Road to Ubar Pa - Nicholas Clapp [26]
Kay and I agreed that the time had come to see what could be done to organize a ground expedition. It was also time to get some sound advice from professional archaeologists. And so, a month after the Challenger went down, I flew to Montreal for a rendezvous with Sir Ranulph Fiennes, Ran for short. He was en route to the high Arctic for another installment of his polar adventures.
Though a hereditary baronet, Ran Fiennes's life had been anything but tea and crumpets. In the military he had shown promise as an officer in the Special Air Service—until the night when he and his mates got themselves up in greasepaint and camouflage and dynamited the principal set of the movie Dr. Dolittle. It wasn't right, he felt, for the film's producers to push around the people of Castle Combe, a picturesque village near his SAS barracks.
Parting ways with the military, Ran took up a life of professional adventure. He ran the upper Nile in a hovercraft, rafted British Columbia's treacherous Headless Valley, and from 1978 to 1981 led an epic expedition to circumnavigate the globe on the Greenwich meridian, crossing both the South and North poles. As a London cabby put it to Kay and me, "Ran Fiennes ... that boy will do anything to avoid an honest day's work."
I had worked on To the Ends of the Earth, a documentary on the Greenwich meridian expedition, and I knew Ran as an immensely likable, if sometimes quicksilver, fellow. I also knew that, although best known for his polar exploration, he had, in his military days, seen service in Oman as the leader of an irregular bedouin patrol. He knew the country and its people. He spoke Arabic. He had heard of Ubar. In his book Where Soldiers Fear to Tread, he wrote:
The bedu tell of such places around their camp fires but none can point accurately to the ancient sites. Their ancestors passed on tales of sand "yetis" that moved with great speed and grace but were hideous to behold, having only a single leg and arm attached to their chest. Their home was the epicentre of the Sands, that mysterious place where no bedu had ever been and where the lost city of Ubar was to be found.1
Ran was intrigued by what I had learned of Ubar, as well as the potential of further JPL space imaging. We discussed leading an expedition together. I would continue doing research and work with JPL on a plan for locating the elusive city. For his part, he would seek the blessing of Oman's Sultan Qaboos ibn Said, whom he knew, and would then plan and oversee the expedition's logistics. But there was a hitch. He would not push ahead until I had come up with the necessary funds. He guessed that our expedition would cost $35,000, maybe more.
With a wave of his ice axe, Ran was off to polar reaches. With some trepidation, I continued on a round of meetings with East Coast experts on Arabia. Trepidation because what I proposed doing—searching for a site by relying on historical clues—was anything but archaeologically p.c. This had a lot to do with a number of past scholars who, guided by the Bible, had for over a century wandered the Middle East seeking the actual sites of biblical revelations, battles, and the like. In spite of all the money spent and the hopes of the faithful raised, their approach had not been terribly productive. In fact, it had produced such a muddle of speculation and misidentification that today Middle Eastern archaeologists tend to ignore (or at least mistrust) historical references and clues and focus on what they find in methodical,