Road to Ubar Pa - Nicholas Clapp [9]
Suddenly the Arabs, who were always childishly anxious to draw attention to anything they thought would interest me, pointed to the ground. "Look, Sahib," they cried. "There is the road to Ubar."
"Ubar?" I wondered.
"It was a great city, our fathers have told us, that existed of old; a city rich in treasure, with date gardens and a fort of red silver. (Gold?) It now lies buried beneath the sands in the Ramlat Shu'ait, some few days to the north."
Other Arabs on my previous journeys had told me of Ubar, the Atlantis of the sands, but none could say where it lay. All thought of it had been banished from my mind when my companions cried their news and pointed to the well-worn tracks, about a hundred yards in cross section, graven in the plain. They bore 325°, approximately lat. 18°45'N., long. 52°30'E. on the verge of the sands. 10
On his remarkably accurate map of Arabia, prepared for the Royal Geographic Society, that is where Bertram Thomas noted "the road to Ubar."
It was an unexpected, exciting discovery, and Thomas must have been tempted to follow the impressive road to the fabled city. But a side trip at this point would have depleted his waterskins and jeopardized his dream of reaching the desert's far side. Passing the road to Ubar by, Thomas embraced the Rub' al-Khali, whose virgin landscape he found less an enchanting bride and more "a hungry void and an abode of death." Great was his relief when, ninety-five days after leaving Salalah and the Arabian Sea, he came in sight of the town of Doha and the Persian Gulf. He'd done it! The Rub' al-Khali was his.
Detail of Bertram Thomas's map of Arabia
In Riyadh, the news so enraged and disheartened Harry Philby that his route across the Rub' al-Khali desert he shut himself indoors and refused to come out for a week. When he did, he made no effort to conceal his feeling that he had been betrayed by his friend and protégé. Quoting a verse of Arabic poetry, he expressed his hurt: "Twas I that learn'd him in the archer's art; / At me, his hand grown strong, he launched his dart." 11
Philby's petulance aside, Thomas's achievement was greeted with acclaim. T. E. Lawrence called it "the finest thing in Arabian exploration." He wrote, "Bertram Thomas has just crossed the Empty Quarter, that great desert of southern Arabia. It remained the only unknown quarter of the world, and it is the end of the history of exploration."12
Or was it? Thomas had crossed the desert but had by no means thoroughly explored it. His very journey had a tantalizing loose end: a mysterious byway, a road leading to a lost city of the sands. Granted that his knowledge of Ubar came from his not-known-for-their-truthfulness bedouin companions. ("If there's anything they do better than lying, it's stealing.") Still, there was the fact of the road itself, witnessed by a keen observer, a man not to be doubted. And all roads lead somewhere.
Fifty years later, half a world away, over a #1 and #6 at the El Coyote Spanish Cafe, I wondered, and Kay did too: Might we have a reason to return to Arabia? Had Bertram Thomas gone back? Had anyone else taken up the search for Ubar?
Yes, they had. Revisiting Hyman and Sons and haunting the DS 200–250 history stacks at UCLA's University Research Library, I found that Thomas's report had made Ubar a touchstone of Arabian exploration. The famous, the foolhardy, and at least one out-and-out charlatan had taken up the quest to find the lost city. As for Bertram Thomas, he never returned to Arabia, though there was a wisp of evidence that he visited Mecca. In a trunk of his memorabilia, which is in the custody of the Institute of Oriental Studies in Cambridge, England, there's a snapshot of him in front of the "Mecca Post Office." But why is the sign in English, not Arabic? And what is that over Thomas's shoulder, barely visible through the post office window? With a magnifying glass, I