Road to Ubar Pa - Nicholas Clapp [39]
When they reached the top, they beheld beneath them a city, never saw eyes a greater or goodlier, with dwelling-places and mansions of towering height, and palaces and pavilions and domes gleaming gloriously bright ... and its streams were a-flowing and flowers a-blowing and fruits a-glowing. It was a city with gates impregnable; but void and still, without a voice or a cheering inhabitant. The owl hooted in its quarters; the bird skimmed circling over its squares and the raven croaked in its great thoroughfares weeping and bewailing the dwellers who erst made it their dwelling. 5
Within its walls, the city is a showcase of death, at once splendid and the stuff of nightmares. Its streets and palaces are filled with ghastly long-dead maskoot. The queen of Sheba even makes a cameo appearance. Reclining on a bejeweled couch, she appears as "the lucedent sun, eyes never saw a fairer." But..."she is a corpse embalmed with exceeding art; her eyes were taken out after her death and quicksilver set under them, after which they were restored to their sockets. Wherefore they glisten and when the air moveth the lashes, she seemed to wink and it appeareth to the beholder as though she looked at him."
Everywhere in this city of the petrified are graven inscriptions that drive home the moral message: the pleasures of immense riches—here everywhere in evidence—are for naught, for life is brief and death almighty. This powerful idea is central to medieval Islam. As a legend over the tomb of the son of King Shaddad ibn 'Ad tells us: "Be warned by my example. I amassed treasures beyond the competence of all the kings of the earth, deeming that delight would still endure to me. But there fell on me unawares the Destroyer of delights and the Sunderer of societies, the Desolator of domiciles and the Spoiler of inhabited spots." The angel of Death.
Though its message and central story line are relatively simple, "The City of Brass" in its entirety is a dense, complex tale, a concatenation of imagery and characters from diverse times and places. Emir Musa appears to be an incarnation of the Old Testament's Elijah. And what are not only the queen of Sheba but Solomon and Alexander the Great doing here? The tale, packed with hundreds of allusions, is based on at least eight major sources. Indeed, the brass city itself appears to be inspired not only by Ubar but by rumors of a town of copper and brass located either in North Africa or in Spain. To accommodate these rumors, whoever wrote the tale whisked Ubar and its People of 'Ad from Arabia and plunked them down in Andalusia!
"The City of Brass" is ultimately surreal, beckoning us ever onward into a sun-drenched yet sinister landscape that "is like unto the dreams of the dreamer and the sleep-visions of the sleeper or as the mirage of the desert, which the thirsty take for water; and Satan maketh it fair for men even unto death."
The tale draws to a close with hardly a glimmer of Ubar as a real place. If mythmaking can be likened to a mirage—hiding yet reflecting a distant reality—that mirage has finally become all but impenetrable. Emir Musa and his companions take leave of the sepulchral brass city they have discovered and retrace their steps across the desert to the sea. But then, in the span of a single sentence, the mirage fleetingly dissolves. We are told that the emir's party "came in sight of a high mountain overlooking the sea and full of caves, wherein dwelt a tribe of blacks, clad in hides, with burnooses also of hide and speaking an unknown tongue."
Here, quite unexpectedly, is a sudden cluster of clues.
1. "a high mountain overlooking the sea and full of caves ..." In all of Arabia, the only seaside peaks known for their caves