Road to Ubar Pa - Nicholas Clapp [63]
The vehicles ahead of and behind us became rippling abstractions, mirrored upside down in water that wasn't there. We were floating out across Arabia, our destiny uncertain. It didn't at first register when Ran's vehicle fishtailed wildly and barely recovered. Andy radioed back, "Watch it! Camel wallow!"
The wallow—a place where camels come to roll on their backs and take sand baths—was hidden by a mirage. They hadn't seen it coming. We braked and hit a twenty-foot patch of treacherously loose, deep sand, almost quicksand. How we got through it without spinning out of control or bogging down hopelessly, I'm not sure. Talking by radio with Andy, we then learned that the trick to negotiating a camel wallow is to slow down, engage the vehicle's differential lock, and don't try anything fancy with the steering wheel. By late afternoon we had white-knuckled our way through three more wallows.
An unexpected weather front moved in, clouding the sky and dramatically dropping the temperature. The desert's phantom lakes evaporated. Toward evening we sighted on the horizon the first dunes of the Rub' al-Khali, in English the "Empty Quarter."
The Empty Quarter derives its name from a legend that on the eve of creation God divided the world into four quarters. One was the sea, two were set aside as the settled lands, and the fourth was to be forever barren: the Empty Quarter. Sprawling across a quarter of a million square miles of the Arabian interior, it is a desert of dunes, a vast sand sea, the largest on earth. In 1885 a Colonel'S. B. Miles was one of the first westerners to gaze upon it from our direction, the south. He had this to say: "This wilderness ... stretches away to the westward for about 700 miles, forming the largest and most inhospitable expanse of sandy waste on the continent of Asia. Broadly speaking, it is devoid of rivers, trees, mountains, and human habitations, unexplored and unexplorable, foodless, waterless, roadless, and shadeless, windswept, and a land of quietude, lethargy, and monotony, perhaps unparalleled in the world."1
Over the years, the Rub' al-Khali's reputation has gotten no better. There is something inherently terrifying about so much sand and so little life. In the 1930s, Bertram Thomas saw it as a place of romance and wonder but also as "a hungry void and an abode of death."
Our personal reflections on the Rub' al-Khali would have to wait. As the sun edged to the horizon, we pulled up in the lee of a large dune and hastened to set up camp. Kay and Mr. Gomez sorted our rations of MREs. There were twelve assorted meals to a box, which had to be matched to the dietary requirements of our twelve-member team. Our Omani Police guards were yes on beef and no on pork. Our camera crew were vegetarian, so they got (the closest we could come) the chicken and turkey dishes. By a process of elimination, Kay and I wound up with—breakfast, lunch, and dinner—a choice of sliced ham or franks and beans (" NOT FOR PREFLIGHT USE," the label advised). The MREs weren't bad. They could be eaten cold, were better boiled, and were best fried; for added zing, their packets included tiny bottles of Tabasco sauce.
Our sheltering dune was clearly visible on our space imagery, providing Ron with a good opportunity to verify the accuracy of our satellite navigation system. He punched out instructions on the receiver's keypad, only to have it flash "NO SATS FOUND." HOW could this be? By his calculation, even in our remote location three satellites should be overhead. Ron shut the receiver off, then tried again. And again. The device was adamant. "NO SATS FOUND."
This was serious. Satellite navigation had proved so reliable on our reconnaissance that we had planned to find our way solely with satellite fixes plotted directly onto space images. What was wrong? Ron guessed that the