The Road to Ubar (9 page)

Parting ways with the military, Ran took up a life of professional adventure. He ran the upper Nile in a hovercraft, rafted British Columbia's treacherous Headless Valley, and from 1978 to 1981 led an epic expedition to circumnavigate the globe on the Greenwich meridian, crossing both the South and North poles. As a London cabby put it to Kay and me, "Ran Fiennes ... that boy will do anything to avoid an honest day's work."

I had worked on To
the Ends of the Earth,
a documentary on the Greenwich meridian expedition, and I knew Ran as an immensely likable, if sometimes quicksilver, fellow. I also knew that, although best known for his polar exploration, he had, in his military days, seen service in Oman as the leader of an irregular bedouin patrol. He knew the country and its people. He spoke Arabic. He had heard of Ubar. In his book
Where Soldiers Fear to Tread,
he wrote:

The bedu tell of such places around their camp fires but none can point accurately to the ancient sites. Their ancestors passed on tales of sand "yetis" that moved with great speed and grace but were hideous to behold, having only a single leg and arm attached to their chest. Their home was the epicentre of the Sands, that mysterious place where no bedu had ever been and where the lost city of Ubar was to be found.
¹

Ran was intrigued by what I had learned of Ubar, as well as the potential of further JPL space imaging. We discussed leading an expedition together. I would continue doing research and work with JPL on a plan for locating the elusive city. For his part, he would seek the blessing of Oman's Sultan Qaboos ibn Said, whom he knew, and would then plan and oversee the expedition's logistics. But there was a hitch. He would not push ahead until I had come up with the necessary funds. He guessed that our expedition would cost $35,000, maybe more.

With a wave of his ice axe, Ran was off to polar reaches. With some trepidation, I continued on a round of meetings with East Coast experts on Arabia. Trepidation because what I proposed doing—searching for a site by relying on historical clues—was anything but archaeologically p.c. This had a lot to do with a number of past scholars who, guided by the Bible, had for over a century wandered the Middle East seeking the actual sites of biblical revelations, battles, and the like. In spite of all the money spent and the hopes of the faithful raised, their approach had not been terribly productive. In fact, it had produced such a muddle of speculation and misidentification that today Middle Eastern archaeologists tend to ignore (or at least mistrust) historical references and clues and focus on what they find in methodical, dispassionate surveys.

Perhaps the archaeologists I met still secretly liked the old romantic, if not very effective, way of seeking a site. Or perhaps they were being tolerant of an amateur. In any case, they enthusiastically supported the idea of an expedition to find Ubar. At Brown University I met with professors Ernest Frerichs and Jacob Neusner. They told me that historians had unjustly ignored Arabia and that Ubar—if it existed—might have a significant role in the Middle East's complex archaeology. Gordon Newby of the University of North Carolina, an expert on early Arabic texts, was quite familiar with Iram/Ubar. He was particularly intrigued by the prophet Hud, a name that linguistically could be taken to mean "He of the Jews." He wondered: could Hud have been a lone wandering Israelite, a voice in the wilderness decrying Arabia's idolatry?

In Washington I spent an encouraging afternoon with Smithsonian archaeologist Gus Van Beek. I also visited with explorer Wendell Phillips's sister, Merilyn Phillips Hodgson, who, since his death, had supported Arabian archaeology. She arranged for me to meet Father Albert Jamme, the inscription expert who in 1953 had prompted a bedouin sheik's unreasonable, insatiable lust for latex, which in turn had propelled the Phillips expedition on to Oman and the search for Ubar. She said not to take it personally if the learned Jesuit threw me out.

Tucked away under the eaves of a timeworn Victorian mansion on the campus of Washington's Catholic University, Father Jamme's office was crammed with arcane journals, latex squeezes, and worn oaken files indexed not in English or even his native French but in ancient south Arabian script. "A to Ag," for instance, was
. I knew that Father Jamme had no patience for fools and that many a visiting scholar had been sent packing down his narrow stairs with fulminations of "dangerous assumptions" and "unbelievable ignorance" echoing in his ears. It was a relief, then, after a few uncertain minutes, to be unrolling the father's annotated maps of Arabia and relating them to JPL's space images, which he found of great interest.

For some curious reason, members of his order—beginning in the 1860s with the self-described Jewish Jesuit, Gifford Palgrave—had long had a role in penetrating the mysteries of Arabia. And to Father Jamme, the Ubar region was a critical missing piece in the puzzle of an ancient land.

"The road!" he exclaimed as he paced about. "The road to Ubar! Yes, it could well be! An expedition? Yes! It will be valuable, even if it's to show us there's nothing there!" (This might be his idea of a crackerjack expedition; it wasn't mine.)

Father Jamme carried on about the importance of tracking the trade routes of ancient Arabia, pointing out that the land beyond Dhofar's coastal mountains was still pretty much an archaeological blank. He told me that according to classical sources, the world's finest incense—a translucent "silver" grade of frankincense—had been harvested on the back slope of those mountains, taken down to the coast, and exported by sea.
²
But if evidence could be found that frankincense was also transported directly across the desert via Ubar, a new—and until now secret—chapter of the ancient past might be revealed.

After I returned to Los Angeles, we corresponded. In one letter Father Jamme said that although no known inscriptions mentioned the place, he hoped that someday I might come across the simple word m, Ubar. Along the way, though, I had better not make any "dangerous assumptions."

On a practical level, Kay and I wondered what we could do about Ran Fiennes's challenge: raise the money, and he would come aboard. I knew that whatever my abilities, fundraising wasn't one of them. I thought of George Hedges, an attorney I had worked with on an interactive video project. George, a complex and talented fellow, could not only raise money, he
liked
raising money. There were many Georges: George the dramatic trial lawyer, who often worked pro bono on near hopeless death penalty appeals; George the ex-rocker (who once had been Lush Pile of Lush Pile and the Car Pets); and George the archaeology buff, who had excavated sites in Greece and held a master's degree in classical languages from the University of Pennsylvania.

George and I agreed to work together to try to get a modest Ubar expedition off the ground.

In his search for funds, George knocked on the doors of corporations, museums, and foundations. And he got used, if not immune, to a range of not-very-encouraging responses. There was the stuffy "That's not in our prescribed area of interest." There was the kiss-of-death "I'll get back to you." There was the pass-the-buck enthusiasm of "I've got a wonderful idea for you. Why don't you talk to the National Geographic Society?" Traveling to Washington, we
did
talk to the National Geographic Society. People there were intrigued by the project but ultimately decided it was "too dangerous." They had a point. If luck was with us, we would be the first archaeological team allowed into an area where the locals had for a number of years taken serious issue with the regime of Oman's Sultan Qaboos, expressing their discontent with Chinese-supplied machine guns and rocket launchers.

While in Washington, we rendezvoused with Barry Zorthian, a friend of George's who had once been a key CIA operative in Vietnam and now appeared to be working as a freelancer, though it was hard to tell for who or what (as it should be). Barry was genuinely fascinated by archaeology and thought he might be able to help us, for he had recently done some consulting for clients from the Sultanate of Oman.

Back in California, George's quest for funds produced Count Brando Crespi, scion of the French
Vogue
magazine empire. Meeting us for lunch at Baci, a suitably trendy restaurant, the Count wore a perfectly tailored off-white linen suit (but no socks) and spoke with an aristocratic lisp.

"I live in Milan, but keep pieds-à-terre in London and L.A.," he noted, then turned to the waiter to discuss the provenance of the porcini mushrooms cited on the menu.

"You hear that, Nick?" George whispered. "Pieds-à-terre here and there. Must have a pretty big foot."

He had long had an interest in archaeology, the count confided—
psychic
archaeology. He had, in fact, recently underwritten an extensive search for the tomb of Alexander the Great. Psychics in his employ had labored long and hard to visualize the final resting place of the Macedonian conqueror. They finally concluded that he lay buried beneath the Grand Mosque of Alexandria, an opinion shared by (and perhaps derived from) E. M. Forster's excellent 1947
Guidebook to Alexandria.

"But you just don't go into grand mosques and start ripping up the pavement," the Count lamented.

"No, I guess you don't," we sympathized.

The Count and his people had had no choice but to close down their Alexandria operation and go home. But perhaps his people could now help us locate Ubar. Yes? All they would need was a map and perhaps a few hints as to how they might focus their psychic powers.

"As an example, what kind of mosques did they have?" inquired the Count, mosques on his mind.

"They didn't have mosques, actually, back then," George gently explained. "Nick, maybe you could send Count Crespi a map?"

I did. Not just a single map of our search area, but a half-dozen randomly photocopied maps of different areas of Arabia, only one of which included our search area. And we heard nothing further from Count Crespi. At least he picked up the tab for lunch.

Over the course of the project, the Count wasn't the only one to volunteer psychic advice. One fellow placed Ubar on the banks of an antediluvian trans-Arabian canal. Another knew its whereabouts thanks to a direct line to Divine Revelation. And a "dowser into sacred geometry" offered us the services of "Jorsh," his spirit guide.

What more? Revelations from outer space? Actually, yes. Ron Blom called from the Jet Propulsion Lab. A magnetic tape had come in, containing the raw digital data of a Landsat 5 "Thematic Mapper" satellite pass over our search area. If we were lucky, a photographic image could be produced within a month.

"Any chance of a peek?" I wheedled. "Just a quick peek?"

"Let me see what I can do," Ron replied, ever good-natured.

The next afternoon, Ron cleared George Hedges and me through JPL security and led us to the Image Processing Lab. Its heart was a dark, hushed room in which not only the floor but the walls were thickly carpeted. At a dozen or so workstations, planetary scientists were caught in the glow of large color monitors. With a few taps on their keyboards, digital tapes rolled, were routed through a mainframe computer, and became beautifully rendered images of Earth and distant planets and moons.

Settling into our workstation, we were joined by data entry technician Jan Hayada and Bob Crippen, a colleague of Ron's who had a knack for matching wits with space images and coming up with unforeseen data. It was 3:15; we had until 4:00 to see what we could see.

Bob's fingers rippled across the keyboard. Nothing happened. "We're sharing a mainframe Data General," Ron noted. "Lot of people must be on it today. Slows it down." Then (slowly) a series of scans—cyan, magenta, yellow—swept down the screen and produced a high-resolution video image of our corner of far Arabia. "This is a Landsat quarter-scene, sixty kilometers across. False color," Ron explained.

"Bands three, five, and nine," Bob added. "Original plus an eleven-by-eleven high-pass filter. Linear stretch. Standard stuff."

Ron nodded. As a result of "false color" imaging, the scene's gravel plains were rendered in unnatural blues and greens; dunes were painted rich shades of beige, ocher, and brown. We searched the scene: there wasn't a hint of anything man-made.

"Can we take a closer look? Here?" I wondered. Up and to the left was the outline of the ancient lakebed where Bertram Thomas had encountered "the road to Ubar."

"Sure," Bob replied, "It will take a few minutes, though." He centered a cross-hair cursor on the lakebed and typed in a sequence of commands.

We waited. Then, ever so slowly, the image rescanned. And we saw roads. Not one but several roads, coming from the east, crossing the lakebed, then branching off to both the west and the north.

"Fantastic!" George exclaimed.

"Not too shabby." Ron nodded and smiled. We were elated. But then it sank in that some, if not all, of these roads had to be modern, tracks laid down by oil prospectors, military patrols, and by freewheeling bedouin of the age of the Toyota.