Road to Ubar Pa - Nicholas Clapp [69]
"Say you're a bedouin of the last century or so, and you find a Neolithic artifact, like a big grinding stone, which can be pretty impressive. Aha, you think, you're on the outskirts of Ubar! And your imagination gets all fired up thinking of the treasure that must be hidden under the next dune, or the next one after that. And so not only the bedouin but explorers like Bertram Thomas and Wendell Phillips get to thinking this is where to find Ubar."
Late in the morning of that fourth day in the dunes, we reached a point of no return. Getting lost two days ago had cost us considerable fuel, and now we had just enough to make it back to the beginning of the Rub' al-Khali, where we had dropped off a reserve 55-gallon drum of gas.
Reluctantly, we turned back on our tracks and, without incident, crossed the dunes that guarded our lost valley. We were then able to find a more direct route back to the Wadi Mitan. As we drove, we talked back and forth by radio. What next? Our best (and about only) hope was that we had found the Ubar road, but that it was not the road to the city, but from it. Ubar might lie in the direction we were now heading, in open desert closer to the incense groves. This was logical, but it was also unlikely, for there was hardly an inch of the open desert that hadn't been crisscrossed by sharp-eyed bedouin who, we had found, were perfectly willing to share the secrets of their land.
After the Wadi Mitan we knew we were more or less following the Ubar road, but our earlier reconnaissance had told us that we would have a hard time making it out. According to our space images, sometimes we were right on it, sometimes a few kilometers to the north or south. We considered how and where we might look for Ubar. A good start would be to explore where the road crossed wadis that once might have provided a water supply. We could also, centimeter by centimeter, again go over our space images. Had we overlooked any promising anomalies? At this point we doubted it.
It was after dark when we made it back to our first Rub' al-Khali campsite. Our fuel drum was exactly where we had left it, but empty—a blessing, we guessed, upon a passing bedouin's pickup. No matter, we had enough gas to make it on to the little oasis at Shisur, and maybe even back to the airbase at Thumrait.
Tuesday, December 17. Day 5: to Shisur. Desert winds can drive you to distraction. Or you may pray for them. The next day was hot and deathly still. The Discoverys kicked up huge clouds of sand that just hung there. Only the first vehicle had a view of where we were going; the others followed blindly. An hour or so out, we stopped to regroup. The cloud that had enveloped us cleared. Across the sandy plain, not all that far away, shining white buildings and towers floated in a mirage.
"Must be Ubar," Kay remarked, not very seriously. "How could we have missed it?"
Ran steadied his binoculars. "It's a housing development, would you believe," he said. "Tsk, tsk." Actually, it was the settlement of Shisur, site of the ruined fort we had seen on our reconnaissance and a dozen brand-new houses and a mosque that the government had recently completed for the principal sheiks and families of the local Rashidi. As we drove on, the mirage melted, and we could make out little kids darting between houses and alerting everyone to our arrival.
Through the desert telegraph, Shisur had heard we might be coming, and its thirty-six souls, from wide-eyed infants to white-bearded elders, all dressed in traditional Omani robes, turned out to greet us. They offered warm salaam aliechems; for whatever peculiar reason the strangers had come here, peace be upon them. Baheet ("Luck") ibn Abdullah