Road to Ubar Pa - Nicholas Clapp [40]
2. "caves, wherein dwelt a tribe..." The peninsula's only cave dwellers—past or present—are tribes of the Dhofar Mountains.
3. "a tribe of blacks..." The people of the Dhofar Mountains are distinctly dark-skinned.
4. "clad in hides, with burnooses also of hide..." Hides come from cattle, and there is only one area of Arabia where within the past 4,000 years cattle have been a mainstay of a tribe's livelihood: the Dhofar Mountains.
5. "and speaking an unknown tongue." The Dhofar Mountains are the only area where a language other than Arabic is spoken—an ancient language, only recently studied.6
Were these legitimate clues? Or was this a cluster of incredible coincidences? In any case, if we ever found the wherewithal to search for Ubar, we would begin our journey at the foot of the Dhofar Mountains. We would cross these mountains, where to this day dark-skinned people raise cattle and speak a strange language. Until recently, they dwelt in caves.
This was the logical route to our search area in the desert beyond. In following it, we would be setting out in the footsteps of Bertram Thomas, Wendell Phillips—and now, apparently, Emir Musa of the Arabian Nights.
10. The Singing Sands
AT THE TURN OF 1990 I was at work, alone, sorting out paperwork for a documentary film for Occidental Petroleum. I gazed out the window of my office at the company's Los Angeles headquarters, and instead of steel and glass towers saw the sands of Arabia. Was Ubar really out there? Or was it only a city of the imagination—as real as brass horsemen, djinns in furnaces, and queens with quicksilver eyes.
The phone rang. It was George Hedges. "We got a letter from Yahya," he said. His voice was curiously flat, as if he was feigning nonchalance.
Yahya. Another mystic? Like the Count, like Jorsh?
"Yahya..." George repeated. "According to his letterhead, he's with the Oman International Bank. They want to sponsor us."
George explained that Barry Zorthian, the ex-CIA operative we had met in Washington, had brought our project to the attention of Dr. Omar Zawawi, chairman of the Oman International Bank. A physician and philanthropist as well as entrepreneur, Dr. Zawawi liked the idea of looking for Ubar and asked his associate Yahya Abdullah to contact us. If we could make a brief preliminary trip to Oman, Dr. Zawawi's bank would not only pay our way but help us enlist additional sponsors, who would either help underwrite the expedition or donate services and equipment. At the same time we could get a feel for the problems we would face and perhaps even fit in a quick reconnaissance of our search area.
"How about that?" said George with a deep and heartfelt sigh. "At last!"
We called Juri Zarins. He was delighted with the news. At the time he was researching the demand for incense in the ancient kingdoms of Mesopotamia, a need that may have been met by shipments from Ubar.
We called Ran Fiennes. With the influential Dr. Zawawi behind us, Ran felt that permission would be granted for at least an Ubar reconnaissance. There was a hitch, though. Ran was about to set out on another Arctic adventure—a walk, unassisted by machine or dog, to the North Pole. The earliest he could fit in the Ubar reconnaissance was the following summer. We settled on the last two weeks in July. Considering that nearly ten years had gone by, what was another few months? The delay, in fact, would give us time to analyze some space imaging that was due in, in fact overdue, from the French SPOT satellite.
At the Jet Propulsion Lab, Ron Blom and Charles Elachi were delighted that an expedition was now possible. "But," Ron grumbled, "I don't get it."
"Get what?" I asked.
"What's wrong with the French?" What Ron had in mind was their inexplicable delay in forwarding computer tapes of the SPOT satellite's pass over our search area. It was not as if JPL/NASA had written a bad check.
Ron called the SPOT people and got the verbal equivalent of an exasperated shrug. The reason for the delay, they explained, was that the satellite