Road to Ubar Pa - Nicholas Clapp [97]
The king clapped his hands and called for the wives and children who had accompanied him to Ubar. They were richly arrayed. His wives were unveiled and much freer than in Arabia of later days. Still, they had been painfully marked on their betrothal to Khuljan. He had ordered his fool to make a wide part in their hair by using a razor to remove a strip of skin from their foreheads to the back of their necks. It was a sometimes fatal operation.
Khuljan clapped his hands a second time, and his fool brought forward a gourd of water. The king dipped his right hand in it as if to wash, but did not. Like most of his countrymen, he believed bathing damaged the body. (Although he washed on entering the temple, it was for appearances only.) Thank the gods for frankincense. With a burner, the fool perfumed the king's garments and beard.
The king clapped his hands a third time, and servants brought forth bowls of squash, roasted beans, and meat both raw and roasted. There were flat breads and honeycakes, richly flavored by the nectar of the flowering elb tree. There was wine, too, pressed from the grapes that grew high in the Dhofar Mountains. Though the royal company ate well, they ate with haste, a custom born of the ancient reality that mealtime was the best time for lurking enemies to stage a surprise attack.
As the remaining food was cleared away, to be shared by the servants and the king's animals, the fool rubbed the soles of Khuljan's feet and his calves with butter. The king relaxed and whiled away the desert night. From where his tent was pitched, he could take pleasure in looking across at Ubar's fortress, bathed in the light of the moon and set in a diadem of twinkling campfires. Some nights he would send the fool off to recruit camel drivers who could entertain him with their riding chants and songs of memory and love. Other nights the fool would entertain the king's family with jokes and riddles.
"Which is there more of, land or sea?" asked the fool.
"The sea," ventured one of the king's children, "for it goes on forever."
"No," answered the fool, "it is the land, for the sea itself is set upon the land. And what is the sweetest thing in creation?"
"A horse or a camel?" replied the king, only half joking.
"A king's favorite wife," ventured the king's favorite wife.
"Close," said the fool. "The sweetest thing is love from the heart. On this earth it is all we can expect."
On rare and special nights, the king was favored with the presence of a poet. The crafting of verse was considered a great skill, a way to preserve tales of a tribe's history and glory, to immortalize its bold warriors and their dark-eyed women. Poets admitted to being possessed by shaytan djinns; how else could they produce anything so complex in rhythm and rhyme, so entrancing?
Enthralled by a woman of the oasis, a poet versified:
Were it not for her whose wily charms and love
My heart have captured and my soul possessed,
Never would I at Iram have pitched my tent...8
Another poet evoked the melancholy destiny of Ubar and all Arabia: riches may come to you; death will surely come to you. A poem that cites "a man of the race of 'Ad and Iram" might well have portrayed King Khuljan and his court:
Roast flesh, the glow of fiery wine,
to speed on camel fleet and sure.
White women statue-like that trail
rich robes of price with golden hem,
Wealth, easy lot, no dread of ill,
to hear the lute's complaining string.
These are Life's joys. But man is set
the prey of Time, and Time is change.
Life straight or large, great store or naught,
all's one to Time, all men to Death.9
The king's fool ventured the riddle: "Who shall conquer all human races?"
"We all know," Khuljan answered. "It is death. Violent and cruel toward all."
When he had had his fill of poetry and wine, Khuljan selected his beloved for the night and prepared to retire. His fool shooed away the other wives and children and extinguished the lamps of the royal tent. All but one. By its light, Khuljan regarded himself in the sheet of polished