Road to Ubar Pa - Nicholas Clapp [79]
Our volunteers, a slightly slurred voice informed us, were partying. That was strange, we thought, for weren't our Airwork volunteers responsible for the maintenance of Thumrait's aircraft? Yes, yes, they were, and that was the point. The crash had been due to pilot error; a nonstop, sixty-two-hour party was celebrating the fact that the crash wasn't their fault!
Week five at Shisur ... This was to be the last week for all but Juri and his five students.
For years George Hedges, now back in Los Angeles, had worked tirelessly to organize the expedition and get it financially off the ground. In the field, Ran Fiennes had done a superb job of orchestrating our logistics. We always had what we needed, and Juri never lost a minute as he excavated Shisur. Our original plan had called for the sinking of one or two modest test shafts if we found a site that appeared to be Ubar. As it turned out, with as many as forty people digging at a time, we had brought to light an entire buried fortress and surveyed its surrounding terrain.
Our plan had called for three months in Oman, and now those three months were about up, and our bank account was about done for. There was just enough money left to see Juri and his students through the rest of their work-study semester.
In our last week at Shisur, a radio call alerted us that an Omani Air Force Huey had refueled at Thumrait and was on its way north to Shisur. What good fortune! We could photograph the site from the air. The helicopter and its crew showed up in time for dinner; the English pilot and Omani copilot found it hard to believe that anybody had built anything so far out in the desert so long ago.
The next day was clear, with not a breath of wind. We were quickly aloft and circling the site. With the tiny figures of Juris students for scale, it looked bigger than it felt on the ground. We could easily make out the foundations of several towers and see that the site had had not only an outer wall but, most likely, an inner wall to protect the immediate area of the Citadel; it had been all but wiped out in the sinkhole's collapse.
Ubar in ruins
This, we finally believed, was ancient Ubar.
For over a month now, we had worked a puzzle. Its key pieces had to do with pottery types and sequences, architectural plan, and the role of the incense trade. Along the way, some pieces didn't seem to fit. What was a chess set doing here? Where, as Baheet asked, was the gold? In finding what fitted with what, there had been no magic "Eureka!" moment, no time to proclaim "This is Ubar!" and unleash the formidable party potential of our Airwork volunteers. Instead, a picture had slowly formed of a distant time, place, and people, a picture that seen in its entirety was a convincing match for the legendary lost Ubar.
Ubar as it may have been
Key to that match were...
LOCATION The site was where it was supposed to be. The myth of Ubar had led us to the unremitting desolation of a remote area of Arabia—and, against all expectation, an impressive fortress.
AGE The site was ancient. In myth, Ubar was founded by Noah's grandson, a first patriarch of the People of'Ad. What we had found dated to 900 B.C. or earlier—the very dawn of civilization in this land. Our site was among the oldest, if not the oldest, of Arabia's incense-trading caravansaries.
CHARACTER Here was an expression of the Koran's , dhat al-imad, city of lofty buildings. And Ubar's eight or more towers guarded a water source that, more than anything else in the surrounding fifty thousand square miles, qualified as "the great well of Wabar" described by the historian Yaqut ibn Abdallah as the city's principal feature. For all its isolation, here was a place where, as in its