The Road to Ubar (21 page)

On that uneasy note, as darkness overtook us, we each spread our allotted two blankets on folding aluminum camp beds. These put us a few inches above any creatures that might go slithering or skittering through the night. As we bedded down, Ran propped himself up on his elbow and casually mentioned that we were in the domain of a solpugid commonly known as the camel spider.

"Not asleep yet?" he queried, to be sure no one missed his tale. He then recalled that some eighteen years earlier, he and his Omani military patrol had also camped on the edge of these dunes.

"My signaler, Ibrahim, got visited in the night. The spiders are six inches long, hairy legs and big mandibles."

"For their size, I daresay," Andy Dunsire chimed in, "they have the strongest jaws of any creature in all the animal kingdom."

Ran continued, "One of them couldn't get into Ibrahim's sleeping bag, so it started to eat his face! It desensitizes before it bites, so that you don't know it's biting. This fellow woke up in the morning, and half his nose and all of his cheek had gone AWOL!" Ran let this last thought hang in the desert air, then signed off with a cheery "Sleep well!"

Saturday, December
14.
Day 2: into the Rub' al-Khali.
The weather front that had moved in the previous afternoon had driven the overnight temperature down to near freezing. Some of us had stoically made do with our two blankets, others had tried to sleep sitting up in the Discoverys. A rather droopy Mr. Gomez, a gray blanket draped over the shoulders of his cook's whites, brewed an inky pot of coffee and doled out a round of MREs. The combination perked us up. "MREs, we love 'em," Kay commented. "All protein and sugar. Fighting food."

We packed up and set out northwest across the dunes. Our first objective was the Wadi Mitan at a point where it terminated in a distinctive dry lakebed, twenty kilometers long. With our satellite navigation inoperative, this would be a reliable waypoint.

For what lay ahead, there were two theories—two extremes—of how to handle your vehicle. The first, widely practiced by the bedouin, was a kind of Zen of dune driving. They would "read the sands," evaluating slope, texture and color to determine exactly what path to take at what speed. They would then effortlessly float out across the terrain. No sideslips, no spinning wheels. It looked so easy, so effortless. To the skilled and confident bedouin, it was.

The other way was our way. Not having the faintest idea if the sand ahead was hard packed or treacherously soft, we careened recklessly up and down, over and around the dunes, foot to the floor, driving as fast as we dared. It looked like joy riding. It
was
joy riding. But it was also a survival tactic. To slow down was to risk getting stuck.

With Ran at the wheel, the first of our Discoverys crested the shoulder of a dune and for a second or two flew through the air. "Whaa! Ha ha!" Ron shouted as we crunched down into the sand. Soft sand. "Uh-oh," we all reacted. The vehicle fishtailed, slowed a bit, then lurched on, and we careened up and over the next dune. And the one after that. The next was much higher, and just short of its crest we hesitated for no more than a split second, not sure of what lay beyond. With a heart-sinking whir, the Discovery's tires spun out of control.

"Whoa!" we shouted in chorus. We got out. We were dug in up to our hubcabs.

"Someone call nine one one," Ron suggested.

In what was to become an oft-repeated routine, we lowered our tire pressure to sixteen pounds per square inch. We then shoveled as much sand as possible out of the way before jacking up the rear wheels, which we then dropped back down onto aluminum sand ladders. The five-foot ladders gave us just enough of a run to send us on our way.

By radio we advised the vehicles following us when to follow our tracks and when to take a longer, easier route. We never knew quite what we were in for, especially when we crested a ridge. On the other side, we could very well slide down into a "dune pocket," a bowl of sand so steep-sided that a vehicle, even with the aid of a winch, could never climb out and would have to be abandoned.

Our route was not all up and down. On the outskirts of the Rub' al-Khali, dune fields alternate with gently undulating
ramlats,
or sand plains. We cruised along the southern edge of the Ramlat Mitan, and by midday we reached the dry lake once fed by the Wadi Mitan. The temperature was in the comfortable low eighties, the air still, the day clear. We scanned the way ahead with binoculars. Somewhere out on this lakebed was a stretch of the Ubar road, discovered in 1930 by Bertram Thomas but overlaid now by recent tracks. If necessary, we could return later and seek it out. But for now, our plan was to keep moving. By day's end we hoped to intercept the road where it was well defined. We were equipped to survey and follow it for two, possibly three, more days.

Our Discoverys headed out across the lakebed, aiming for a cluster of dunes identifiable on our space imagery. It was a little unclear where to go next. We picked what appeared to be a fairly obvious route west, which led us into a winding dune street a hundred or so yards wide between parallel lines of dunes. We made good time. The dunes became higher and higher—so high they could no longer be crossed. We felt increasingly uneasy as the dune street angled us more and more to the north, farther and farther away from where we wanted to go.

On we went, flanked now by walls of great red dunes more than six hundred feet high. Nearly three hours after leaving Wadi Mitan, shielding his eyes against the low but still intense sun, Ron said, "Uh-oh," followed by, "Rats!" Ahead, the way was blocked by a massive wall of sand. We had driven into a huge cul-de-sac.

And it was us, not it, that was in the wrong place. We were lost.

Distracted by the challenge (and fun) of driving the sands, we hadn't stopped to fuss with compass bearings and land navigation. We had not paid heed to the fact that in this desert, as in all deserts,
everything looks alike,
and there is little or nothing (such as buildings, telephone poles, trees) to lend a sense of scale. From a distance, a small dune looks just like a huge dune. And features like slopes, ridges, and gullies are replicated over and over. With your nose to a map—or a space image—you can go for miles quite certain that you are where you're not, only to realize the error of your ways when you come up against an inescapably distinctive landmark. Case in point: the wall of sand before us.

We decided to camp where we were for the night. The next day, though we could ill afford it, we might have to retrace our route back to the Wadi Mitan and try another route west. We pored over a detailed Landsat 5 / SPOT image in search of our cul-de-sac. With a yellow grease pencil we marked three possibilities. None was even close to where we wanted to be.

That evening, Ron used three Kit Kat bars to illustrate that at any given time at least one NASA navigation satellite would be overhead. "But why the silence? I just find it hard to believe the whole system is down. What of ships at sea? What of animals with transmitters around their necks?"

"And what about people lost in the desert?" Kay added.

"There
has
to be some emergency provision," Ron convinced himself, and reached for the receiver, to be greeted again by "
NOSATS FOUND.
" He grumbled and punched away at the keypad. "Aha!" he finally said, for he had discovered an advisory: in our part of the world, the system would be up and running once a day, between 2 and 3:30
A.M.

"Encouraging," Ron said, "provided these dunes don't block any signals." The Rub' al-Khali's darkly encircling dunes could easily stand between us and a satellite hovering low in the sky. Setting the receiver on the roof of a Discovery, Ron programmed it to switch on at the appropriate hour and automatically record our position.

Sunday, December 15. Day 3: searching for ghostly cities of the mind.
2:15
A.M.
I woke and looked over to see that Ron Blom was also awake and up on the roof of the Discovery, "just checking" on the satellite receiver, he whispered down. "It's okay. We've got a position—18 degrees 59 minutes 16 seconds north by 52 degrees 32 minutes 16 east."

"Good! And good night."

"Good night."

A few fitful dreams later, it was 5
A.M.,
time to get moving. Everyone was soon up, and with dawn still an hour away, Ron unrolled our Landsat 5 / SPOT image on the hood of a Discovery. By flashlight we saw that we were about as far away as we could be from intercepting the road to Ubar.

"We know we're up here, by this dune," Ron explained, "and where we want to be is all the way over here. And it's roughly thirty kilometers between the two, but we can't go straight there. We're going to have to work our way back down this dune street, then across to here, then strike out across this rather confused area aiming for here..."

With his finger he traced a route weaving through a maze of dune streets. Inevitably, though, we would have to tackle the dunes themselves. If they were anything like what was around us, they could easily be too much for us. Ran summed up our prospects: "If Ron's doing his dead reckoning navigation very carefully, shouldn't be any bother. But when you come to these two enormous lines of heavy dunes, I can't see a way through."

We began by backtracking twelve kilometers to a junction that took us into a parallel dune street. "From looking at the image, this is the only way in," Ron dryly noted. "Short of walking, that is."

We navigated very carefully now, by old-fashioned dead reckoning. Every few kilometers we would stop and set a new course. On our space image, Ron would measure where we had been and plot where we should go. I would get clear of the vehicle's magnetic field and take a compass bearing. At the wheel, Ran would hold to that bearing and track our progress in tenths of a kilometer. A single mistake and we would be lost again.

By noon, we had taken more than thirty bearings and were still apparently on course as we approached our first big line of dunes. They were wide but not high, and we found a workable way across. We dropped into a pristine dune street, no tracks at all. We were beyond the range of wandering bedouin, drug smugglers, and military patrols.

If we could only cross the next line of dunes, we would be on the road to Ubar, close to where Bertram Thomas thought the city lay buried. At the foot of what on our space image appeared to be the most promising way across, we stopped and, with binoculars, surveyed a saddle several hundred feet above us. Mr. Gomez passed out a round of Kit Kats. We decided to give it a try with one vehicle, then have the others follow if the first made it through. Ran, Ron, and I circled to get a running start.

"Really, our only choice..." said Ron.

"So it's up and over or not at all," added Ran, as he drove straight into and up the dune. It was steep. It was soft. We slowed from fifty to forty to thirty miles an hour, then held at a little over twenty. I looked back. Our tracks were a foot deep. Juri, Kay, and Mr. Gomez waved us on. We climbed higher and yet higher. What did we think we were doing?

A verse of bedouin doggerel had one answer:

Only a fool will brave the desert sun
Searching for ghostly cities of the mind.
Allah protect us from djinns and fiends,
Spirits of evil who infest the dunes.
³

"Hold on back there," Ran shouted, not quite in time to forestall my head bouncing against the roof. The way ahead now was waffled, moguled, and still steep. Ran spun the steering wheel hard one way, then the other. We slalomed onward, upward. In his shift-happy, foot-to-the-floor way, Ran drove magnificently. And we were able to radio back: "We're through! Come ahead."

It would be hard to imagine a grander or wilder or more magical desert scene than the valley, shaped like the crescent moon, that swept away below and before us. The dunes enclosing the valley were monumental, of exquisite form and color. Burnt sienna, ocher red. On its floor we spied what we thought was a fragment of the Ubar road. We should be able to see it for certain from a sand ridge across the way.

The second and third Discoverys caught up with us. How fortunate we were. Who, if anyone, had ever passed this way and gazed upon what lay before us?

With ease, we dropped down onto the valley floor. A mile farther on, juris voice came over the radio: "You know what you clowns just did?"

Ran answered, "No. We don't know what we clowns, as you call us, just did."

"You drove right through an encampment, that's what."

We stopped, and all walked back to where Juri pointed out a random assortment of rocks. "That? An encampment?" Ran asked, not at all convinced.

"Was once," Juri affirmed, as he began picking up and examining small stones. The first half dozen he threw over his shoulder, noting them to be worthless AFRs.
⁴
But then he said, "Look here now, here you've got a potsherd, though not much of a potsherd." It was orange, badly worn. It was quite old, he thought, dating to as early as 1500
B.C.

Ran examined the shard and asked what other pottery had been found in the Rub' al-Khali. Juri hesitated, then answered, "There hasn't been any, really..."

"What?" Ran blinked. "So this is a first piece of pottery?"

Juri believed it was. Ran shook his hand, impressed that we had an archaeologist who was "not just another pretty face." Juri chuckled and pointed ahead to more rocks, laid out in a large rectangle. He walked through a gap that could have been an entrance and prowled about, looking for more pottery or other artifacts. There were none. He guessed that what he had found was the foundation of a brush corral, evidence that caravans had camped here.

We drove on to the far side of the valley, and on foot climbed the steep sand ridge we had spotted from the pass. We were rewarded with a panoramic view of the road to Ubar. The great track, as wide as a ten-lane freeway, emerged from under a line of dunes opposite us, crossed the valley, and was swallowed once again by the sands.