Road to Ubar Pa - Nicholas Clapp [72]
We settled in at Shisur. The three houses we had rented were filled with fine red sand that had to be shoveled out, our first excavation. Returning from a run to Salalah and the coast, Kay arrived with every inch of her Discovery packed with pink and turquoise foam rubber mattresses that she had found in the souk for four dollars each. When she opened the door, they sprang out and flew all over the place, much to the amusement of the locals. For a homey touch, Kay distributed brightly colored cotton bedspreads that featured sayings in an unknown (to us) language: "NAMI KAMA MAMA." "ADUI NI MDOMO WAKO."Swahili, Juri thought.
From the airbase at Thumrait, Ran procured a woebegone generator and coaxed it to life. It gave us a couple of hours of evening light and powered our Racal radios, our link to the airbase and the world beyond. Curiously, the world beyond seemed remote from us, not we from it. We were quite happy just to check in with Thumrait twice a day, at one and seven P.M. In a typical call we discussed the impending arrival of five student diggers from the States and were delighted to learn that Airwork, as a gift, would be providing us with two twenty-pound Christmas turkeys.
Juris Southwest Missouri State students were a little dazed when they arrived at Shisur, about as far away as they could be from the rolling cornfields of home. Three were undergraduates: Rick Brietenstein, Jean England, and Julie Knight. Rick had never been outside the country or even on a plane, yet he would soon be hard at work, both digging and compiling a tribal Who's Who of Baheet, Mabrook, and related Shisurites. We had two grad students, assistant archaeologist Jana Owen and registrar (recorder and keeper of our finds) Amy Hirschfeld. Both were experienced in the Middle East, having worked together in Israel. Kay and I were also delighted by the appearance at Shisur of our daughters, Cristina and Jennifer, on Christmas breaks from work and college (Cristina was editing a magazine; Jennifer was in her last year at Wesleyan University).
To dig Shisur, Juri came up with a simple, specific plan: survey and test-excavate the ridge running east from the old fort (see plan, opposite). The ridge didn't look terribly promising. A few meters beyond the fort the broken walls of three small rooms rose from the dirt and sand, but otherwise the ridge appeared to be a purely natural feature edging the north side of Shisur's sinkhole. Juri explained that if this indeed was true, we could focus on the ruins of the fort and wrap up work here in relatively quick order. But if the ridge produced results, the site might amount to something.
For surveying purposes, Juri and Jana Owen established a zero point, then measured everything out from there. Sighting with a theodolite, they laid out a grid of three-meter by three-meter squares and marked each with metal rods and orange string.
While Juri and his crew prepared to dig the ridge, Kay bounced off across the desert in a Discovery and returned triumphantly with a bone-bleached, leafless bush in the passenger seat. Our Christmas tree. To the accompaniment of carols played on little speakers connected to her Walkman, she decorated it with a strand of twinkly lights, which she'd found in a hardware store on the coast.2
On Christmas Day, Mr. Gomez outdid himself. As Kay had promised, he now had real food to cook, and though refrigeration was impossible, he had a two-burner butane stove supplemented by desert stoves improvised by our Airwork volunteers. To make one you fill a metal ammunition case with sand, then riddle it with automatic rifle fire. Pour in gasoline, toss in a match, and you have a hot, smokeless (in case of lurking enemies) fire. Today a dozen Airworkers joined us, bringing gifts of Christmas plum pudding, brandy, and their good company.
North ridge 1: before excavation
We found a place for everyone at one long table set outside. Our seats were concrete blocks borrowed from the construction of new Shisur. Our American students, all away from home at Christmas