Road to Ubar Pa - Nicholas Clapp [53]
Yours, Kevin O'Brien
In the second week of November 1991, all of our original Ubar team, plus cameraman Kevin O'Brien and soundman George Ollen, were back in Oman, at Salalah, on the shore of the Arabian Sea. After a fifteen-month delay, we were anxious to pick up where we had left off. Before we set out in search of Ubar itself, we intended to explore the Dhofar coast and mountains for tangible evidence of the People of'Ad.
In 1329, Muhammad ibn Battuta, a traveler to the far reaches of the known world, visited these same shores and wrote that "half a day's journey east of Mansura [an old name for Salalah] is the abode of the 'Adites."1 He was apparently referring to ruins encircling a great well that appears on Ptolemy's classic map of Arabia. There it is marked "Oraculum Dianum," the oracle of Diana, goddess of the hunt and the moon. (In reality, the site was probably dedicated to a southern Arabian equivalent of the Roman Diana.)
We had scouted this well during our first reconnaissance and found that it was called, even today, the Well of the Oracle of'Ad. 2 Hidden in a valley just beyond the coastal plain, it was a very impressive hole in the ground, a good fifty feet wide and no telling how deep. Was it dug by man, or was it a striking oddity of nature? Whatever it was, we guessed that over the centuries it had gradually filled with debris, debris that could contain artifacts dating to the time of the People of 'Ad. Ancient peoples were forever dropping coins, curses (written on scraps of lead), offerings, and even vanquished enemies (and their weapons, armor, and all) into wells.
We backed a Land Rover Discovery as close as we dared to the rim of the well. Andy Dunsire, a stout, ruddy Scotsman, peered down it and muttered, "Daresay I doon like the look of that," then set about anchoring climbing ropes to the vehicle's rear bumper. Unique characters fetch up in the desert, and Andy was one of them, as were his associates Black Adder (Pete Eades) and Guru (Neal Barnes). They were engineers for Airwork, a British firm contracted to maintain Omani Air Force fighters, and one of our sponsors. As much as possible, Airwork would be giving Andy and his friends time off to help out with our expedition. Black Adder was fascinated by desert plants and flowers, Guru was a snake man, and Andy lived to explore desert caves and sinkholes, which made him just the fellow to lead the descent into the Well of the Oracle of'Ad.
On parallel ropes, Andy Dunsire and ex-SAS commando Ran Fiennes roped up and, side by side, rappelled down the well's initial sixty-degree slope. "Ran, mind your..."Andy cautioned. "Uh, never mind," he added as a sizable chunk of rock broke lose from under Ran's foot, bounced down the well, and landed with a sickening thunk far below.
Juri hovered at the rim of the well. "Keep going," he shouted down.
"Easy for you to say."
"Ran, right to your left. That flat rock there. Can you check it out?"
Twenty feet down the well, Andy and Ran maneuvered to either side of the rock Juri had pointed out and started clearing it with trowels and brushes.
"Looks man-made," Ran shouted up.
Within a few minutes, Andy and Ran had cleared off four blocks, part of what had once been a cut-stone platform—evidence that the well was more than a natural hole in the ground. Gingerly now, Andy and Ran eased over the platform and down into the well's narrowing vertical shaft. And hardly were they out of sight than they reappeared, pulling themselves up and out of the well.
"There's a bad overhang," Ran reported.
"And the walls. They're nothing but boulders stuck together with mud," Andy added.
Dropping deeper into the well, they agreed, would be courting disaster. The friction of the rappel ropes on the overhang could easily trigger a rock fall.
Well