Road to Ubar Pa - Nicholas Clapp [25]
We calculated the point where Bertram Thomas had crossed and regretfully left behind the road to Ubar. It was in the middle of Ron's long lake. With a magnifying glass we searched for the road, but found no trace of it. As in the line from Winnie the Pooh, "The more they looked, the more it wasn't there."
"Right..." Ron said with a sigh. "To be expected, I guess. With space imaging, it's rare you find what you're actually looking for." He added, "But then you come upon something else that may—or may not—be helpful."
As he looked at the shuttle's transparencies this way and that, Ron spoke of what might be described as the Zen of Space Imaging. You
Radar image of area of the Ubar road
clear your mind of preconceptions. You look for an anomaly, something out of place. If you're interested in the presence of man, you look for geometric features. Straight lines, right angles, and the like. But beware: nature can concoct shapes that you could swear were roads, walls, or canals. Above all, you keep an open mind.
Ron pointed out a few "hot spots," white patches where the radar may have recorded "disturbed earth." Such disturbances, he explained, were often caused by man and his endeavors. "These are places worth looking at. If we ever could." He singled out a particularly striking hot spot. "Like here. It's a hill. But why so bright?"
He gathered up the images and handed them to me. "Have a look. See what you can find."
At home I spent hours poring over the images, millimeter by millimeter, until at last, south of the large lakebed, I saw the outline of ... a city? With a macro lens I photographed this suspicious feature and blew it up so that I could examine its every dot of grain (its every digital pixel). Sure enough, I saw a distinct continuous line—a wall?—enclosing a mile-square area.
Hopes up, I returned to JPL, only to have Ron say, "Artifact." Radar imagery, he explained, has the perverse ability to produce random geometric features—called artifacts—that have nothing to do with what is really there. But I shouldn't feel bad; artifacts had led more than one serious scientist down the garden path.
In archaeology, artifacts are keys to the past. In space imagery, they're meaningless doodles.
We met with Charles Elachi and reviewed the SIR-B images. There was no sign of the road to Ubar. Yet we had a good overview of the area and at least one particularly promising hot spot. We had found just enough to want to find more. Ron suggested that we follow up on the SIR-B sweep of Arabia by obtaining satellite coverage. It would be in color and could be processed to bring out features not visible on the SIR-B radar images. Charles agreed. But this would take time, he cautioned. JPL was swamped with NASA priority projects.
As the meeting broke up, I told Ron and Charles of Abu Muhammad al-Hamdani, a southern Arabian scholar who had spent a lifetime (893–945) gathering reports of past civilizations. In his Eighth Book of al-lklil, he lists "Iram, the city of Shaddad ibn 'Ad" as first among the lost treasuries of Arabia; he predicts that someday "it will be unearthed by ants.... This will take place when despots are gone and the tyrannous pharaohs are no more."12
"Well, there are no more pharaohs," Charles reflected. "But despots? In that part of the world it could be a while."
I decided not to tell Charles and Ron of an additional Ubar item, a curse recorded in The World History of Rashid al-Din (1290): "Whoever shall find and enter Ubar will be driven mad with fear."13
5. The Search Continues
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