Road to Ubar Pa - Nicholas Clapp [4]
Ahead, fingers of red sand reached out for us. "The Rub' al-Khali?" I ventured, surely mispronouncing the Arabic for the Empty Quarter.
"If you want it to be," Muldoon replied. "Who knows where it begins?"
Land of the oryx
The Empty Quarter is the great sand sea of Arabia, the largest sand mass on earth. Following the fingers of sand to the horizon, Kay and I could see—or thought we could—distant dunes, dancing through the heat waves. And then the fingers of sand were gone, left behind. Muldoon squinted ahead and began his descent to Camp Yalooni. Beyond the reach of roads, with scant vegetation and no water (the nearest well was eighty miles away), it was the ideal place to release our oryxes, as far as possible from harm's way. A scattering of specks became a cluster of small prefab buildings and a water truck. No airstrip. Muldoon circled once, slowed till the plane's stall alarm went off, and hit the rocky terrain with a bump and a crunch.
By now the oryxes had been in their crates for just over sixty hours.
Clambering out of the Skyvans, we were greeted by Mark and Susan Stanley-Price, the personable wildlife biologists in charge of Camp Yalooni. Behind them, running across the desert, came a band of bedouin, shouting and waving rifles. Members of the Harasis tribe, they were garbed in turbans and long robes. Wickedly curved daggers were tucked into their belts, and state-of-the-art Motorola walkie-talkies hung from their shoulders. They were to be the oryxes' gamekeepers.
Mark Stanley-Price and the bedouin shouldered the first crate from the plane and carried it to the edge of a nearby fenced enclosure, the holding area for the animals until they were turned loose in the desert. Dave Malone scrambled up onto the crate and unlatched its sliding door. Mark nodded, Dave pulled up, and the first oryx flew out of the crate. We cheered. He slowed to a trot and circled, not the least bit the worse for wear. The bedouin broke into a tribal chant. The two other oryxes repeated the performance.
In honor of the occasion—or so we assumed—the Harasis prepared a favorite meal: Take one whole, tokenly eviscerated sheep, add rice. Cook. Flavor with half a case of La Ranchita taco sauce. From the day I had been given the okay to go to Arabia, I dreaded what I was sure was going to happen next. The sheep's eyeballs, I had read, were traditionally offered to honored guests. Kay had a plan, at least for herself. She would lower her eyes, and murmur words never to be breathed outside of Arabia: "Oh, how kind, but I'm not worthy, for I'm just a woman." Inevitably, an orb (perhaps two?) would be in my court. Were they viscous and slimy? Crunchy?
I was relieved when, apparently unaware of this tradition, the Harasis bedouin unceremoniously dug in, the dread orbs disappearing in a melee of hungry hands. The bedouin were fast eaters—to avoid surprise attack, it's been said, but also, I suspect, to get the best parts and leave the gristle to the poky. When they rose from the feast, they were in an exceptionally good mood. They unsheathed their daggers and broke into a wild impromptu dance that somehow turned to terrorizing zookeeper Dave. He was a good, if nervous sport. As knives swiped within an inch of his nose, he pleaded to little avail, "Why me? I'm from New York."
"They're a little cranked up today," observed Mark Stanley-Price.
"It's a big event, the oryxes coming in," I added.
"The oryxes? Oh my, no, dear me. These chaps came back this morning from raiding their rivals, the next tribe off into the interior. Dynamited their best well, I hear."
"Oh..." And I got a glimmer that even if ecology was not a major part of the Harasis ethic, it wouldn't be a very good idea to lay a hand on the oryxes they were now charged to protect.
Late that afternoon, when Camp Yalooni's drab plain turned fleetingly golden, Kay and I walked over to visit the oryxes. And we saw that myths could be real. Here it was the myth of the unicorn.
Though unicorns appear in Persian and biblical chronicles, their heyday