Road to Ubar Pa - Nicholas Clapp [41]
Clouds in the Rub' al-Khali? Unlikely, Ron thought. And then he recalled that the French routinely spot-checked incoming images with low-resolution, low-quality scans. "Perhaps you're not seeing clouds at all," he suggested. "Perhaps those clouds are dunes."
They were. And a month later we had images that were worth the wait. In black-and-white rather than color, they had triple the resolution of our previous Landsat 5 shots. The road to Ubar was razor sharp and clearly visible as it ran far out into the dunes of the Rub' al-Khali.
As I studied the image, absorbed in what might lie along the Ubar road, Ron and Bob Crippen whispered back and forth; I caught phrases like "computer waypoints" and "pixel registration."
"We can do better," they announced.
What they had in mind was a computer-generated merge of data from our Landsat 5 and SPOT images. The result would be a single image that had the sharpness of the black-and-white SPOT data and the rich color of the Landsat 5 imagery. It was a technologically daunting idea. Two disparate pictures, taken years apart from different altitudes and angles, with different lenses, would have to be precisely overlaid: 36,000,000 pixels of SPOT information superimposed on 16,262,000 pixels of Landsat 5 information.
It worked, and the merged image was detailed and dazzling. If the expedition did go forward, we had plenty of candidates for Ubar to check out. The most promising was one we named the "L" site. Our "road to Ubar" led to a sharply defined L (400 by 400 meters) that appeared to be man-made. It could be an agricultural area—or even a walled, ruined city. There was nothing remotely like it anywhere else on our images.
In early May I compiled a list of coordinates of points of interest along our road and faxed them to Ran, who in turn forwarded them to the Omani military authorities. There was a chance that we could have the use of a military aircraft for our reconnaissance. If so, we had a flight plan.
At about this time a very curious thing happened. Finding myself with an unexpected few days off, I decided to take a break not only from filmmaking but from the Ubar project. I was getting a little obsessive about it, to say the least. In our garage I dusted off my
Landsat 5 / SPOT composite image of the Ubar road
thirty-year-old Raleigh bicycle. Though a clunker by current standards, it had in recent years taken me on longer and longer solos out across the deserts of the Southwest. What could be better than a swing out across the Mojave, then through Joshua Tree National Monument, and on into my favorite desert, the Anza-Borrego? It would be good exercise. I'd enjoy clear air, sweeping scenery, and, for company, a couple of paperback mysteries. My daughter Jennifer recommended I take something by the English writer Josephine Tey. I picked The Singing Sands, which had a rod, reel, and a trout on the cover; it appeared to be a tale of fishing and felony in damp, dull-skied Scotland.
And it was ... until my Raleigh and I stopped for Gatorade and pretzels (lunch when I'm left to my own devices) in the shade of a sandstone outcropping. Inspector Hugh Grant, Tey's Scotland Yard detective, has been puzzling over a murder on the London-Aberdeen sleeper. The victim, Grant learns, had been a pilot for Orient Commercial Airlines, an outfit that ran freight to southern Arabia. Grant conjectures that somewhere in Arabia the pilot may have been driven off course by a windstorm—and from the air discovered something incredibly rare and strange, something that led to his death.
I cycled on through the heat of the afternoon and thought about The Singing Sands. What was Arabia doing in this story? What was the something the pilot saw, the something worth killing for?
I stopped again for Gatorade and a few more pages. In Scotland, Inspector Grant drops by a local library to read up on Arabia—and happens on a description of a place called Wabar: "Wabar, it seemed, was the Atlantis of Arabia. The