Road to Ubar Pa - Nicholas Clapp [66]
"Good! And good night."
"Good night."
A few fitful dreams later, it was 5 A.M., time to get moving. Everyone was soon up, and with dawn still an hour away, Ron unrolled our Landsat 5 / SPOT image on the hood of a Discovery. By flashlight we saw that we were about as far away as we could be from intercepting the road to Ubar.
"We know we're up here, by this dune," Ron explained, "and where we want to be is all the way over here. And it's roughly thirty kilometers between the two, but we can't go straight there. We're going to have to work our way back down this dune street, then across to here, then strike out across this rather confused area aiming for here..."
With his finger he traced a route weaving through a maze of dune streets. Inevitably, though, we would have to tackle the dunes themselves. If they were anything like what was around us, they could easily be too much for us. Ran summed up our prospects: "If Ron's doing his dead reckoning navigation very carefully, shouldn't be any bother. But when you come to these two enormous lines of heavy dunes, I can't see a way through."
We began by backtracking twelve kilometers to a junction that took us into a parallel dune street. "From looking at the image, this is the only way in," Ron dryly noted. "Short of walking, that is."
We navigated very carefully now, by old-fashioned dead reckoning. Every few kilometers we would stop and set a new course. On our space image, Ron would measure where we had been and plot where we should go. I would get clear of the vehicle's magnetic field and take a compass bearing. At the wheel, Ran would hold to that bearing and track our progress in tenths of a kilometer. A single mistake and we would be lost again.
By noon, we had taken more than thirty bearings and were still apparently on course as we approached our first big line of dunes. They were wide but not high, and we found a workable way across. We dropped into a pristine dune street, no tracks at all. We were beyond the range of wandering bedouin, drug smugglers, and military patrols.
If we could only cross the next line of dunes, we would be on the road to Ubar, close to where Bertram Thomas thought the city lay buried. At the foot of what on our space image appeared to be the most promising way across, we stopped and, with binoculars, surveyed a saddle several hundred feet above us. Mr. Gomez passed out a round of Kit Kats. We decided to give it a try with one vehicle, then have the others follow if the first made it through. Ran, Ron, and I circled to get a running start.
"Really, our only choice..." said Ron.
"So it's up and over or not at all," added Ran, as he drove straight into and up the dune. It was steep. It was soft. We slowed from fifty to forty to thirty miles an hour, then held at a little over twenty. I looked back. Our tracks were a foot deep. Juri, Kay, and Mr. Gomez waved us on. We climbed higher and yet higher. What did we think we were doing?
A verse of bedouin doggerel had one answer:
Only a fool will brave the desert sun
Searching for ghostly cities of the mind.
Allah protect us from djinns and fiends,
Spirits of evil who infest the dunes.3
"Hold on back there," Ran shouted, not quite in time to forestall my head bouncing against the roof. The way ahead now was waffled, moguled, and still steep. Ran spun the steering wheel hard one way, then the other. We slalomed onward, upward. In his shift-happy, foot-to-the-floor way, Ran drove magnificently. And we were able to radio back: "We're through! Come ahead."
It would be hard to imagine a grander or wilder or more magical desert scene than the valley, shaped like the crescent moon, that swept away below and before us. The dunes enclosing the valley were monumental, of exquisite