Road to Ubar Pa - Nicholas Clapp [43]
Oil exploration had favored the sultan and the Omanis, and overall the proceeds appeared to have been wisely spent on first-class roads, schools, public health (you could drink the water anywhere), and hospitals. The country appeared serene, though there were hints that its current prosperity had suspended but not dissolved tribal rivalries and that old religious enmities—some having to do with Islam and the West—were not far from the surface. Early on, a deputy minister did, quite diplomatically, question whether it was proper for us, as westerners, to seek Ubar.
"There might be some people—not me, of course—who might have an objection."
"To?"
"Looking for a city that is in the Koran."
"I see ... But these people, the ones at Ubar. Doesn't the Koran say they were bad people? Like, wicked?"
I rue...
"So Ubar couldn't be a holy city. In fact, it would have been anything but a holy city. It would be..."
"Sin city!" the deputy volunteered. "Quite. Well, there you are."
We were mutually relieved, though I sensed the deputy was not altogether convinced by this line of reasoning. Always, our team decided, we should be as circumspect as possible when it came to religious matters. As a result, more than once we would find ourselves faux-piously sipping orange juice as Omani hosts knocked down gin and tonics.
Most of that week was taken up by a round of meetings in Muscat orchestrated by Malik al-Hinai, of late an officer of the sultan's Palace Guard and now with the Oman International Bank, our initial sponsor. We paid calls on ministries. We made appeals to potential sponsors. Silver-tongued and charming, Sir Ranulph was a master at this. He initially estimated that a proper expedition would cost $35,000, then arbitrarily upped the figure to $78,000. When no one seemed to blink, he further raised the ante. "What's he saying? Where did he get that?" George Hedges whispered when, in the midst of a presentation, Ran offhandedly remarked that $180,000 should see us through.
Though we eventually did raise a modest amount of cash, our wherewithal to look for Ubar proved to be in-kind donations by companies from a variety of countries. Gulf Air offered to fly us between England and Oman. While in Muscat we would be put up at the al-Bustan Palace Hotel. Out in the desert, "the Official Vehicle of the Ubar Expedition" would be the Land Rover Discovery. To keep in touch we would use French Racal radios, and we would log our finds on IBM computers. And we most gratefully accepted Scotland's Rowntree-Mackintosh as the expedition's exclusive chocolatier. Their Kit Kat bars became an expedition staple. At one point I had occasion to request a favor from a desert imam. Ran translated the religious leader's reply: "He says just give him Kit Kats, and it's anything we want."
By the end of the week, all was well in Muscat and we were winging south in a single-engine World War II-vintage Beaver. We were traveling in the same direction we had flown when we accompanied the oryxes to their home range, but now we continued on. For close to three hours the desert rolled beneath us, then we angled southwest toward the coastal mountains of Dhofar—and a seething mass of clouds. This is the only place in Arabia where the great Indian monsoon swirls ashore, engulfing the mountains in a drizzly gloom. The little Beaver plunged into the clouds; visibility dropped to zero. Somewhere below, unseen, the damp fog nurtured the trees that produced the finest grade of the world's finest incense: frankincense.
A half hour later, we dropped through a low ceiling