The Road to Ubar (2 page)

At three
A.M.
we banked to the right just short of the silvery Arabian Sea and were on final approach to what the pilot was pretty sure was Muscat's Seeb Airport. We landed and barely had time for a catnap before three winged boxes emerged from a hangar and whirred toward us. They were Skyvans, small Irish-made military planes that could carry a small vehicle—or a crated oryx—and land it almost anywhere. The pilot in charge, Muldoon, Irish like his plane, supervised the loading with inordinate cheerfulness, considering the hour. Muldoon was a mercenary for Oman's fledgling air force. He was a
good
mercenary, he took pains to explain, busy with worthy missions (food drops, medical flights, and so on) in a time of peace.

We boarded Muldoon's plane. He flashed a thumbs-up and hit the throttle. Despite being loaded down with oryxes and fifty-five-gallon drums of fuel for the return flight, our three planes were quickly airborne. We circled over the sea to gain altitude and greeted the dawn as we headed toward the Jebel Akdar, the rugged "Green Mountains" that rise abruptly from Oman's coast. The greenery at first was limited to tiny terraced cornfields and vineyards. But then we flew into a long, winding valley and over grove after grove of palm trees.

Beside me, Kay had her face pressed to the window, taking all this in. Neither of us had ever been east of Europe, much less flown a barely charted desert in a tiny, mercenary-piloted plane. This didn't faze Kay a bit; she loved it. In everyday life, though, some things did faze her. Raised in the South, she could become distraught upon discovering that her navy shoes didn't match her new navy skirt or, worse yet, that her hair had become "a mop, with simply nothing to be done about it." Big things, like a crazed teenager trying to knife her or an international dope dealer threatening to have her "disappeared," didn't bother her at all. Our documentary filmmaking jaunts were breaks from her job as an in-the-trenches federal probation and parole officer. I remember her coming home one day all black and blue.

"Mom, what happened to you?" inquired first-born daughter Cristina.

"More aikido training with the FBI," she said nonchalantly. "This morning it was how to slow bad people down by, um, doing things to their kneecaps."

Always chipper, immensely capable, Kay is a good partner in strange places. We unbuckled our seat belts and squeezed by a crated oryx for a view from the cockpit. "The way to the interior," Muldoon the (beneficent) mercenary gestured, as our three Skyvans buzzed a crumbling old watchtower and cleared a narrow pass.

Ahead now was a vast, rocky plain dotted with mud-brick villages. But soon the villages were behind us, all but one, set in a lonely cluster of palms. "Adam, the oasis of Adam," Muldoon said, then mused, "Suppose that's where he and the missus got the gate?"

The oasis was a last landmark. Oman's interior, desolate and featureless, rolled off to the horizon. We droned on for an hour. The Skyvan couldn't go very fast and, with no pressurization, had to stay under 5,000 feet.

Ahead, fingers of red sand reached out for us. "The Rub' al-Khali?" I ventured, surely mispronouncing the Arabic for the Empty Quarter.

"If you want it to be," Muldoon replied. "Who knows where it begins?"

Land of the oryx

The Empty Quarter is the great sand sea of Arabia, the largest sand mass on earth. Following the fingers of sand to the horizon, Kay and I could see—or thought we could—distant dunes, dancing through the heat waves. And then the fingers of sand were gone, left behind. Muldoon squinted ahead and began his descent to Camp Yalooni. Beyond the reach of roads, with scant vegetation and no water (the nearest well was eighty miles away), it was the ideal place to release our oryxes, as far as possible from harm's way. A scattering of specks became a cluster of small prefab buildings and a water truck. No airstrip. Muldoon circled once, slowed till the plane's stall alarm went off, and hit the rocky terrain with a bump and a crunch.

By now the oryxes had been in their crates for just over sixty hours.

Clambering out of the Skyvans, we were greeted by Mark and Susan Stanley-Price, the personable wildlife biologists in charge of Camp Yalooni. Behind them, running across the desert, came a band of bedouin, shouting and waving rifles. Members of the Harasis tribe, they were garbed in turbans and long robes. Wickedly curved daggers were tucked into their belts, and state-of-the-art Motorola walkie-talkies hung from their shoulders. They were to be the oryxes' gamekeepers.

Mark Stanley-Price and the bedouin shouldered the first crate from the plane and carried it to the edge of a nearby fenced enclosure, the holding area for the animals until they were turned loose in the desert. Dave Malone scrambled up onto the crate and unlatched its sliding door. Mark nodded, Dave pulled up, and the first oryx flew out of the crate. We cheered. He slowed to a trot and circled, not the least bit the worse for wear. The bedouin broke into a tribal chant. The two other oryxes repeated the performance.

In honor of the occasion—or so we assumed—the Harasis prepared a favorite meal: Take one whole, tokenly eviscerated sheep, add rice. Cook. Flavor with half a case of La Ranchita taco sauce. From the day I had been given the okay to go to Arabia, I dreaded what I was sure was going to happen next. The sheep's eyeballs, I had read, were traditionally offered to honored guests. Kay had a plan, at least for herself. She would lower her eyes, and murmur words never to be breathed outside of Arabia: "Oh, how kind, but I'm not worthy, for I'm just a woman." Inevitably, an orb (perhaps two?) would be in my court. Were they viscous and slimy? Crunchy?

I was relieved when, apparently unaware of this tradition, the Harasis bedouin unceremoniously dug in, the dread orbs disappearing in a melee of hungry hands. The bedouin were fast eaters—to avoid surprise attack, it's been said, but also, I suspect, to get the best parts and leave the gristle to the poky. When they rose from the feast, they were in an exceptionally good mood. They unsheathed their daggers and broke into a wild impromptu dance that somehow turned to terrorizing zookeeper Dave. He was a good, if nervous sport. As knives swiped within an inch of his nose, he pleaded to little avail, "Why me? I'm from New York."

"They're a little cranked up today," observed Mark Stanley-Price.

"It's a big event, the oryxes coming in," I added.

"The oryxes? Oh my, no, dear me. These chaps came back this morning from raiding their rivals, the next tribe off into the interior. Dynamited their best well, I hear."

"Oh..." And I got a glimmer that even if ecology was not a major part of the Harasis ethic, it wouldn't be a very good idea to lay a hand on the oryxes they were now charged to protect.

Late that afternoon, when Camp Yalooni's drab plain turned fleetingly golden, Kay and I walked over to visit the oryxes. And we saw that myths could be real. Here it was the myth of the unicorn.

Though unicorns appear in Persian and biblical chronicles, their heyday was in medieval Europe. It has been suggested that a lone traveler to Arabia spied an oryx in profile, with one horn masking the other. On his return home, he entranced his friends and ultimately all of Europe with the vision of a magnificent one-horned creature. This seems unlikely, though, for even minimal and distant oryx-watching will be rewarded by a flick of the head and a view of the animal's two long spiraled horns. It is much more plausible that a single horn (minus oryx) made its way to Europe, and a horselike creature was dreamed up to go with it.

Either way, the Arabian oryx appears to have been the inspiration for the legendary unicorn. As described in a medieval book of beasts, he has "one horn in the middle of his forehead, and no hunter can catch him....He is very swift because neither Principalities, nor Powers, nor Thrones, nor Dominations could keep up with him, nor could Hell maintain him." Only a fair virgin could approach a unicorn and hear him say: "Learn from me because I am mild and lowly of heart."
¹

Two of our oryxes were quietly foraging. The third was silhouetted against the setting sun. At a glance, the animals looked too delicate, too ethereal to survive in a land as harsh as this. They were certainly graceful, but they were also incredibly rugged. Sixty hours in a box was nothing. They could go days—a lifetime, if need be—without water, getting all the moisture they needed from scant forage. Comfortable in searing days and freezing nights, the oryx survived as if by magic. It was hard to imagine this lifeless landscape nurturing a mouse or a bird, but nevertheless...

This was where unicorns lived.

"T
HE
O
DYSSEY OF THE
O
RYX
" proved to be a popular segment of the television series
Amazing Animals.
Bert, George, and I were now dispatched to do a series of domestic stories, some more edifying than others. We covered Bart the Kodiak Bear and Buster the Wonder Dog. "The wonder of that dog Buster," noted cameraman Bert, as Buster demurred at walking his tightrope, "is what that dog doesn't, can't, or won't do." Yet with prompting and patience, Buster finally teetered across his tightrope, jumped through a flaming hoop, and dove from the Malibu Pier, demonstrating his prowess should he ever be called upon to aid a sinking swimmer.

Over the next few months, Kay and I thought often about Arabia. As was our custom, we dined frequently at the El Coyote Spanish Cafe, known for its margaritas and motherly waitresses, got up in beehive hairdos and fuchsia hoop skirts ample enough to conceal steam tables. A conversation between Kay and me would go: "How about trying a number-six special for a change?"

"You can. I'm sticking with a number one. Nice to see all the regulars." (We had passed Ricardo Montalban on our way in and were seated across from the Twins, two elderly, nattily attired gentlemen who dined at El Coyote every single night.) Then, with no transition, "How do you think the oryxes are doing?"

We talked of them and of their keepers, the Stanley-Prices. We remembered that Camp Yalooni had been buggy. The next day Kay purchased a case of Cutter insect repellent and sent it off to them. A week or two later, back at El Coyote, we further wondered: if the oryxes could survive in the interior of Oman (which they did, spectacularly), what other wonders might the Arabian desert hold? What would it be like to venture into the Rub' al-Khali?

"A reason," Kay said. "We need a reason, a way to go back."

We read up on the Arabian peninsula, its natural history, its geography, its exploration. Within walking distance of the
Amazing Animals
editing rooms, I discovered Hyman and Sons, a bookstore specializing in Egyptology with a scattering of books on Arabia. I quickly came to appreciate how fortunate we had been to set foot in the peninsula's interior, to even glimpse the sands of the Rub' al-Khali.

For centuries Arabia had been terra incognita, a mysterious medieval land out-of-bounds to Western exploration. What little had been written discouraged outsiders. In the 1400s Sir John Mandeville characterized the Arabian bedouin as "right foul folk and cruel and of evil kind." A1612 account elaborated: "The people generally are addicted to Theft, Rapine, and Robberies; hating all Sciences Mechanicall or Civill, they are commonly all ... scelerate and seditious, of coulour Tauny, boasting much of their triball Antiquity, and noble Gentry."
¹

But then, beginning in the early 1800s, a succession of adventurers penetrated Arabia, concealing their identities by donning native costumes and creating elaborate cover stories. We don't know how Ulrich Seetzen, a Swiss biblical scholar, disguised himself, but whatever it was, it didn't work. At some point in his 1806 journey, he was set upon and murdered by fierce bedouin, their suspicions possibly aroused by his interest in ancient ruins. Wishing to avoid a similar fate, his countryman Johann Burckhardt darkened his face and hands with the juice of the betel nut and adopted the guise of a wandering physician from India. But when he opened his mouth, bedouin eyes narrowed. His Arabic was strangely accented. Of course it was, he responded, and unleashed a volley of guttural German. Perhaps the bedouin were unaware, he glibly explained, but this was how the Muslim faithful conversed in India. It was only in Cairo—after discovering the lost city of Petra and even entering forbidden Mecca—that Burckhardt's ruses reportedly failed, and he was poisoned or beheaded. Or he may have died of fevers contracted in his Arabian journeys; accounts vary.

Others, against considerable odds, lived to tell their tales. In
Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petraea and the Holy Land
(1837) the American John Lloyd Stephens gave a hilarious account (not so hilarious at the time) of the down side of his elaborate getup. His magnificent turban, long red silk gown, and curly-toed yellow satin Turkish slippers were distinct liabilities when, his infidel identity suspected, he had occasion to flee, on foot over rocky terrain, a band of irate bedouin. He "dashed down the mountain with a speed that only fear could give. If there was a question between scramble and jump, we gave the jump."
²