A real-life detective story
Montagu Curzon
THE ROAD TO UBAR: FINDING THE ATLANTIS OF THE SANDS by Nicholas Clapp Souvenir, £18.99, pp. 272 ands are supposed to contain riddles, if only to compensate for their lack of visible incident, for the emptiness that some love and others find irritating. This story is of the unravelling of the long-standing riddle of the lost desert city of Ubar, and finally of its solution in the discovery of the site in Oman, on the southern edge of the Empty Quarter. If the subtitle's claim of this being `the Atlantis of the Sands' is seriously exag- gerated — one lost city is hardly equivalent to a continent — it can be attributed to the enthusiasm that carries the story along and gives the book its charm.
The mystery of Ubar is intriguing. Sup- posedly there was a city, out in the deserts of Arabia Felix, of fabulous wealth derived from the frankincense market of classical antiquity. It was ruled by powerful kings, but was unfortunately so corrupt that it was suddenly destroyed by God. Its towers fell and it was swallowed by the sands, never to be seen again. This tale pervades Arabic literature and legend like the smoke of frankincense, and for the Bedouin story- tellers it had everything — wealth, wicked- ness, the fist of Allah, and mystery.
It also attracted explorers and investiga- tors, many from the West. St John Philby mounted an expedition in 1932 to look for a city 'burned black by God', but found only a crater scorched by a meteorite. T. E. Lawrence had been convinced that 'the remains of an ancient Arab civilisation were to be found in that desert' and Wil- fred Thesiger noted that the Bedouin of the Empty Quarter argued about Ubar over their campfires. Nicholas Clapp is a documentary film-maker from California who came upon the story while filming the return of some Arabian onyx from San Diego zoo to their original habitat, and became so enthralled that no amount of disappointment, lack of money or delay could overcome the effects until, 15 years later, his expedition located Ubar, to worldwide acclaim.
Ubar had been considered a myth, and a fairly obscure one because wrapped in oral legend — tales of charm but of no histori- cal reliability. There were written refer- ences too, but they were fanciful when not contradictory. Clapp started collecting all the maps of the ancient world he could find in the libraries of the West Coast. He became suspicious of Ptolemy's map of Arabia Felix because it showed a sizeable place called `Omanum Emporium' slap in the middle of the Empty Quarter, a long way from Oman and in one of the least hospitable regions on earth for a tent, let alone an emporium. However, close to Oman were shown the Iobaritae, the Ubarites, and other maps and sources made him suspect that the emporium had been displaced by a scribal error and really belonged in Oman, as its name suggests, and in the land of the Ubarites; in which case the existence and importance of Ubar became more plausible.
This accorded with the report of Bertram Thomas, an early explorer, of a stretch of ancient tracks in the desert, the modem equivalent in width to 'a 10-lane freeway', running north from Oman before vanishing beneath the dunes. This evidence of the passage of countless caravans was the best physical clue to the existence of a major trading centre nearby. But all interest had foundered at the point where the tracks vanished; no one was going to excavate 600-foot dunes. Clapp's eureka followed his reading of the geological studies being made of Africa from satellites using radar images that penetrated the forest canopy and mapped the ground beneath. Why not penetrate relatively soft dunes in the same way and map the hard tracks beneath? He courageously telephoned the formidable Jet Propulsion Laboratory, designers and organisers of many of the most spectacular space programmes, and found their high- powered scientists informal in the West Coast manner and fired by his enthusiasm. After the delays and setbacks that go with all good adventures, the Space Shuttle passed over Oman and its images were ingeniously united with those of a French satellite to produce a picture of submerged tracks, one of which clearly was the frank- incense road.
This was enough to justify an expedition, but who to recruit? Would the Sultan agree and, above all, how was it to be paid for? All this took many years, but Clapp's enthusiasm was shared by an archaeologist specialising in Arabia, and by the explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes, familiar with the area from army days. A nice feature of this sort of story is charting the progress of the pro- tagonist's expertise. From eager amateur nervously approaching seasoned profes- sionals, Clapp becomes increasingly fluent, not just in space and computer language but in texts, inscriptions, the techniques of archaeology, the mythology of Arabia, and even in the mystique of incense in antiqui- ty. Finally a fully-fledged team clamber into an Omani airforce Huey and roar across the dunes.
This first helicopter reconnaissance pro- vided more adventures than hard evidence. Then the Gulf war intervened and delayed their return. But the vast dunes were as misleading as they were beautiful, and like- ly sites drew blanks, until the idea dawned that they might be pursing the track lead- ing away from Ubar, not towards it, and they headed south for the Chofar moun- tains and marginally more passable terrain. They reached the small oasis of Shirsur, recently resettled in a modest way, with a ruined castle, allegedly 16th-century, but also a subsided well. After many more twists to the plot, Ubar is finally on the map and all depart rejoicing.
This is not the Arabian adventure of Doughty, Philby, Stark and Thesiger, but a modern, high-tech, computer-enhanced and satellite-navigated version. Still, the excitement and wonder Clapp felt in the deserts of Oman and the Yemen are in the old tradition, and it is comforting to learn that space technology, apparently so cold, so alien in language and looking out to alien worlds, can also look in and back, connect with the worlds of myth and ancient legend and validate them.
Previous page
