Road to Ubar Pa - Nicholas Clapp [59]
The oldest of the group regaled us with the tale of how the golden treasure of Ubar, spirited away from the doomed city, was to be found in a desert cave, guarded by a snake.
"Was the snake a djinn?" I asked.
"How could that be?" he shot back. "Do snakes have feet?"
I realized my mistake. To be a djinn you have to have hoofs, so a snake can't be a djinn. We agreed that snakes can still be pretty nasty.
The storyteller continued, "One way to keep the snake away [from the treasure] was to have a holy man read to it." This, he said, led two thieves to find themselves a holy man and have him read to the snake while they helped themselves to Ubar's riches.
The old man's voice fell to a whisper: "You see, they were going to cut the holy man out. But he, being both holy and wise, suspected this. He stopped reading. The snake ate one thief; the other ran away. Nobody's gone there since."
The thought crossed my mind: if we couldn't find Ubar, maybe we could find the cave. Read to the snake.
Late in the afternoon, the family's cattle reappeared, and with whistles and trilling shouts, were herded back into their huts. In the clan's living quarters, incense was again burned, and a majlis, a communal gathering, began. In their ancient language, the Shahra sang a rousing song of revenge, then shifted to a melancholy melodic recital of lost love and found wisdom. They sang a capella and antiphonally, with evenly divided groups of men answering each other. They drew their voices across the words like bows across strings, as if to echo a psaltery of the past. In this isolated settlement, speech and song—and a way of life—had been preserved since the ancient days of the incense trade.
At the end of a long and rewarding day, we took leave of the Shahra and headed back to Salalah. We kept an eye out for djinn, but, it being Thursday, we were unmolested. (It's Wednesdays and Fridays that you must beware.) As we bumped along the dirt track, we passed other Shahra settlements, illuminated by kitchen fires, occasional gas lanterns, and the passing glare of our headlights. If the Shahra live now as the People of 'Ad once lived, it was understandable why tangible remains of the 'Ad had proved so elusive. Their culture may have been complex and literate, but their surviving artifacts would have been few. The impressively domed dwellings and most of their contents were perishable. About all that would survive for even a century would be fragments of fired pottery, foundation stones, and the stones marking their departure from their life and land.
Their graves.
13. The Vale of Remembrance
THE VERY NEXT DAY, Ali Achmed took us beyond the settlements of the Shahra to a long, meandering valley—the course of the Wadi Dhikur—that dropped from the tableland of the Dhofar Mountains to the desert beyond.
The Shahra knew the valley of the Wadi Dhikur as the Vale of Remembrance, for this was where they had laid their dead to rest for hundreds, even thousands, of years. An eerie mist shrouded the valley's upper reaches, draining the color from its rock walls. The air was clammy, and not a breath of wind stirred. The place was oppressive. The first graves we encountered were Islamic, oriented to Mecca. Two stone slabs marked a man's burial, and three marked a woman's. Ali motioned to where, higher on the valley's wall, stone blocks sealed a series of caves. We scrambled up and peered into a breach in the stonework. From the darkness within, a congregation of skulls returned our gaze. Patches of their head cloths were still intact. Other bones were scattered about the cave. Since it was not oriented to Mecca, this tomb appeared to be pre-Islamic, earlier than the 600s. We could have reached in and collected sample textiles for carbon dating, but we didn't, for we felt ourselves outsiders to this majlis of the dead. They, not we, belonged in the valley.
Returning to the valley floor, we shared, rather quietly, the lunch Kay had laid out on the tailgate of a Discovery. Ali Achmed ate only half of his turkey sandwich; the rest he scattered in the