![]() A rumor of lost treasure, possibly gold, became attached to the legend, along with ''weird, monkeylike creatures'' called nisnas, numbers of which supposedly haunted the city's ruins. ''When morning came there was nothing to be seen besides their ruined dwellings.'' Several tales in ''The Arabian Nights''Īlso mention it. To Mohammed, for which offense they were blasted away by a holy hurricane. ''Arrogant and unjust were the men of Ad,'' according How could a great city flourish in such merciless terrain, and what political or economic circumstances could have raised it there? Has the landscape of the Arabian interior changedĭrastically in the last 2,000 years? Was the Empty Quarter less empty of sustaining resources then than now? Those are bits of the larger riddle.Ĭlapp makes a plausible leap in identifying Ubar with Iram, ruined capital of the people of Ad under these labels it appears repeatedly in pre-Islamic poetry and in the Koran. Spanning the southeastern interior of the peninsula. Some sources place it in the Rub al Khali, the ''Empty Quarter,'' that fierce wilderness of dunes The legend of Ubar (also known as Wabar, and several other variants) goes back a long way in the literature and scripture of Arabia. This is a story of physical and intellectual adventure. But it has two solid merits in compensation: Ubar seems to have been a real place,Īnd a team assembled by Clapp seems to have found it. It lacks a steadying sense of economy, and it offers no rich literary hum. Clapp is no Shelley, in the matters of language or image, and his rambling account of various researches and expeditions - supplemented, but not well served,īy his occasional fits of unabashed fictionalizing - is more chatty than poetic. ''The Road to Ubar'' is equal parts travel book and archeological post-mortem. Quest by the documentary filmmaker Nicholas Clapp. This is the flavor of sere and mysterious wreckage that also adheres to the (mythical? maybe not) lost Arabian city of Ubar, the focus of a decade-long Surrounding it was anĮmpty horizon, with no survivors, no explanations, no context except the vista of sand. ![]() The ''sneer of cold command'' on that toppled bust had ironically been frozen by some comeuppance. Legs of stone, a shattered visage, a hubristic inscription, all lying derelict in the desert. ![]() How a filmmaker discovered an ancient Arabian city that had been swallowed up by the desert.Į met a traveler from an antique land, Shelley wrote in the sonnet ''Ozymandias,'' who recounted a vision of fallen majesty: two vast and trunkless
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