The Road to Ubar (25 page)

Around ten o'clock we would break for tea and Kit Kats, often joined by Baheet and Mabrook. When digging resumed, they would drift from square to square, help out as the spirit moved them, and contemplate the idea that Ubar, a site celebrated in countless generations of bedouin lore, might actually lie beneath their feet. On one occasion Imam Baheet got surprisingly worked up and proclaimed: "The People of 'Ad were corrupt. We all know it. Allah punished them!" For emphasis he picked up a large rock and thumped it down on the ground, adding "Ubar! Khalas!" (Finished!) Being an imam and warming to the lesson of the Allah-smitten Ubarites, he would sometimes make a stab at converting us. But he always allowed that Islam had great respect for "people of the Book," meaning the Bible.

By noon it was usually uncomfortably hot, and the site offered no shade. We would work as long as we reasonably could, then at one
P.M.
or a little after, the March of Archaeology would retrace its steps. After a light lunch, everyone would lie low for a few hours, updating their field notes, writing home, or reading Bertram Thomas's
Arabia Felix
or, for a change of scene, a dog-eared copy of Elmore Leonard's
Glitz.

About three-thirty, with the hottest part of the day past, digging would resume. Often Juri would leave assistant archaeologist Jana Owen in charge of the site, while he ranged out across the desert, accompanied by Baheet or Mabrook, who knew its every rise and hollow. He had a hunch that the fortress at Shisur was the center of a large seminomadic settlement. Our space imaging revealed that northeast of Shisur there had once been a large slow-moving river. Neolithic man had been drawn to its banks, and when the river ceased to flow, our People of 'Ad might have camped there, for the land could still have been fertile, a sprawling oasis.
⁵
Drawn up around dozens of rock-ringed fire pits—still clearly visible—caravans would have prepared for the crossing of the Rub' al-Khali.

Around six in the evening, we would often join the daily majlis, or social hour, held by Shisur's Rashidi elders. Though their new houses included special majlis rooms, they were more comfortable taking their coffee around a fire laid in a cut-down oil drum set out in the main street. Their conversation often dwelt on the virtues and vices of the several camels that wandered the village. Displaced by Toyotas, the camels at present had no clear role. If anything, they appeared to be backups if the Rashidi's current rather easy life fell apart.

This was confirmed when the discussion one day turned to water. The water table in the immediate area was measurably dropping, and there was a chance that Shisur's water supply, after thousands of years, could run dry. What would the Rashidi do? The question proved a test of their bedouin spirit. With not a glance at their fine new houses, Baheet and Mabrook shrugged and looked out across the desert. "We go," Baheet said.

At dinner we would compare notes, lay plans for the next day, and enjoy our various cuisines (U.S. college / Arabic / U.S. veggie / Baluchi vegetarian), and nod our heads in sympathy when Mr. Gomez let loose with a tirade, or at least what we thought was a tirade—only Kay could tell for sure.

One night the situation got pretty serious as, eyeing our Omani police guards, Mr. Gomez said that someone had been in his off-limits storeroom, and
that someone
had helped himself to the brandy he reserved for special dishes.

Unfailingly courteous, our policemen had often expressed their appreciation with a "Thank you too much!" (They didn't see any particular distinction between "too" and "very.") On this occasion, Jumma, their leader, responded to Mr. Gomez's allegations with a distinctly sarcastic "Thank you too much, Mr. Gomez."

"Thank you not very much, Mr. Policeman Jumma," Mr. Gomez replied, and stalked out into the night.

Juri confirmed that it is not the wonder of the past or the fate of ancient nations that eventually becomes the major concern of archaeological expeditions; it is the food. Its shortcomings, its satisfactions. Our American students were never happier than the day when, with Kay's guidance, Mr. Gomez served up tomato soup followed by a choice of grilled-cheese sandwiches or hamburgers (odd, egg-shaped hamburgers, but hamburgers nonetheless).

It fell to Kay to calm Mr. Gomez and, without the benefit of refrigeration, make sure we had enough food for up to forty people at a time (on the weekends we hosted a legion of volunteers). Every couple of nights, after dinner, she and Mr. Gomez would take stock of what we had and what we needed. Then Kay would slide into a Discovery and drive off across the desert alone, so that she could load it up with as much fresh food as possible. She loved the desert, especially at night. She had high-powered halogen driving lights, and high- and low-frequency radios to call us in case of a breakdown. She could also tune in to the international news, on either the BBC World Service, transmitted from the Persian Gulf, or on the Voice of America. In this part of the world the VOA news in English was de-li-ver-ed ve-ry, ve-ry s-l-o-w-ly. As she heard what was going on with Microsoft and the Moral Majority, she kept an eye on the odometer. She knew, better than anyone, at what mileages to expect camel wallows, and she slued through them with ease.

The round trip to our depot at the airbase at Thumrait took three to four hours. Around midnight I would climb to the flat rooftop of our Shisur house and, sooner or later, I would see, way out in the night and across the desert, two tiny bright dots. Thirty miles away, they moved slowly, disappearing from sight, then bumping over a rise, closer, a few minutes later. Within the hour, Kay would be home.

By flashlight we offloaded the contents of Kay's Discovery into Mr. Gomez's storeroom, and this was the only occasion when the two were at odds. It was predictable; it had to do with the cases of Wadi Tanuf spring water. Tucked in each was a souvenir glass, worth about three cents, decorated in blue with the legend "Wadi Tanuf" in English and Arabic. Both Kay and Mr. Gomez were intent on acquiring a set and, with claims and counterclaims, fought over the glasses as if there were no tomorrow.

In our third week at Shisur, we radioed the news of our discoveries to Thumrait, to be relayed on to our sponsors in Muscat. The next weekend the site was thronged with volunteers. Juri deployed them along the projected course of the site's wall, assigning a student supervisor to each half dozen.

Joan Fulford, a volunteer, had been digging for no more than twenty minutes before a blue-green glint caught her eye. To her great delight, she brushed clear an exquisite Roman vase. "Me?" she exclaimed. "Oh dear, I found this? My, but those people had nice things!"

A few meters away, the idea that the site was once a bustling marketplace—deserving of the designation "Omanum Emporium"—was given further credence as Airwork volunteers Richie Arnold, Nick Deufel, Neal Barnes (Guru), and Pete Eades (Black Adder) enthusiastically attacked a slope overlooking the sinkhole. Waste rock flew through the air, and barrow after barrow of sand was hauled away to the sifting screens. Within a few hours they were rewarded with the outlines of shops, more and more of them, backing onto the site's encircling wall.

When Ran Fiennes, normally busy with logistics and government liaison, had a go at actually digging, he excavated with his hands rather than a trowel. "Now, we don't dig like that," Juri advised. But there was no stopping Ran as he hit a section of the wall and proclaimed, "I'm an archaeologist, an overnight archaeologist!"

"Stop digging like a fox," Juri pleaded, to absolutely no avail.

It was an enormously rewarding week. Juri identified a total of five towers and suspected that two or three more were hidden in the site's rubble and sand. Our fortress's encircling wall finally led us back to where we had started: the old fort, which we now called the Citadel. It was a sizable, complex structure, and dangerous too, for it was severely undercut by Shisur's sinkhole. A week before, without warning, several tons of rock had sheared off the sinkhole's south edge. If anybody had been underneath, they would have been killed. It was now quite possible that, triggered by the vibrations of people at work (or malicious djinns), the entire Citadel could come crashing down. To excavate this structure, we recruited volunteers who had had mountaineering or spelunking experience. They donned safety harnesses and ran ropes to bumpers of Discoverys parked out of harm's way. If the citadel collapsed, they might suffer a nasty jolt but would be left dangling in the air rather than buried under the rubble.

Reconstructed lamp

A few days' excavations revealed halves of rooms, meaning that the Citadel had not been built at the edge of the sinkhole, but had been larger and had collapsed into it. Excavating one of the rooms, Pete Eades discovered the Citadel's first artifact (shown above). Gingerly, Juri made his way over and turned it this way and that. At first he thought it was part of an incense burner, then realized he was holding the handle of a lamp.

A lamp that had shone as this remote settlement thrived. A lamp that fell to the floor and flickered out when it was suddenly, violently destroyed.

Week four at Shisur
... The weather took a turn for the worse. A raw, cold wind raked the site, blowing sand in our eyes and down the backs of our necks. It was a week for spending time in Juris workroom and Amy Hirschfeld's lab. Our initial excavations had circled the site, and it was time to clean, sort, and inventory what had been found.

Amy's lab was now piled with thousands of artifacts: bag after bag of broken pottery, beads, bracelets, glassware, and fragments of three incense burners. Each artifact was given an ID number and logged on an IBM 386 computer. Dbase 4 software three-dimensionally pinpointed the exact level and location where every bit and piece had been found. Some of the artifacts were puzzling (and some still are). In what once was an ancient shop or storeroom, volunteer Ian Brown unearthed a sandstone object, which was unusual because sandstone is not found anywhere near Shisur. Juri first guessed that the rock was a cultic object, perhaps a small betyl.

Sandstone artifact

Then, across the ruin, in rubble in the base of Tower #6, five more similar-sized pieces of sandstone were discovered. Juri lined the pieces up. As he often did, he rubbed his nose and fiddled with whatever was handy, a pencil or a dental pick or in this case an artifact. He ventured an awful pun or two (singing "These stones in the foundation, what do they mean to me?").

"They seem to go together," he pondered, "as a set. You know what, Amy? I don't think these are religious at all ... How about a queen [shown above], with her queenlike attributes? Then some pawns, maybe. I'm not sure what these others are."

Juri and Amy were looking at the oldest known chess set found in Arabia, one of the oldest in the world. As well as a queen, there were (left to right above) three pawns, a bishop or vizier with a telltale "hat," a castle, and a knight. Finally, discovered outside the tower, there was a king, inscribed with a six-pointed star.
⁶

More sandstone artifacts