Road to Ubar Pa - Nicholas Clapp [80]
DESTRUCTION The legend of Ubar climaxed as the city "sank into the sands." It surely did. Ubar wasn't burned and sacked, decimated by plague, or rocked by a deadly quake. It collapsed into an underground cavern. Of all the sites in all the ancient world, Ubar came to a unique and peculiar end, an end identical in legend and reality.
As our helicopter, in widening circles, flew out over the desert, Juri pointed out geological traces indicating where springs once broke the surface and supported a substantial oasis. Water, he felt, was the key to our site's identity. Once there had been many springs; finally there was but one, and it still flowed. "In this desert," he later observed, "Ubar could have been hidden anywhere in, say, fifty thousand square miles. But it's here because there's water. Permanent water."
We had just enough fuel to helicopter to the northeast and photograph the nearby low hills where caravans rested before venturing off across the Rub' al-Khali. Returning to earth, we knew that, as almost always in archaeology, we could not identify the site as Ubar without reservation. We could never be 100 percent certain unless we found an inscription that included the word , Ubar. Father Jamme had written this out for us, but doubted that we would ever find it.8 We consoled ourselves with the fact that no telltale inscription has ever been found at what archaeologists have agreed is Homer's Troy. We were fortunate enough to find what we had found.
It was time now to head home. Ran and the film crew, Kevin O'Brien and George Ollen, were to fly out of the coastal town of Salalah. Kay and I would drive overland to rendezvous with them in Muscat. We packed our Discovery with equipment on loan from our Omani sponsors or to be shipped back to the United States. We said goodbye to Juri and his students; we thanked Baheet, Mabrook, and the people of Shisur. We would leave at first light the next morning.
After breakfasting with Mr. Gomez, Kay and I stepped out into Shisur's dusty main street ... and were startled to find it lined by all our Rashidi friends. They had turned out to see us off and wish us well. We shook their hands, gave them hugs, then waved and wiped tears from our eyes as we drove away. Following the route of the March of Archaeology, we skirted ruined Ubar, then picked up a desert track heading east. "We'll be back, I'm sure we will," Kay said. "But it can never be the same, you know?" She quietly cried all the way to the oil camp at Dawqah, where we turned onto the paved road to Muscat.
17. Red Springs
JURI AND HIS STUDENTS stayed on at Shisur for another month. They confirmed that people had dwelt here long before Ubar's hilltop fortress had been built, not just in the area of its spring but in the surrounding countryside as well. Juri spent considerable time mapping a satellite site he called "Flintknapper's Village." It was Neolithic—as old as 6000 B.C.— and he had a hunch that it had something to do with the beginnings of the People of'Ad. He wanted to work out a sequence of settlement for the area, but that would have to be a project for the future, for it was getting hot on the edge of the Rub' al-Khali. By noon every day, the Arabian sun pushed temperatures well into the triple digits.
In early March, Juri and his students left Ubar to the watchful eyes of Baheet and Mabrook and retreated to the coast. There, almost immediately, he discovered that Ubar had a sister city: Ain Humran, a fortress overlooking the Arabian Sea. We had briefly visited Ain Humran during our reconnaissance back in 1989. It was a gloomy place on top of a gloomy hill, a heap of broken black masonry. "An old Portuguese fort," we had been told back then, a remnant of the swath cut through this part of the world by Afonso de Albuquerque in the 1480s. But now Juri saw that Ain Humran's walls and towers were much like Ubar's in width, height, arrow slots, and overall configuration. Like Ubar, the site controlled