The Road to Ubar (4 page)

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 could make out
Coll ... Colliers,
a popular American magazine of the 1930s. Thomas was not in Mecca, holy city of Arabia, but in Mecca, a sleepy desert farm town in southeastern California, where he had stopped on a lecture tour following the American publication of his
Arabia Felix.

Back in Arabia, Harry Philby, at last and too late, was finally given permission to venture into the Rub' al-Khali. He did so, for he saw a chance to even the score with his protégé-turned-rival.
He
would discover Ubar. His success was, in fact, assured.

Some years before, in a rare year of rain, bedouin dwelling on the northern fringes of the sands had followed their flocks deep into the Rub' al-Khali and had happened upon Wabar (as Ubar was also known). They now agreed to lead Philby back to its ruins, the ruins of a city so rich that pearls still lay scattered in the sand. They described as well a large half-buried camel forged of iron.

In March of 1932, Philby rode south from Riyadh and into the Rub' al-Khali. Forgotten, for the time being, was his grudge against Thomas. He and his bedouin were in high spirits. His companions sang:

Hear then the words of'Ad [Ubar's first king], Kin'ad his son:
Behold my castled-town, Aubar [Ubar] yclept!
Full ninety steeds within its stalls I kept,
To hunt the quarry, small and great, upon;

And ninety eunuchs tended me within its walls
Served in resplendent robes from north and east;
And ninety concubines, of comely breast
And rounded hips, amused me in its halls.

Now all is gone, all this with that, and never
Can aught repair the wreck—no hope for ever!
¹³

In the late afternoon of the nineteenth day of his journey, Philby drew in his breath. Ahead, rising from the sands, were the blackened walls of Wabar, scorched by the fires of its destruction. His bedouin, heartened by the promise of fortune, cheered wildly. Philby, heartened by the promise of fame, raced his camel across the dunes.

His hopes were suddenly and completely dashed. For instead of Wabar, he came upon a circular crater in the sands, "a work of God not man." "I knew not whether to laugh or cry, but I was strangely fascinated by a scene that had shattered the dream of years. So that was Wabar! A volcano in the desert! and on it built the story of a city destroyed by fire from heaven for the sins of its King."

As if Wabar's mythical king were somehow responsible for his bitter disappointment, Philby railed on: "He had waxed wanton with his horses and eunuchs and concubines in an earthly paradise until the wrath came upon him with the west wind and reduced the scene of his riotous pleasures to ashes and desolation!"

But what of the pearls to be found here, scattered in the sands? Philby watched as the bedouin "burrowed for treasure, and took small shiny black pellets to be the pearls of'Ad's ladies blackened in the conflagration that had consumed them with their lord." In reality, worthless globules of crystallized glass ran through their fingers.

And what of the reported great iron camel? The bedouin scoured the site; it was nowhere to be found. They confessed they had never actually seen it, only heard about it from their fathers' fathers. Philby later learned that the great iron camel was in the basement of the British Museum. It seems that in the spring of 1863, a band of Rub' al-Khali bedouin, in the midst of a thunderstorm, had seen a meteorite fall from the sky. They found a large fragment of it—a fragment that resembled a camel—and carted it off. How it found its way to the British Museum is a mystery, but there it was stabled.

What Philby failed to understand was that he had, in fact, made a significant geological discovery. What he first took to be a desert volcano was in reality the impact crater of a meteorite; at the time only four or five had been found worldwide. Yet the discovery of the "Wabar crater" (as it is marked on modern maps) was of little consolation to Harry St. John Philby. On a searing desert day in 1932, his dreams proved only dreams, and he thereafter scoffed at the idea that there ever was such a place 3s Wabar or Ubar.

In England, T. E. Lawrence wasn't so sure. Lawrence's life had come to a strange pass. Assuming the name of T. E. Shaw, he had sought anonymity and obscurity among the rhododendrons of Dorset. Living in semiretirement in his Cloud Cottage, he sought to distance himself from his role as leader of World War I's celebrated Arab revolt. He felt that when all was said and done, he had betrayed the Arabs. He lamented his "mantle of fraud in the east," yet he considered returning to Arabia. The mantle "might be fraud or it might be farce: No one should say I could not play it."
¹⁴

If he revisited the scene of his exploits, Lawrence indicated, it might well be to search for archaeological remains in the Rub' al-Khali. His friend Bertram Thomas had proven that this forbidden region could be penetrated and had brought back evidence that an "Atlantis of the Sands"—Ubar—lay hidden in its heart. Lawrence told an acquaintance, "I am convinced that the remains of an ancient Arab civilization are to be found in that desert. I have been told by the Arabs that the ruined castles of the great King 'Ad, son of Kin'ad, have been seen in the region of Wabar. There is always some substance to these Arab tales."
¹⁵

Lawrence was certainly the most likely candidate to take up the search for Ubar. An erudite Arabist, he was also a trained archaeologist with field experience in Syria. He had a deep, near-mystical feeling for Arabian lore; indeed, the white-robed, blond figure known to the tribes as "al-Aurens" ("Lawrence") had become part of it. They would surely welcome his return.

In the early morning of April 2, 1935, was Lawrence thinking about how he had betrayed his Arab friends and followers? Was he dreaming of castles in the sand? Or was he simply caught up in the thrill of speeding down a deserted Dorset lane on his powerful Morris motorcycle? Suddenly, just ahead, two boys dodged onto the road. Lawrence swerved, lost control, and crashed. He hung on in a coma for a few days, then died. In Arabia the tribes would never again take up the cry of "al-Aurens! al-Aurens!"

A few years later, the world was caught up in another great war, and in its course Arabist-adventurer Wilfred Thesiger was dispatched to southern Arabia by the British Foreign Service. His mission was to find the desert breeding sites of the locusts that periodically swarmed out of the peninsula and destroyed the crops of Africa. This task, he found, provided a ready excuse to explore and write about the desert wilderness of the Dhofar region of Oman. His evocative, austere book,
Arabian Sands,
opens with the lines: "A cloud gathers, the rain falls, men live; the cloud disperses without rain, and men and animals die."

But, Thesiger readily acknowledged, "this cruel land can cast a spell that no temperate clime can match." At first Ubar didn't appear to be part of that spell; the spell "this cruel land can cast" had more to do with the privations of long, torturous marches with the bedouin, privations he seemed, a bit perversely, to enjoy. In
Arabian Sands,
Thesiger mentioned Ubar only in passing, as the sort of thing the bedouin argued about over their campfires.
¹⁶

Thesiger said nothing of actually looking for Ubar. Yet a map included with his 1946 report to the Royal Geographic Society tells a different story. The routes of his major desert journeys are marked with dotted lines, one of which traces a journey that he wrote not a word about. Through waterless terrain, this dotted line takes him north to latitude 18°45'N, longitude 52°30'E, the very position where, twenty years before, Bertram Thomas had encountered his road to Ubar. Thesiger apparently ventured no further, instead retreating the way he had come. Had he sought Ubar but been forced to turn back, perhaps for lack of water? It appeared so.
¹⁷

While Thesiger and his bedouin companions continued to roam Dhofar, yet another quest for Ubar began. On a moonless night in 1945, over the crackle of his campfire, Thesiger just might have heard a Royal Air Force Lodestar winging overhead. The plane had left Salalah bound for Muscat. The crew thought they were following the Arabian coast, but in fact they had made a navigational error and were on a false heading that took them inland over the desert.

As the Lodestar was struck by the first light of dawn, the pilot looked down, expecting to see the dark waters of the Arabian Sea. Instead he saw, from horizon to horizon, the sand sea of the Rub' al-Khali. The plane's crew scrambled to get a fix on their position and calculate their fuel reserves. They were well aware of the many World War II aircraft that had gone missing in the desert, a fate brought home as they flew over the wreckage of two Italian planes that had attempted long-distance strikes on the oil fields of eastern Arabia.

The Lodestar was lucky. Shooting the sun, the pilot got his bearings. They had just enough fuel to make it to an RAF base in the emirate of Sharjah.

On their heading to Sharjah, the plane's crew looked ahead to see a bowl-shaped mesa rising from the dunes. Seen from above, the bowl sheltered walls, towers ... a city, a lost city! The aviators plotted its position. It would be easy to find: the ruin-crowned mesa was within sight of a known desert landmark, the palms of the well of Lihan.

Stationed at the RAF's Sharjah base, an airman by the name of Raymond O'Shea was entranced by the report filed by the pilot of the errant Lodestar. O'Shea had a two-week leave coming up, enough time for him and his mates to requisition a four-wheel-drive truck and travel overland to the site he believed to be "Qidan, the lost city of the people of'Ad."
¹⁸
The people of'Ad, I knew, were the people of Ubar. Qidan, then, would be none other than Ubar. It fit. The site was in the area that had cruelly disappointed Harry St. John Philby. Had Philby given up too readily?

Crossing the desert by truck and then by camel, O'Shea found his way to Qidan with relative ease. It was, he claimed, an impressive place. The city's four-foot-thick walls enclosed acres of ruined buildings, and two forty-foot watchtowers were still standing. And there the search for Ubar might have ended. Describing a site difficult for anyone else to check out, O'Shea might have been lionized by the Royal Geographic Society for finding the lost city. But he made a mistake. In the account he wrote of his exploits,
The Sand Kings of Oman
, he featured a photograph of what he claimed was Qidan.

To archaeologists, the structures in O'Shea's photograph were timeworn but not ancient. To James Morris, a travel writer who had sojourned in Muscat and Oman, the structures were all too familiar; he had passed them many times. Morris wrote, "I realized with a start that Mr. O'Shea's illustration of his legendary city, which I had studied with respectful interest, indisputably showed our well-known road into Muscat. There is something almost Oriental about the glorious effrontery of the Irish."
¹⁹

In all fairness to Mr. O'Shea, there may have been some truth to his story. It may be that he simply got carried away promoting it and couldn't resist the temptation to caption a photograph of Muscat as "Qidan." His mysterious mesa might well have been a desert outpost dating to the 1700s or even earlier.
²⁰

A few years after World War II, a dispute over drums of liquid rubber latex gave rise to a last devil-may-care attempt to find Ubar. The search was led by Wendell Phillips, a young American who had initially gone to Arabia to excavate Ma'rib, a site in Yemen he believed to be the royal city of the queen of Sheba. Phillips cut quite a figure. His signature costume included a checkered Arab kaffiyeh wrapped about his head, aviator sunglasses, a pearl-handled Colt .45 in a tooled leather holster slung low around his waist, and cowboy boots. He didn't object when reporters called him "Phillips of Arabia." Though only in his twenties, with modest academic credentials (a B.A. in paleontology from Berkeley), he managed to assemble an impressive staff of experts for a head-on assault on the antiquities of southern Arabia.

At Ma'rib, Phillips's team started by clearing away the sands that had swept in from the Rub' al-Khali and nearly buried the Mahram Bilqis, the reputed moon temple of the queen of Sheba.
²¹
Almost immediately they found finely chiseled inscriptions. The expedition's epigrapher, or inscription specialist, the Jesuit academic Albert Jamme, "almost trampled over the rest of us to get close enough to read them."
²²
Beside himself with excitement, Father Jamme set to copying the inscriptions by lathering them with latex, then peeling off "squeezes" that three-dimensionally reproduced the elegant letters of the Sabaean (Sheban) alphabet.

The local sheik, who provided laborers for the excavation, was puzzled. What could explain the priest's elation? He reasoned that it must have something to do with treasure; only treasure could make a man so happy. As the good Jesuit's latex squeezes seemed a particular source of joy, the sheik began demanding—and receiving—duplicate copies of each new inscription.

But contemplating his latex squeezes brought the sheik neither happiness nor wealth. Tiring of rows of incomprehensible letters, he fixed on the idea of the latex itself. Though he couldn't quite understand why, latex equaled treasure, and it was only right that he should have his share of the expedition's remaining fifty-five-gallon drums of the liquid rubber. Phillips resisted. The sheik was furious. Things got ugly. A tense cable from Ma'rib read: "
JAMME NOW HELD VIRTUAL PRISONER MARIB STOP Q A DI ZEID INAN DEMANDS JAMMES RUBBER LATEX COPIES OF INSCRIPTIONS STOP ALL ARCHAEOLOGICAL SPECI
MENS LOCKED UP STOP GOVERNOR HOLDS KEY STOP FEAR SITUATION GETTING OUT OF HAND.
" Even though Father Jamme said "his latex squeezes meant more to him than life itself," the Phillips expedition elected to pack up and flee across the desert.