Road to Ubar Pa - Nicholas Clapp [56]
"You seek evidence of the People of 'Ad?" Ali Achmed asked. "Please, have a look."
After climbing up to the cave, we could see that its back wall was covered with hundreds of pictographs drawn in red and black pigment. Long ago, Ali Achmed explained, caravans had paused here and left their mark. He pointed out where someone had recorded the scene of a wolf attacking an ibex. Farther up on the cave's wall were three figures that looked like—but were not—the biblical Three Kings. Ali Achmed thought they were more likely three bandits, part of a group marauding an incense caravan.
Pictograph of wolf attacking ibex
Pictograph of attack on a caravan
What excited Ali was that in the cave were not only pictographs but written inscriptions. Here was evidence that his ancestors not only traded in incense but were literate and civilized. (By definition, a civilization is a society with a written language.) Making sense of these meandering lines was problematic—a challenge beyond us.
Inscription in Dhofar cave
Many of the letters in these inscriptions related to letters in ESA, the Epigraphic South Arabic alphabet we had encountered on the coast at Sumhuram. But these mountain inscriptions contained eight additional letters, and it was anyone's guess how they were sounded or what they meant. Ali Achmed thought they might correspond to the eight sounds in the Shahra language beyond the twenty-eight sounds of classical Arabic. He pronounced them for us. They sounded something like "sh'a, jh'a, je', k'e, ka', th', k'a, le'"—curious, almost birdlike sounds, springing from the back of the throat. Sounds of Arabia long ago. Ali Achmed said, "Nobody can pronounce them but the people of our mountains."
At the far end of the cave, Ali pointed out a pictographic map that charted routes leading on to where, in antiquity, "silver" frankincense—the finest variety—grew wild and was harvested, as it still is. Ali Achmed showed us where.
A few days later we watched a band of little children dancing along behind two tribesmen—one wiry, one corpulent—as they crossed an arid valley and approached a scattering of scraggly trees with reddish bark. Bent and twisted, many of the trees were only waist high. Yet their resin, or sap, was once as valuable as gold. They were frankincense trees, found where the mountains of Dhofar gave way to the great interior desert of Arabia.5
The wiry man's craggy face was framed by a handsome white beard and a black turban. He wore a saronglike garment with a traditional silver dagger at his waist, complemented by a recent-issue assault rifle slung over his shoulder. Approaching a frankincense tree, he noisily exhaled, then chanted: "Ab st't d'h'la fe lh'ya!" (Exhale!) "A1 as'r m'sly 1'yo tr'le'ha!" (Exhale!)...His age-old song of harvest had a driving, intense rhythm, punctuated by strange, percussive exhalations.
Moving in time to his song, the wiry tribesman slashed bits of bark from the tree. A few yards away his partner—a pashalike fellow topped by a large red turban—mirrored his movements. The little children ran from one man to the other as, giggling and laughing, they played tag in groves of antiquity.
The Roman historian Pliny the Elder (23–79 A.D.) relates that these frankincense groves were inaccessible and that the southern Arabians—our People of 'Ad—did not encourage visitors. In addition to tales of flying serpents (quite true), the 'Ad appear to have propagated stories of deadly vapors arising from the punctured trees (not so true). Not surprisingly, Pliny tells us that "no Latin writer so far as I know has described the appearance of this