Heat

by Ranulph Fiennes

  I drove to a wild and remote part of the jebel where, after many enquiries, I found my old friend Hamed al Khalas who was staying with a wealthy camel-herder. The two decades and more that had passed since we had worked together under Sultan Said bin Taimur had been kind to Hamed. We talked for two hours over a bowl of foaming camel’s milk and I told him of our plans. He promised to guide me to any of the ‘old places’. There was nowhere in Dhofar that Hamed could not find.

  Sultan bin Nashran was also in good health and living in Salalah, for he had long since retired from government Intelligence. His memories of our long patrols in the nej’d were undimmed, but he was as adamant as ever that Ubar lay to the west of the Wadi Mitan.

  Once our sponsored Land Rovers and supplies were ready in Salalah we moved to the first work site on the Plain. This was a long-abandoned well some seventy feet deep which Ptolemy had described as the Oracle of Diana. Juris wanted to excavate the shaft itself and the ruined village around the mouth of the well, so I borrowed a mobile crane from BP of Oman in Salalah.

  Nick and I were lowered into the shaft inside the crane’s bucket. The smell of rotting flesh was overpowering and emanated from the bloated bodies of dead foxes. I manoeuvred the corpses into polythene bags and swatted at the fat flies that settled on my arms. I tried to keep my thoughts off the glistening carpet of insect life that crawled, leapt and slithered in that foul-smelling hole.

  Even inside the swinging iron bucket we were attended by a host of flying, biting insects, but the stench lessened once the foxes’ bodies were gone. Subsequent lowerings took us back down with shovels and we began the task of hoisting debris into the buckets. Each time we raised a new item, be it a tattered tent canvas or a stinking mattress, hundreds of disturbed creatures of all imaginable shapes and sizes scuttled in all directions.

  Unfortunately, the deep stratum of modern garbage and animal bones that formed the floor of the shaft defeated our attempts to reach detritus from earlier times, so we left the Naheez valley and headed north, via Shisr and Fasad, with eight days’ supply of food, fuel and water. Andy Dunsire came as our guide, but in Fasad I asked the Imam, a gentle Rashidi named Mohammed Mabhowt, if he would take us to a specific but nameless spot out in the Sands.

  Ron Blom produced one of his satellite pictures which was taken from 260 kilometres above Earth and clearly delineated each and every sand dune. Mohammed made various grunting sounds that indicated comprehension if not recognition and agreed to accompany us. One thing he could promise us: wherever we ended up, he would be sure to find the quickest route back out again. Just as no man could, for many centuries, travel the Sands by camel better than the Rashidi, so nowadays they were accepted as the master rally drivers of the great dunes.

  This was no idle boast. Mohammed drove our lead Discovery, travelling over the softest sand and mounting the severest of slopes.

  Somewhere well within the eastern furrows of the Uruq al Hadh, with high dunes on all sides, we camped and Ron extricated his Magellan GPS satellite navigation in order to locate our position to within 100 metres. We eagerly awaited the results of this high-tech magic, the box of tricks which rendered any city-dweller a capable navigator overnight. Ron appeared nonplussed. ‘Odd,’ he muttered. ‘Very unusual. They certainly never gave any warning of this.’

  Magellan had decided, for unstated reasons, to make their navigation services unavailable to ground users for twenty-four hours. So much for reliance on state-of-the-art boffinry, I mused, but said nothing, not wishing to upset Ron.

  The next day we reverted to old-style position-line navigation, using the satellite pictures as though they were maps. This was a slow process involving many stops and interesting debates between the film director, the explorer, the space scientist and the Imam of Fasad, through whose familiar home terrain we were hesitantly creeping. If only we could have given him a known name as our desired goal he would quickly have taken us there by the best available route. But the faded tracks of the ‘Thomas Road’ had no name and their grid reference could not be speedily inferred from our own, until the latter was indisputably revealed at such a time as Ron’s Magellan condescended to supply the relevant data.

  There was even now no way of knowing that the elusive Ubar did not lie beneath the very sand that we trod in our wanderings that day.

  When Philby had asked the famous Saudi governor, Ibn Jiluwi, where Ubar was, the reply had been: ‘Somewhere in the Rubh al Khali.’

  Sadly, the satellite photographs had not provided any more specific information than Ibn Jiluwi. They had shown up the ‘Thomas Road’, but Thomas had already established that feature and its exact location without the help of the Space Shuttle Challenger.

  Towards noon on the following day we found the correct valley, having negotiated various sand bridges across the serried ranks of dunes, thanks to Mohammed and his impressive dune-driving techniques.

  We all camped that night by the vehicles, but Andy and I, keen to savour the still beauty of the desert night, climbed to the rim of a nearby dune. The sky was wide and full of the mystery of the universe. For me this was helpful, inspiring thoughts of a future still worthy of dreams and an antidote to the narrowing outlook of middle age. I wished that Ginny was with me. She was to arrive in a week or so.

  Sirius, the Dog Star, crept, brilliantly glinting, into the lacuna of pre-dawn luminosity between two crested ergs. Desert dew settled and tiny grains of sand whispered in their millions as they trickled down the face of their mother dunes. Allah was close by on such a night. It is written in the Quran’s Chapter of the Star that: ‘It is He who makes men laugh and weep, it is He who kills and makes alive . . . He is the Lord of the Dog Star, He who destroyed Ad of yore, and Thamud, and left none of them, and the people of Noah before them. Their cities, he threw them down and there covered them what did cover them.’

  At the break of day the clear and mellow voice of Mohammed, Imam of Fasad, sounded the morning incantation to God. The soul of Arabia, the thunder of the Saracens and the air of the desert came together in the passion of the mullah’s voice. No God could ignore such a sound: ‘Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar . . . ’

  Later that day we established that there were two main camel tracks and, since camels were not used as load-carrying beasts before 2500 BC, the dunes that now buried them must have done so since then. This was yet another conundrum.

  An expedition by the Smithsonian Institute to a Baluchistan desert monitored twenty-foot-high dunes that moved six inches a day, but only in the windy season. Juris scoffed at the idea of major sand advances in the Rubh al Khali. ‘The mass of these dunes,’ he told me, ‘haven’t moved their butts since the Ice Age.’

  At this point, and thanks to Mohammed’s navigation, we returned safely to our new base at Shisr, chosen for its easy central position and facilities. It was also one of a dozen sites of potential interest, both for clue-searching and for scenic film-making. Our visit there the previous year caused the following reaction from Juris: ‘Sure, Shisr had a bit of pottery . . . but it had nothing to do with Ubar.’ Later, in 1992, he told me: ‘I didn’t think Shisr was Ubar, even when we started digging there.’

  When first I planned which areas of Dhofar were most suitable for Juris to visit, the key person who judged the value of each site (whether a suspect JPL blip in the Sands, an old village in the steppes, or a nest of ruins on the plain) was Trevor Henry. But in the mountains our chief guide and adviser, a remarkable Dhofari of the Shahra tribe, was Ali Ahmed Ali Mahash.

  Back in the 1960s Ali had, like many Dhofaris, joined the British-trained Trucial Oman Scouts. His outstanding qualities of leadership soon saw his promotion to lieutenant and he was sent to Mons Officer Cadet School in England two years after I graduated from there.

  In the late 1960s we were both at the Army School of Languages in Beaconsfield, where I was a student of Arabic and he was a teacher. He was recalled to the Gulf States as a captain and, being the best young officer of his generation, was sel
ected for a three-year posting to a British regiment. Unfortunately the Gulf Intelligence services discovered that Ali was promulgating revolutionary ideas and he was jailed in Muscat for seven years.

  On his release he obtained a government job in Salalah but remained restless until, in March 1988, a fellow Shahri showed Ali some cave writings in the Wadi Naheez. Ali was fascinated. He knew that the history of his country, of his people the Shahra and the lost people of Ad, was locked within a pre-Islamic language that existed only in southern Arabia, and especially in Dhofar. He spent long hours working to try and decode the cave hieroglyphics.

  Ginny arrived in Salalah, having left her beloved herd of Aberdeen Angus under the care of a trusted neighbour. Together, while the team under Juris – and always being filmed – continued their desert searches, we spent three weeks with Ali in remote and wonderful places all over the Qara Mountains.

  We drove the track east from Sudh to Hadbin until it tapered out on a precipitous coastal track in the mountains west of Hasik. Then we went to the homesteads of Ali’s people, the Shahra, high on the grassland downs of Kizit and deep in the Wadi Darbat where they kept large herds of camel.

  Ginny, with her communications expertise from our polar years, set up radios at Shisr, Thumrait and in each of our three Land Rovers. In brief lulls, usually on Fridays, we went alone in our Discovery to areas where Fiend Force had once patrolled and fought, to the pools of Ayun and out on the Dehedoba trail to places where I had slept under the stars and dreamed of Ginny.

  Ali led us to the little-known Mahra waterhole of Leeat, an hour or so east of Hanun and tucked into the base of the mountain cliffs. Years before I had twice been ambushed by communist forces at this place, and the memories flooded back of our successful Operation Snatch.

  ‘Was it not the Mahra,’ Ali loved to ask men of that tribe, ‘who killed the camel of the Prophet?’

  ‘No, no,’ they would always respond. ‘The Shahra, your people, did that thing.’

  Juris’s archaeological team arrived from Missouri not long before Christmas. They were all in their early twenties and none had any previous experience of Arabia. The five girls were blessed with long hair, pretty faces and well-rounded figures. I thanked God (and Juris) for an excellent selection process and felt confident that there would be no problem in Andy Dunsire finding a great number of volunteer male diggers from among his Airwork colleagues at Thumrait. If the attraction of the actual digging was not enough, this bunch of alluring American belles would surely do the trick. I nursed mental images of hundreds of randy diggers shovelling aside vast amounts of sand from our sites over the next three months.

  The common picture of Western archaeological students and field diggers, as defined by archaeologist and author Paul Bahn, was in our case wide of the mark, but may well have been what our helpers from Thumrait were expecting:

  Diggers, undergraduates and volunteers are the cannon fodder of any dig. They normally provide all the sweaty labour and are kept in a state of blissful ignorance about what they are doing and why. Amazingly, some even pay to be treated in this way. Their basic task is to move dirt from one place to another and occasionally sieve it into different sizes before dumping it. Useful items they take on excavations include scruffy old clothing marked ‘Archaeologists do it in holes’; a pointed trowel except in France where bent screwdrivers are preferred; insect repellent; insurance against trench collapse; condoms and bottle opener. . .

  Bahn also warns of the qualities endemic in many modern archaeologists with regard to their field reports:

  A basic rule is to fill your reports with ‘maybe’, ‘perhaps’ and ‘possibly’. This enables you to make an orderly and dignified retreat in case of attack. Another way to sidestep criticism is to make your prose so obscure and tortuous that nobody is quite sure what you are saying. If later proved wrong, this smokescreen will enable you to claim that you were misunderstood and that you actually said nothing of the kind.

  Well into December Juris had taken his team to many sites but found nothing worth digging for. However, the film crew happily continued to film the scenic ‘search’.

  Two days before Christmas I was sitting with Ginny in the shade of an old wall at Shisr when I overheard two Omani students chatting on the other side of the wall. They were unaware of our presence. Both men were with us on loan from the Ministry of National Heritage and Culture and were commenting on the fact that we had been in Shisr for ten days, the teams were ready and yet all we seemed to do was to film each other. This seemed a fair summary, but it would not sound good in the wrong quarters. The two students were likely, in their next report on our activities to their boss at the ministry, to repeat these observations which would then reach the all-seeing Sultan. We would, I felt sure, then get the royal boot without delay, in the same way as had my American Ubar-seeking predecessor Wendell Phillips in the 1950s.

  So Ginny and I went post-haste to Juris and told him that he must start digging at once.

  ‘Where?’ and his eyebrows rose. ‘We’ve found no real clues yet – anywhere!’

  ‘Dig anywhere,’ Ginny said. ‘It doesn’t matter where.’

  We explained the likely imminent threat to our ongoing existence in Oman. So Juris quickly mustered his team and they applied their tools to the nearest rubble around the Shisr well.

  Months later Juris, laughing at the memory, told me, ‘By 23 December we had done no archaeology in Shisr.’ But by Christmas Day, with a workforce of four Omanis, three Asians and six Americans, he was looking decidedly perky. I asked what was up, but he was cautious.

  ‘It’s good,’ he said. ‘Interesting.’

  ‘Is it four hundred years old?’ I pressed him. ‘Like they say? And so not the correct period for us?’

  ‘No,’ he replied, winked and returned to the room where retrieved artefacts were beginning to spread all over the improvised shelves. The team were buried in site maps, lists and hushed discussions. There was an unmistakable air of excitement.

  At first Juris concentrated his small force on or close to the original rubble pile. Within a week the outline of the rock heap had taken on the clear-cut silhouette of a ruined tower connected by low battlements to a second round tower and a beautifully built horseshoe tower to its east. Pottery and flints were hourly unearthed, including, to Juris’s great pleasure, both Roman and Greek-style urns from the period that would have been Ubar’s heyday.

  Days later a piece of red pottery was found that was identical to the pottery style of the Jemdet Nasr period in Uruq, Mesopotamia. If carbon dating proves this to be so then it will predate previous thinking as to the commencement of trade between Mesopotamia and south Arabia from 5000 to 4000 BC. That, in turn, will affect many other evolving theories about our human history.

  ‘I am not going out on a limb,’ Juris told me, ‘and saying that this is or isn’t Ubar, but I will go back to the university to check out all our findings. Then I can make some statement. But I can already say that this is a very important Roman site. It probably goes back at least four thousand years.’

  Of our site, Juris told me, ‘So far we have walls and towers that are square and round and horseshoe-shaped. There was clearly a central tower, an inner sanctum and an outer wall which had a minimum height of between ten and fifteen feet and a consistent thickness of eighty centimetres. Some of the original rooms, complete with hearths, have already yielded rich finds for the key periods between the second millennium BC and around AD 300, when trading activities seem to have dropped off.’

  He added that, ‘The central site would have appeared majestic and without equal in the land to the bedu cameleers. For nine hundred kilometres of desert in any direction there was no edifice even a quarter the size of Shisr. The walls and towers would have stood out to the weary and thirsty traveller from up to twenty miles away – to them, indeed, a city of the desert.’

  One notable find in the rubble was the only ancient chess set ever to be found in south Arabia. The si
x soapstone pieces, each two or three inches high and well polished by the fingers of the players, had lain buried for over a thousand years. Shatrinj, the forerunner of modern chess, was a Persian war game and the king was shah. The word for dead is ma’at and a victorious player, cornering his opponent’s monarch, would shout ‘Shah ma’at’ – not so different from ‘checkmate’.

  By the end of January 1992 we had found no major inscription (such as a sign saying Irem or Ubar), but nine towers were unearthed, some 60 per cent of the main outer wall, and over 6,000 individual artefacts.

  Andy Dunsire had told me of a cave system in the Qara jebel which was six hundred feet down at the base of a giant sinkhole called Tawi Ateer, the Well of the Birds. He had promised to show me a great cavern, which I hoped might contain wall writings or at least paintings, for it was known, certainly before the advent of recent rockfalls, that jebalis used to descend into the hole by way of vertiginous pathways.

  Andy drove me with a Range Rover full of his friends to the village of Tawi Ateer on the high plateau of the jebel and a mile to the north, and we trekked into the dry bush with rucksacks and ropes. Three of his friends were to camp at the edge of the 600-foot-deep crater to ensure that our descent ropes were not removed during the night.

  Because I was inept with the special rope techniques that Andy used, he took an hour to make everything ready. I felt a touch giddy, for the cry of pigeons and the starling-like Tristram’s grackle echoing around the vast natural chamber kept reminding me of the long drop down to the cave system.

  By the time we were ready, dusk had filled the huge, perfectly rounded sinkhole and, as Andy encouraged me to let go of the safety rope by the crater lip, stars were already appearing in a sky of midnight blue. I could not see below me and my helmet torch, striking a rock, went dead. This had the advantage of making it impossible to see the 600 feet of thin rope dangling down into the void between my swinging feet.