The Road to Ubar (15 page)

He picked up a pottery shard and explained that it could have accompanied a burial and, over the millennia, worked its way to the surface. "Burnished ware. Look at that. See, hold it in the sun there. Kind of shines. See that? The people who made that pottery took a little stick and rubbed it real good to give it a shine. They couldn't make fancy pottery. But they tried hard. Did their best."

In a simple scrap of pottery, Juri the archaeologist had glimpsed the hand and life of an ancient potter. Moreover, the piece was unlike anything Juri had previously seen in Arabia. He logged the potsherd and hastened past the graves to the crest of a hill overlooking a marshy area called, we later learned, Khor Suli. He wasn't sure, but he thought he could discern traces of the docks of an ancient harbor. And closer to the sea we saw some structures that George Hedges dubbed "boats." They were stone enclosures, three to four meters long, shaped very much like small boats still in use on the Arabian coast. Juri wondered if cargoes of frankincense might have been sorted and weighed here before being loaded onto actual boats.

The site at Khor Suli almost certainly predated Sumhuram. Its masonry was rougher; there were no inscriptions. It had its own style of pottery, and its graves and stone "boats" were unique. This was the work not of outside colonists but of a native populace.

The People of'Ad?

The next day we were to fly a long-range desert reconnaissance. If we were lucky, we would find compelling evidence of the People of 'Ad. Of course we might find absolutely nothing, in which case the quest for Ubar would probably be over.

In an early-morning drizzle, under a leaden overcast, we clambered aboard a camouflaged Huey helicopter provided by the SOAF, the Sultanate of Oman Air Force. It was a tight squeeze: our six team members plus three National Police escorts and the pilot and copilot. And camping gear, weaponry, water, and fuel.

Pilot Nick Clark, an Englishman on contract to the SOAF, flipped a sequence of switches. "Ignition," he announced. The Huey's main rotor turned, lazily at first. "Well, then, two minutes to liftoff." The Huey's rotors spun and whined, faster and faster. The big helicopter rocked and shuddered. And then, hardly realizing it, we were airborne, angling up into a thousand feet of dense monsoon. As we banked and turned north, there was a misty glimpse of the ground crew, waving and wishing us well.

A half hour later, we broke free of the coastal monsoon and saw before us the desert: blindingly bright, parched, pristine. Not a settlement, not a road to be seen. Nick the pilot swung an opaque combat visor down over his eyes. His voice crackled over the intercom: "Holding at 2,000 feet. On a direct bearing to your coordinates 18 degrees 32 minutes by 52 degrees 36 minutes. Should be there in a little over an hour." The coordinates were for the spot where Bertram Thomas, sixty years earlier, had crossed "the road to Ubar." Because we were heavily loaded and would be burning fuel at a rapid rate, we had elected to head directly to our most promising sites.

Nick: "Off to the left, that's the Wadi Ghadun." This great serpentine dry streambed heads north and into the sands of the Rub' al-Khali. What a trade route this could have been. I imagined caravans bearing frankincense off to the horizon, perhaps to Ubar. But imagining was one thing, and finding hard evidence was another. We could easily go down in the annals of Ubar exploration as hapless dreamers—"misguided at best."

I had read about cold sweats and seen a few in the movies. They hit Humphrey Bogart when he had his back to the wall and realized his automatic was in his other jacket. Wedged into the Huey, I remembered, or thought I remembered, a big close-up of John Garfield, as on a wing and a prayer he coaxed his battered B-24 back to Britain. I knew how he felt. This day would
have
to lead us somewhere, to something. I looked around. Was anybody else not feeling so good about this outing? Ran and George were lost in thought (conversation was impossible); framed by the barrels of a pair of automatic rifles, Kay smiled over at me, immensely enjoying her first helicopter ride. An old hand at flying desert terrain, Ron Blom shifted his gaze back and forth from the window to the Landsat 5 space image spread across his knees.

Nick the pilot, Ron, and I were linked by headsets. "Ron? Anything?" I asked him. "See anything?"

"Nothing as yet. Some great geology, of course. And up ahead it looks like we're in for a sandstorm."

"Afraid so," Nick confirmed.

I thought out loud, "It's hard imagining anyone actually
living
out here, isn't it? Now or then." Hoping that they would disagree.

"Yes, it is," said Ron.

"I'd say so," confirmed Nick, then added, "Coming up on target."

Discernible ahead was the ancient dry lakebed that had caught our attention on our very first radar space image. As we dropped down onto it, a cloud of swirling red sand, kicked up by our rotors, engulfed us. "Not to worry," Nick assured us, landing blind and hitting the desert floor. As the cloud of sand drifted clear of the idling helicopter, he warned, "Watch the rotors. Stay where you can see me. Nobody get behind me."

According to our calculations, we were more or less where Thomas had reported the hundred-yard-wide road to Ubar. But now we found the lakebed crisscrossed and churned up by modern vehicle tracks too narrow to show up on our space imaging. They would make it difficult to find and follow Thomas's road. How they got here was answered as three vehicles materialized on the horizon and sped our way.

An Omani military border patrol. Or, as we were to call them, the Phantoms of the Desert. They drove stripped-down, sand-swamped Land Rovers. No doors or windshields, but a few key accessories: racks for extra fuel and water, passenger-side .45-caliber machine guns, and, most critical of all, three extra batteries battened between the front seats. This wasn't the place for a balky starting motor. If you had to get out and walk, you might as well lie down and die.

We never saw the Phantoms' faces, hidden behind dark Afrika Korps-style goggles and woolen Omani head cloths called
shamags.
What they were patrolling for was a mystery to us, though we later heard they were engaged in a shoot-on-sight war with smugglers, who followed the route of the Ubar road as they ran drugs from the Arabian seacoast north across Oman and into Saudi Arabia. On their return, if they hadn't been gunned down, they would smuggle back gray-market color television sets.

The Phantoms of the Desert were quite willing to help us look for the road to Ubar. We thanked them for their offer, but considering the overlay of modern tracks, we felt we would be better off seeking our road farther on, in less trammeled reaches of the Rub' al-Khali.

Just as suddenly as they had appeared, the Land Rovers raced off across the desert to destinations and destiny unknown. And we were again airborne. Ahead now were the red dunes of the Rub' al-Khali. They did not yet form a solid mass of sand. Rather, they stretched in long rows, with intermittent gravel plains—known as "dune streets"—between them. At first these intervals were scored by modern tracks, but as we flew on—and the dunes rose to heights of two, three, four hundred feet—the tracks thinned out.

"Ten kilometers to target," Nick announced.

"Ron," I asked, "just to the north? You see what I see?"

"Could be our road. It's hard to tell with the blowing sand and all. But it's wider, more diffuse than the vehicle tracks we've seen."

"Older then?"

"Can't say." He squinted. "Can't see. Lost it."

The blowing sand blotted our vision, then cleared. And below us now there were no tracks at all. This, though, was as it should have been; below us, according to our best Landsat/SPOT image, a flash flood had wiped away our road.

Nick punctuated our thoughts: "Five kilometers to target." What we were heading for was the most dramatic appearance of the road to Ubar on our space imaging. It was
also
where, on his detailed map of Arabia, Bertram Thomas had spotted the "
Probable Location of the Ancient City of Ubar.
"

"Four kilometers." Ahead now was a massive red dune more than six hundred feet high.

"Three kilometers." Nick guided the Huey over the shoulder of the dune and into a valley beyond.

"Two kilometers to target."

And there it was, unmarred by recent tracks: our road to Ubar. It came out from under the dune below us, continued for a good kilometer across an intervening plain, then disappeared under another dune. The track had to be very old, for it clearly had been laid down
before
the immense dunes that had buried it were formed. The road had been there for thousands of years.

"One kilometer..."

"Our road ... Can you land right beside it?"

"Going in..."

We tumbled out of the helicopter and, as fast as we dared walk in the 115-degree heat, hastened across the plain. But the road wasn't there.

"You just walked right over it," Nick shouted (and no doubt chuckled to himself).

So we had. We marveled: the road to Ubar was clearly visible from 520 miles out in space, yet was barely discernible on the ground. What our space imaging had measured was not the earth's color or contrast, but its compression from the passage of untold caravans. With Nick's correction, we saw it: the road was composed of rows and rows of faint but unmistakable tracks heading northwest.

Quickly, we were airborne again for a short hop to the "L" site, which was the leading candidate for lost Ubar. Our expectations rose—and, even before we landed, fell. What might have been a walled settlement was nothing more than an unusual L-shaped alkali dry lake. It's been said that nature avoids right angles. Not here. The L formation had six of them, all beautifully shaped and geometrical, all formed by nature, not man.

As we lifted off, I thought again of the phrase "misguided at best."

Yet we saw that the Ubar road was still down there, and we were able to follow it onward, the sole track through this desert wilderness. Time and again, the ancient route would disappear into the sands, then, a kilometer or so later, reappear on an interval of gravel plain. Where it was buried, could Ubar also be buried? From the air, there was no way to tell. But on the ground, there would likely be telltale clues as the road neared the city: a concentration of potsherds, graffiti left on small rocks by camel drivers, perhaps even fragments of structures.

"I hate to say it, but if it's all the same to you, we should be turning back," said Nick. "It's hot. We're heavy. And we're not doing all that well on fuel."

Up ahead we could make out where the dunes became a solid mass, swallowing up the caravan tracks we'd followed. If Ubar was buried farther on, it would be impossible to find it. The helicopter banked, turned, and headed back along the road. We scanned it again, now looking for additional features that had caught our attention on our space images.

We passed back over the "L" site. A bust. Next we looked for what might have been a lost oasis where our space imagery showed a patch of infrared radiation. But whatever created it must have been transient—we saw nothing. (When the Landsat 5 satellite passed over, seasonal vegetation may have sprouted from a rain-dampened hollow in the dunes.) It was then that Nick announced, "We're not going to make it. We're burning fuel like mad." He hesitated, then suggested a plan. "Best bet is I drop everyone off, lighten up. Should be able to make it to an emergency fuel dump, then back. Okay?"

"Okay. But could you at least drop us off at the next waypoint, the one at 18 degrees 32 minutes by 52 degrees 31 minutes?"

"Will do."

This was a hot spot that had seemed promising on our SIR-B radar scan. But as we dropped down to it, we could see that it was yet another natural (though unusual) formation, a small limestone hill rising from the surrounding dunescape.

Nick offloaded us at the base of the hill. "Got to keep moving, so no shutting down. Watch yourselves. Should be back in an hour if all goes well..." In less than two minutes, he was on his way. His Huey became a speck on the horizon, then vanished.

We trudged to the top of the hill and found there a single, solemn bedouin grave. We checked the temperature. Shaded, at eye level, it was 120 degrees. The ground temperature, then, would be well over 160. We checked our supplies. Kay had some sandwiches. But most of our water, we realized, was still in the helicopter. We had only a few quarts in backpacks. Normally this would have been plenty, except that out here you were thirsty five minutes after your last drink.

Kay opened the umbrella she had brought along. Earlier on we had kidded her about it. Now, one by one, we took turns strolling over to Kay to double-check the time and gaze out across the desert, burning with a heat so intense it felt as if the oxygen were being drawn from the air. "Heat suffocation" sounded like an appropriate medical term—was there such a thing?

An hour went by. Everyone now just happened to be facing east-southeast, where Nick's helicopter had disappeared across the dunes. Our unspoken thoughts, I'm sure, were similar: what if Nick didn't quite make it back to the fuel dump? What if he ran out of gas or threw a rod or lost a bearing?

Two hours since Nick left. We said nothing, just listened. In the desert stillness, the tiniest of sounds was exaggerated. The crunch of a foot was thunderous, a whisper a shout. Then, two hours and twenty minutes after the helicopter had winged away, we heard a distant thumpety-thump, then spied far off a gnatlike, angellike speck skittering over the dunes.

Once we were aboard, Nick explained that the fuel dump had been marauded, either by drug runners or local bedouin. Out in the desert, fifty-five-gallon drums all but beg you to fill up. Luckily, he had managed to scrounge a few gallons and make it on to an SOAF outpost.

"Sorry about that, mates. It will be on to Shisur, then?"

"If it's okay by you..."

Prior to the drilling of recent bore holes, the well at Shisur had provided the only reliable fresh water in this quadrant of the Rub' al-Khali. As indicated on our space imaging, the Ubar caravan route made a considerable swing to pass by Shisur. Our theory was that the well had been a way station, a rest stop on the road to Ubar. It might be a good place to find traces of the People of 'Ad.