Road to Ubar Pa - Nicholas Clapp [47]
The Phantoms of the Desert were quite willing to help us look for the road to Ubar. We thanked them for their offer, but considering the overlay of modern tracks, we felt we would be better off seeking our road farther on, in less trammeled reaches of the Rub' al-Khali.
Just as suddenly as they had appeared, the Land Rovers raced off across the desert to destinations and destiny unknown. And we were again airborne. Ahead now were the red dunes of the Rub' al-Khali. They did not yet form a solid mass of sand. Rather, they stretched in long rows, with intermittent gravel plains—known as "dune streets"—between them. At first these intervals were scored by modern tracks, but as we flew on—and the dunes rose to heights of two, three, four hundred feet—the tracks thinned out.
"Ten kilometers to target," Nick announced.
"Ron," I asked, "just to the north? You see what I see?"
"Could be our road. It's hard to tell with the blowing sand and all. But it's wider, more diffuse than the vehicle tracks we've seen."
"Older then?"
"Can't say." He squinted. "Can't see. Lost it."
The blowing sand blotted our vision, then cleared. And below us now there were no tracks at all. This, though, was as it should have been; below us, according to our best Landsat/SPOT image, a flash flood had wiped away our road.
Nick punctuated our thoughts: "Five kilometers to target." What we were heading for was the most dramatic appearance of the road to Ubar on our space imaging. It was also where, on his detailed map of Arabia, Bertram Thomas had spotted the "Probable Location of the Ancient City of Ubar."
"Four kilometers." Ahead now was a massive red dune more than six hundred feet high.
"Three kilometers." Nick guided the Huey over the shoulder of the dune and into a valley beyond.
"Two kilometers to target."
And there it was, unmarred by recent tracks: our road to Ubar. It came out from under the dune below us, continued for a good kilometer across an intervening plain, then disappeared under another dune. The track had to be very old, for it clearly had been laid down before the immense dunes that had buried it were formed. The road had been there for thousands of years.
"One kilometer..."
"Our road ... Can you land right beside it?"
"Going in..."
We tumbled out of the helicopter and, as fast as we dared walk in the 115-degree heat, hastened across the plain. But the road wasn't there.
"You just walked right over it," Nick shouted (and no doubt chuckled to himself).
So we had. We marveled: the road to Ubar was clearly visible from 520 miles out in space, yet was barely discernible on the ground. What our space imaging had measured was not the earth's color or contrast, but its compression from the passage of untold caravans. With Nick's correction, we saw it: the road was composed of rows and rows of faint but unmistakable tracks heading northwest.
Quickly, we were airborne again for a short hop to the "L" site, which was the leading candidate for lost Ubar. Our expectations rose—and, even before we landed, fell. What might have been a walled settlement was nothing more than an unusual L-shaped alkali dry lake. It's been said that nature avoids right angles. Not here. The L formation had six of them, all beautifully shaped and geometrical, all formed by nature, not man.
As we lifted off, I thought again of the phrase "misguided at best."
Yet we saw that the Ubar road was still down there, and we were able to follow it onward, the sole track through this desert wilderness. Time and again, the ancient route would disappear into the sands, then, a kilometer or so later, reappear