our Ubar search area. Further, the radar had seen through superficial drifting sand,