The Road to Ubar (5 page)

Escaping by boat from Yemen, Wendell Phillips could have headed home, but instead he followed the coast of the Arabian Sea east to the Dhofar region of Oman and, among other enterprises, took up the search for Ubar. At the wheel of a stake truck borrowed from the wali of Dhofar, Phillips made his way to the edge of the Rub' al-Khali. Passing a lone bedouin, he asked directions: "When I enquired if he knew the location of Ubar he shouted into my ear
faqat ash-shaitan ya'rif,
'Only the devil knows.' I shouted back
wallahi sahih,
'True, by God.'"
²³

Phillips suspected the bedouin might be right, for, hard as he looked, the great road reported by Bertram Thomas was nowhere to be found. In danger of running out of gas, he and his crew gave up. In their retreat they fortunately chose a different way than they had come.

Regretfully we had turned back, heading east just south of the great dunes, when suddenly Charlie exclaimed, "There are the tracks!" It was California Charlie, not my desert-bred guide, who located these rows of parallel tracks incised deep in the hard surface and covered with glazed pebbles.
²⁴
I counted eighty-four tracks running side by side. They had every appearance of being very old and must have represented a time when there were countless camel caravans in transit through this uninhabited region of today.

Exploring the ancient caravan route would have to wait for two and a half years. In 1955, Phillips returned with an armada of Dodge Power Wagons and followed the road a good twenty miles. He lost it in the sands that had drifted over it, then found it again. The Power Wagons bogged down. The caravan route led away into a no man's land of impassable dunes, six hundred feet high. With a melodramatic flourish, Phillips recounted: "From here on I knew we were through, for there is no barrier so great as billowing immeasurable sands stretching like a vast ocean as far as the eye could see in cruel and sublime grandeur."

But Phillips wasn't quite through, at least according to one of his bedouin guides. He apparently fixed on a particular red dune and proclaimed (for no apparent reason) that Ubar was under it. He shouted, "This is Ubar!" and, quick-drawing his pearl-handled revolver, emptied it in the air.
²⁵

When he returned to America, Phillips published his findings and prospered in the oil business.
²⁶
But, though outwardly brash and cocksure, he had long been in frail health. He passed away at the untimely age of forty-two.

What a saga! The quest for Ubar had an
Arabian Nights
flair to it, a tumble of interwoven tales penned by scholars and scoundrels. And Ubar—if it existed at all—was still out there, undiscovered, a phantom city approached by a road that vanished in the dunes.

It was a city of dreams, or at least daydreams. Driving around Los Angeles, I would occasionally realize, with a start, that I no longer knew where I was; my mind, with increasing frequency, was lost in the sands. I would find myself puzzling over how to traverse the dunes. Maybe camels were the best after all. Or maybe specially designed vehicles. I ordered a catalogue from Johnnie's Speed and Chrome, an outfit that produced customized "sandrail" buggies that on a 45-degree slip face of dune could come to a full stop, then restart and climb on. The secret was the tires: huge, inflated with a minimum of air. They could run over you without leaving even a bruise. But then, I realized, these balloon tires would be quickly shredded by the Rub' al-Khali's intermittent flinty plains. And fine red sand would quickly clog the sandrail's exposed carburetors. Nevertheless...

We had decided to use the sandrails after all. And so far, so good. We
had changed tires—from hard to soft, then back again—more than a dozen times, and now we were beyond where Wendell Phillips had given up and turned back. The dunes were enormous, but we raced up and over them with surprising ease. Then the wind picked up. We were in for a major sandstorm...

Where was I? Somewhere in Los Angeles, of course, but where? It was only when I looked in my rear-view mirror that I spied, two blocks back, the Denny's where I should have turned right.

Ubar ... The sandstorm had passed, and we weren't at all sure where we were. We had strayed from the tracks of the Ubar road. Hoping to pick them up, we headed north and slightly west. We passed a small round boulder that seemed out of place in the dunes. We shifted into reverse and backed up. Turning the rock over, we found it scratched with ancient graffiti. Similar stones lay ahead, as did a great red dune. We scanned it with our binoculars and spied a fragment of masonry breaking free of its sands. Racing ahead, we discovered it to be part of a buried structure of finely cut stone. Carefully we removed a few blocks and entered a long, dark passage. It was clogged with sand, yet we could follow it deep into the dune. Our flashlights played across inscriptions. With
A Dictionary of Old South Arabic
(purchased at Hyman and Sons), we began to make sense of the elegant chiseled lettering...

No harm in dreaming.

He is crazed with the spell of far Arabia,
they have stolen his wits away.

The words of a poem by Walter de la Mare buzzed through my mind.
¹
And it occurred to me: daydreaming of far Arabia aside, there was something very real I, as an amateur, could do to further the search for Ubar. Though prior seekers could not be faulted for their daring, it appeared that none had really done his homework. No one had taken the time—or perhaps had the opportunity—to see what, if anything, lay behind the campfire stories of the Rub' al-Khali bedouin.
²

Given Kay's and my situation at the time (no contacts, modest means), this was about the
only
thing I could really contribute to the search for the lost city. The resources were certainly at hand: the nearby UCLA University Research Library alone had 60,000 volumes on the beliefs and lands of Islam. I could seek Ubar, not in the sands of far-off Arabia but in new and old accounts and documents. Was Ubar a real place? Or was it a mirage, a city that never was, a place that existed only in the realm of myth?

To begin with, was Ubar on any maps? For as long as I can remember, I've loved maps. As a kid, in my imagination I journeyed across them to distant isles and buried treasure. Now, presumably a grown-up, I planned to scour recent maps, then work my way back to the wonderful old ones that featured the woodcut legend "Arabia Felix."

To better understand the expeditions of the 1930s to the 1950s, I had already purchased a series of English operational navigation charts, the best available in the early 1980s. Designed for use by aircraft, they indicated prominent ruins with three little dots. I thought there was a remote chance that Ubar had been sighted and noted without anyone realizing what it was. But this was not the case. Though the rest of Oman was dotted with ruins (medieval or later), there was nothing whatever in the vicinity of Bertram Thomas's coordinates for the road to Ubar. The area was, in fact, blank. No contour lines, no shading. A legend said only "
MAXIMUM ELEVATIONS BELIEVED NOT TO EXCEED
1800
FEET.
" Even in the early 1980s, the land was uncharted.
³

That the landscape of the area had long been a blank was clear on maps going back as far as the 1500s. Huge swatches of desert were written off as "great Sandy Space" and "deserts très arides." The maps did note a number of old towns, survivors from antiquity, but not Ubar. An exception was the Reverend William Smith's 1872
Atlas of Ancient Geography,
in which "Wabar" appeared in the middle of a surprisingly detailed map of Arabia. This was heartening, for it meant fabled Ubar was more than a recent bedouin invention.

Reaching further back, into medieval times, I couldn't believe my luck in finding a map that was all I could ask for. I first saw it as a reproduction, then obtained detailed slides of it from the British Library, where it resides. On the Psalter Map, a
mappa mundi
compiled circa 1225 and less than four inches across, tiny triangles marked the location of eighty-four of the world's major cities—among them, it would appear, Ubar! And what a city it must have been. Though it didn't appear on the Psalter Map by name, the area where the road to Ubar had been found in southern Arabia was marked:

This says
are liberi n colime er culis,
Latin (not-very-good Latin, I was told) for "the altar of Liber and the Pillars of Hercules." In classical mythology, the Pillars of Hercules marked the edge of the known world, and "Liber" (often "Father Liber") was another name for Dionysus, god of the vine and wine, patron of revelry and ecstatic carrying-on.

But what were these two monuments, altar and pillars, doing in Arabia, let alone at Ubar? Dionysus was a Greek god, as was Hercules. And the Pillars of Hercules, I recalled, were said to have marked the Strait of Gibraltar. Delving into classical accounts, I pieced together what I thought was a plausible explanation.

First, consider Dionysus. According to the historian Diodorus Siculus, the god was born at Nysa, a "happy mountain" in Arabia Felix. It was only natural, then, that the Arabians should venerate Dionysus as one of their own,
especially
at a city known for its wanton ways. I found ancient Arabia's fascination with Dionysus confirmed by the Greek historian Herodotus: "The way they cut their hair—all round in a circle, with the temples shaved—is, they say, in imitation of Dionysus."
⁴

Concerning the Pillars of Hercules, it seems that in the lore of the ancient world there were more than one pair. In particular, a chronicle of the conquests of Alexander the Great relates that Alexander found "Gates of Hercules" ninety-five days' march along the Babylon road, about what it would take a traveler to reach the Arabian Pillars of Hercules recorded on the Psalter Map. (Ever on the alert for spoils, Alexander ordered the pillars pierced to see if they were hollow or solid gold.)

It was late on a work night when I read this. Just for a moment or so, I closed my eyes.

Digging the great red dune was easier than we thought. Slowly but surely, we uncovered many buildings. Most had fallen to ruin, yet one was remarkably preserved. It was a temple. Two grand free-stand
ing pillars dedicated to the god Hercules flanked its entrance. As described in an account of Alexander the Great's adventures, they were the equivalent of twelve cubits high.

Our hopes high, we passed between the pillars and entered the temple. It took several minutes for our eyes to adjust to the gloom inside. Quietly, hardly exchanging a word, we picked our way forward and were startled by the sight of a procession of drunken revelers reeling along behind the god Dionysus. They were figures on a frieze decorating a stone altar, figures frozen in time. We were awestruck. This had to be the very spot where, 2,300 years ago, Alexander the Great, the Macedonian king and conqueror, had come upon monuments to Hercules and Dionysus...

But alas, just when Alexander the Great became part of my theory concerning the Psalter Map, my theory fell apart. I discovered that though the Macedonian hero's conquests had been very real, they had given rise to some of the most outlandish fantasies of all time: the "Alexander books." Allegedly dating to an account written by one of his generals, these tales were popular well into medieval times. There were Armenian and Ethiopian Alexander books, an Indonesian version and an Icelandic one. They were forerunners of
Gulliver's Travels
and superhero comic books. In their pages Alexander encounters amazons, mermaids, and men who live on the smell of spices. He marvels at fleas the size of tortoises and lobsters as big as ships. He soars through the air in a griffin-powered flying machine and dives to the bottom of the Persian Gulf in a goatskin submarine.

It was likely, then, that whoever created the Psalter Map, probably a monk long on imagination (and short on spelling), had an Alexander book tucked under his straw pillow. And it turns out that the map's
are liberi n colime er culis
were not only fragments of spurious iconography, but they were inked in the wrong place. As the Alexander books have it, they should be in India; instead, they were set down in Arabia. There's a reason for this. In the Psalter Map, India is bisected by a wall built by Alexander to keep the rapacious hordes of the giants Gog and Magog from overrunning the world. The iconography of this takes up so much space that depictions of other Alexandrian events, like his pillar and altar encounter, had to be expeditiously shifted to the neighboring emptiness of Arabia, where Alexander never set foot. In either reality or legend.
⁵

The realization that the
are liberi n colime er culis
had nothing to do with Ubar was naturally disappointing. It had taken several weeks of spare time to decode the Psalter Map's promising inscription, find it worthless, and then figure out why. I must admit, though, I enjoyed the diversion. The Alexander books were surprisingly well plotted, and wildly entertaining. For instance, in an Armenian version written in the first person, Alexander, guided by the stars, crosses a desert that is anything but deserted: