Road to Ubar Pa - Nicholas Clapp [35]
The cloud moved until it had emerged from Wadi al-Mughith. When the people of'Ad saw it, they said, "This cloud has come to give us rain!"
God's angel Gabriel said, "O cloud of the Barren Wind, be a 150 torment to the people of 'Ad and a mercy to others!"
On the first day the wind came so cold and gray that it left nothing on the face of the earth unshattered. On the second day there was a yellow wind that touched nothing it did not tear up and throw into the air. On the third day a red wind left nothing undestroyed. And the wind kept on blowing over them for eight unhappy days and seven hapless nights. On the eighth day the 'Adites lined up and began to shoot arrows at the wind, saying, "We are mightier than you, Lord of Hud!"
Thereupon the wind ripped them apart and went into their 160 clothing, raised them into the air and cast them down on their heads, dead. The wind snatched their arrows and drove them into their throats. Thus it continued until there was left of them only their king, who remained to be shown what had become of his people. He fended the wind with his chest and said, "Woe on this terrible day! Sons and thrones are destroyed!"
Then the wind entered his mouth and came out his posterior, and he fell down dead. The wind hurled the palaces together and killed all the women and children that were in them. It passed on to the sanctuary and raised them into the air 170 and cast them down on their heads, dead. As God hath said: And when our sentence came to be put in execution, we delivered Hud, and those who had believed in him, through our mercy (11.58).
Hud and those believers who were with him traveled to the Yemen, where they camped. They remained there for two full years, then death took him and he was buried in the Hadramaut.
Kaab al-Ahbar said: One day I was in the Prophet's Mosque during the caliphate of Othman. A man entered the mosque, 180 and everybody stared at him because of his height.
"I am from the Hadramaut," he said, and he spoke of Hud's grave.
"In my youth I went with a group of lads of my own people, and we traveled through the land of the sandy desert until we reached a high mountain, where in a cave we found a huge rock stacked on top of another rock, and between the two was an opening through which only a thin man could pass. As I was the tiniest of the group, I entered and found a throne of red gold on which sat a dead man. I touched his body; he was Hud. 190 I looked at him and saw that his eyes were large and his eyebrows met. He had a wide forehead, an oval face, fine feet, and a long beard. Over his head was a rock shaped like a board, on which were written three lines in Indian letters. The first of these said, There is no god but God; Muhammad is God's messenger.' On the second was written, 'I am Hud ibn Khulud ibn Saad ibn 'Ad, God's apostle to the tribe of 'Ad. I came to them with the message, and they denied me. God took them with the Barren Wind.'"
This tale told in dusky medieval Cairo illustrates why the Ubar myth has survived for many a century. It is a good yarn, here related by a skilled and stirring storyteller.
On the lookout for Ubar clues, I was first intrigued by the choice of three clouds offered to the tale's rapidly sobering delegation of drunks (lines 140–145). I was aware that a three-way choice was a venerable Semitic theme; similar choices are described in the Bible and in accounts of Arabian soothsaying. But why are the three clouds white, then red, then black? The answer came in a flash of perception from JPL's Ron Blom.
"Tell you what it sounds like to me," he remarked over lunch at the lab's cafeteria, "sounds like a report of a volcanic eruption. First there's a cloud of white smoke, then comes a rain of red magma, and finally black ash falls. Like the old story says, 'ashes and lead.' But I don't recall any volcanoes