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By Root 159 0

were JPL's Charles Elachi and Kris Blom, Ron's wife, also a JPL scientist. First on our agenda was to probe the sands that had drifted into the site's yawning sinkhole over the centuries. We would do this with a mini version of the radar that, seven years before, had scanned this desert from the space shuttle Challenger. Our three JPL scientists unpacked five crates containing the components of a Geosystems SIR ground-penetrating radar rig. With stakes and string, Juri, Kay, and I laid out a grid on the floor of the sinkhole. Ron assembled the radar's sender-receiver—a red sled resembling an oversize carpet sweeper—and connected it by cable to a stationary signal processor and recorder. Kris switched it on. Graph paper rolled; ink flowed. Charles set the unit to record what lay under our feet to a depth of fifty feet.

We were all set to go when, without warning, the whole array went dead. Charles checked the power supply; Kris leafed through the manual; Ron thought the recording unit might be overheated. The three scientists moved it into the shade and waited for it to cool off. Still it wouldn't run. They tried everything. "Myself," Ron muttered with mock disenchantment, "I still think the best way to find buried objects is to dig them up."

Everyone was about at wits' end when Ran Fiennes ambled over and politely asked, "You mind if I try something?"

Shisur's sinkhole as radar mapped

"Not at all," Ron said.

Ran bent over and lifted the recording unit a foot in the air. And dropped it. Sixty thousand dollars' worth of sophisticated hardware hit the ground and whirred to life. Looking on, Baheet ("Luck") and Mabrook ("Congratulations") uttered, "Hamdullalah"—thanks be to Allah.

Ron was soon dragging the red sled methodically back and forth across the sinkhole. Bedrock was thirty feet down, and between us and it, the radar detected a jumble of fractured rock and, quite possibly, fallen walls and broken buildings.

Charles and Kris monitored the recorder's complex squiggles. A sudden change caught Charles's eye. "Look here," he said, "see how it comes down?"

"Which means?" Juri asked.

Charles thought a minute and replied, "A well. I would say there's an old well down there." Further scans confirmed it. In the center of the sinkhole was the shaft of a well that might have been sunk by the People of 'Ad as, faced with a diminishing water supply, they sought to save their desert stronghold.

That night Juri was drawn back to Shisur's fort and sinkhole, and by flashlight he walked the site. Kay and I tagged along. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble out here, quarrying and dressing thousands of stone blocks to make their stand in this remote desert wilderness. It would be nice to say that Shisur's stones spoke to us. But they didn't. As Juri pointed out, nothing belied their age. They could date to the days of the incense trade or, as most everyone thought, they could be the handiwork of the Yemeni sheik Badr ibn Tuwariq in the 1500s.

"Time to stop speculating," Juri said, "and start digging."

16. City of Towers

FROM TIME TO TIME, Imam Baheet would ascend the minaret of his settlement's new mosque and summon the faithful to prayer...

God is the greatest,

There is no god but God.

Baheet's call rang out across the tiny settlement and its nearby ruins. How strange it would be if Ubar lay buried within sight and earshot of where the faithful gathered to chant suras (chapters) from the Koran, suras that proclaimed:

Arrogant and unjust were the men of 'Ad. "Who is mightier than we?" they used to say. (from the sura "Revelations Well Expounded")

Have you not heard how Allah dealt with 'Ad? The people of the many-columned city of Irani, whose like has never been built in the whole land? (from "The Dawn")

On a day of unremitting woe we let loose on them a howling wind which snatched them off as though they were trunks of uprooted trees, (from "The Moon")

And when morning came there was nothing to be seen besides their ruined dwellings. Thus we reward the wrongdoers, (from "al-Ahqaf")

'Ad denied their Lord. Gone