Chapter 17

            The great sand sea of the Empty Quarter conceals many secrets. The immense dunes that ripple across the surface of Arabia cover ancient riverbeds, primordial lakes, volcanic cinder cones, some of the earliest human settlements, even entire cities that existed long ago but which have faded from memory. Some of the secrets are even stranger.

            A thousand feet beneath the surface of Aramco’s Hima field, in the remote southwestern sector of the Rub’ al-Khali, lies a geological anomaly that the oil company’s scientists cannot explain. From the outside, it resembles an enormous inverted pyramid. From the inside, it is something else entirely.

            Bamahfuz’s visitor, Abu Sameer, returned to the anomaly, to the underground city. Standing on one of its grand balconies at the very top level, he looked down into the great well before him, and as usual, the view stunned him and left him breathless. Level after level of the great city descended before him. Each level, slightly smaller in area than the one above, wrapped around the central well and was a city in itself.

Massive pillars supported the levels; each seemed to be made of titanic slabs of gemstone, of ruby and blue beryl, of emerald and amethyst. The walls of the buildings at each level were gleaming and metallic, as of gold or silver or even platinum. There were extensive plazas and mind-boggling sculptures, carved of marble and clear crystal and pure copper. Towering fountains shot jets of life-giving water and other fluids of a myriad colors into large pools. The amazing world inside the anomaly was washed by waves of opalescent light from unseen sources.

Throughout the levels, living beings moved, going about their normal day-to-day business. Many of these beings were humanoid, and just as many were not. Some, for their own amusement, took the forms of animals, like snakes and cats and goats. A few were monstrous in appearance – sometimes huge, horned and hulking – but seemingly docile. Others were somewhat difficult to see, and yet others were totally unseeable, producing merely shimmers in the air. Some of the beings walked, some flew, some rode in sleek, silent vehicles. Some vanished suddenly, and others just as suddenly appeared from nowhere. Enwrapping all was the hum of activity, the sounds of a living city. Abu Sameer found the complexity and color of this scene captivating. He marveled at his luck in being assigned to this important outpost between the two worlds.

            Abu Sameer looked upward, at the staggeringly vast, ribbed vault overhead. It was light blue, simulating the cloudless, daytime sky outside. He gripped the railing of the balcony as he renewed his personal commitment to protecting his City – his Iram of the Pillars – from invasion. Above all, he was determined that this magical place would not change, would not lose its baraka, its divine blessing. Invigorated, he turned and walked back to his living quarters.

            Bamahfuz, now seated in his office, dialed one of the contacts on his cell phone.  As he waited for the number to connect, he stared at the vast expanse of desk, highly polished and uncluttered.

            “Salamu alaikum,” he said, “just checking in. Everything is under control. The Americans will have problems, and will have to end their interference. I assure that you all will remain as it has been.”

            He listened for a moment, and replied: “Yes. What has been lost for ages will remain lost. May God’s will be done. Yes. Good-bye.”

            Bamahfuz turned off the call and stuffed his cell phone back in his pocket. He sat back, stared at distant, unseen landscapes, and for a moment visualized the Lost City of Iram of the Pillars. Its gleaming columns of beryl and amethyst rose to the heavens. He gasped at the vision – so rich and textured it was, so believable. He had never been there, but he felt he knew the city well. He saw himself as the city’s protector, and he swore silently that he would not let outsiders violate its sanctity.
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Chapter 16

            Dan Keller had heard about the lost city of Iram of the Pillars before. But at the time, he had not taken it seriously. Some months after his wife had died of cancer, after he had returned from the stateside funeral and resumed work for Aramco Industrial Security, Keller had volunteered for a rather unusual desert expedition. It was organized by a friend, an Aramco well sites supervisor of Bedouin stock, named Muqrin Al-Murri. Al-Murri, as his surname indicated, was from the Murrah tribe, the so-called Bedouins of the Bedouin. These people of the sands were said to be the very best desert trackers and hunters, experts at raising camels and moving migratory herds of goats and sheep from one waterhole to the next, through trackless wastelands few Arabs would dare to traverse. There were a fair number of Murrah tribesmen in the Eastern Province, but only a few remained faithful to the desert life. Muqrin was one of these.

            A short, wiry, dark-skinned man with a droopy black mustache, Muqrin was a born storyteller, steeped in the oral traditions of his people, and a lover of nature who preferred spending a night under the stars to one in a five-star hotel. Blessed with boundless energy, he dedicated most of his spare hours to working at a small “farm” on the desert’s edge, where he raised fine racing camels and grew an array of vegetables, irrigated by artesian well water, for his many friends and for his prodigious extended family.

            Muqrin had decided one day to organize an expedition, a classic camel crossing of a stretch of the Rub’ al-Khali. Very few Bedouins traveled by camel these days; most used Toyota pickups or Land Cruisers. Muqrin wanted to take a small group from one of the remote southern oil facilities across the dunes to a strange place called Umm al-Hadid, or “Mother of Iron.” Umm al-Hadid was the site of ancient meteorite strike – which left behind a great crater, now filled with sand, and an extensive debris field of ferrous rock chunks. Englishman Harry St. John Bridger Philby – a confidant of King Abdulaziz Ibn Saud, who founded modern Saudi Arabia – had explored the area once in the 1930’s, lured by talk of a lost city. Philby, who had taken the name Abdullah and become a Muslim, suspected the local legends bore hidden truth about Wabar, or Iram of the Pillars, the lost city of the Qur’an. He scoured the landscape of Umm al-Hadid, but failed to find a lost city. He concluded that the fragments of the meteorite strike had been mistaken for ruins of the fabled metropolis.

            But Muqrin thought another search at Umm al-Hadid would be worthwhile. One of the Murrah elders who knew the site well had told him once he had personally seen stone fragments of a great city exposed in the sands of Umm al-Hadid by a freakish south wind. The elder, who knew the difference between worked stone and meteorite chunks, said he had been alone when he had spotted the ruins; by nightfall, northerly winds had covered them up again. The old man was now dead, but Muqrin thought he should check out the story.

            So he pulled together a small team of would-be explorers, and set aside a few weeks of vacation time. His team consisted of three American and three Saudis. Muqrin liked Americans. He remembered his father’s stories about the early days of Aramco, when Americans and Saudis had begun a great national adventure, one that would result in the discovery of vast quantities of oil and assure Saudi Arabia its wealth for generations to come. Americans were open and practical, and the Saudis liked that. Muqrin recruited some of his American friends from Aramco for the camel expedition. One of them was Dan Keller.

            Muqrin provided the camels – six of his own, which had to be trained for the arduous desert crossing. The camel expedition was a great help to Keller in dealing with the passing of his wife. He was not so much interested in the search for a lost city, and more in reconnecting with nature and the physical world.

            Keller’s most lasting memory of the trip was riding through the dunes on camelback, day after day, rocking and jouncing, forcing painful wear and tear on his spinal column. His camel was a fawn-colored, leggy female named Nabilah, who was much more patient than Keller expected. But he could never really adjust to the long daily trek, seated on colorful cushions strapped to a wooden frame around the camel’s hump, a “saddle” that squeaked and groaned with each jerky step of Nabilah’s long, knobby legs and large, padded feet. By the time they reached the area of Umm al-Hadid, Keller was making a quiet commitment to himself never to join an expedition like this again.

            As it turned out, Muqrin never found the buried ruins described by the Murrah elder. They searched and searched fruitlessly, most of one day and half of the next. They found only sand and fragments of iron-laden rock.     They had camped that night in the middle of the crater, and as they sat by the crackling fire, Muqrin regaled them with tales of jinn and desert adventure. They sipped endless tiny cups of lightly roasted Bedouin coffee, spiced with cardamom, and they chewed on pieces of dried meat, sour dried yoghurt chips and gritty desert bread.

            Muqrin told them of the evening he and his well-sites team had been camping not far from there, when they had spotted two women, cloaked in black, moving along a sand ridge to the west, silhouetted by the setting sun. The presence of the women was surprising enough; there were no villages or settlements within hundreds of miles. But Muqrin noted that the women were not walking, but rather hopping on one leg. As they watched the two women, it became clear that each one had only a single arm and leg. Moments later, the women vanished over the edge of the dune.

            “Nisnas!” Muqrin had shouted to his companions. “The ‘half people,’ with one leg and one arm! They are the guardians of the lost city of Iram! Quick!”

            Muqrin and the others jumped to their feet and headed up the dune. When they reached the crest, they looked down to the west, but the women were gone.

            “We never saw them again,” Muqrin told Keller and the other members of the expedition. The Arab shook his head, his eyes tinged with genuine sadness in the firelight. “Perhaps if we had moved faster, we might have captured a nisnas.”

            As they headed back to the oil base, Muqrin, Keller and the team were hit by a rare desert rainstorm. It was January, and such storms were not unheard of at this time of year. But this one was unusually intense, and lasted for two full days. They continued to ride, enjoying the coolness of the rain. For the Bedouin, rain was a blessing from God, and the Saudi members of the team were all smiling. The Americans tried to keep their spirits up, but their clothes were soggy and it was getting very cold. And then, suddenly, on the second day, the rain stopped.

            As they rode atop the dune crests in the bright sunshine, they could see pools of water in the low-lying areas; the many sabkha salt flats were flooded. As they passed close by one of the pools, Keller could see tiny living creatures swimming in the water, some of them leaping up in the air and splashing back into the water again.

            “Desert shrimp,” said Muqrin, his eyes flashing. “They sleep inside their eggshells for many years in the dunes, waiting for the rain. Then they come awake when water touches them, and they rejoice. They mate and produce eggs that lie on the bottom, waiting for the waters to dry up. And so the eggs remain there in the hot sands for many more years, until the rains come again.”

            Keller was fascinated. “Shrimp!” he said. “Do you eat them?”

            “No,” said the Bedouin. “That would be cruel, don’t you think? They sleep for so long, but their lives are so short.”

            After they returned to the oil base, Muqrin learned that word of their expedition had spread among the tribes. It was the favored topic of conversation in many majlises. Some were amazed not only that Saudis were riding camels across the desert but also that Americans were riding with them. It reminded some old-timers of the distant past, when the first American geologists had come to Arabia. Accompanied by Saudi trackers, some from the Murrah tribe, the Americans had ridden camels deep into the dunes, in search of the geological traces indicating the presence of oil. The old men of the tribes often remembered those times with affection, and they said God was clearly smiling upon this new expedition. Look at all the rains He had bestowed upon them! The desert will soon be blooming again, at least through the spring, offering fodder for the flocks and replenishing the water wells. Marveling at God’s blessings, the old men prayed fervently that these times would long continue.
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Research Note

They haunt old, abandoned buildings and serve as vigilant guardians for any treasures that lie concealed in their ruins.

One legendary trove was the lost city of Ubar, or Iram of the Pillars, which belonged to the ancient tribe of ‘Ad. An opulent city in a fertile oasis, Ubar and its inhabitants were destroyed by God, ostensibly in punishment for their sins. Early Arab histories said that guardian jinn haunted the ruins of Iram and protected its buried riches. But where the lost city might be found was seriously disputed. Some Arab chroniclers thought it would be found on the southwestern edge of the Empty Quarter, in or near Yemen. Others believed it was located close to Oman, in the eastern Rub’ al-Khali.

In the 1990s, Los Angeles filmmaker Nicholas Clapp told the world that he and a team of fellow explorers had discovered this lost city on the southeastern edge of the Empty Quarter. Clapp and his team did not actually discover Ubar – but they did find the ruins of an old caravanserai and fort near the village of Shisr on the fringes of the desert in Oman. They called it “Ubar,” but no treasures or signs of opulence were found, and so the search for the legendary city continues.

Ubar is one of many names for this ancient Arabian city, which is said to have vanished beneath the sands of the desert. The city was reputedly a major trading emporium at the intersection of trade routes in the Empty Quarter. It was said to have existed from about 3000 BC until the first century AD. Other names include ‘Ad, Wabar, Wibar, Wubar, Irem, Iram, and Iram dhat al-‘Imad (Iram of the Pillars). This last name is explicitly mentioned in the Qur’an: “Seest thou not how thy Lord dealt with the ‘Ad (people) – of the (city of) Iram with lofty pillars, the like of which were not produced in (all) the land?” [Qur’an 89:7].

Early Arab chronicles said the city was built by a powerful king named Shaddad, son of ‘Ad. Modeling the city on his vision of Paradise, Shaddad ordered it constructed of gold and silver in place of stones. Its walls were studded with jewels. Ubar featured a hundred thousand palaces, supported by great pillars made of ruby and aquamarine. The city was filled with orchards and gardens, to complete the picture of Paradise.

Shaddad’s arrogance in trying to re-create Paradise was his own undoing. On the way to inspect his new city, a great sandstorm swept in and overcame him and his entourage. The storm raged for days, and towering dunes rose up around the city. The king and his grand new metropolis of Iram were swallowed up by the sands, never to be seen again.
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Chapter 15

            Salem Bamahfuz sat in his ornate, dimly lit majlis with several of his aides, sipping hot sweet tea and discussing the day’s business. Bamahfuz was a merchant in Abha, not far from Najran. He imported and exported goods – mostly herbal substances from India, East Africa and Oman. He was an important member of the Shi’ite community in southwestern Saudi Arabia. Although not many knew it, he was also a prominent member of a secret religious sect known as the Qarmatians, an offshoot of Ismai’ili Shi’ite Islam. To most Arabian Muslims, the Qarmatians were extinct. They were known as an extremist sect that had ruled the eastern region of Arabia, including the great Hasa oasis and the island of Bahrain, in the tenth century of our era. They had undertaken a veritable reign of terror against the Sunni Abbasid Empire.

            The Qarmatians regarded the Muslim pilgrimage, or Hajj, to Mecca as a primitive superstition. They attacked pilgrimage caravans, and in the year 906 they massacred 20,000 pilgrims returning from the Hajj. In 930, they sacked Mecca itself, throwing bodies of pilgrims into the sacred Well of Zamzam and stealing the venerated Black Stone. The Qarmatians kept the Black Stone in one of their mosques in the eastern region for some 23 years, finally returning it for a hefty Abbasid ransom. About a century later, the Qarmatian state collapsed when its army was defeated in battle at the Hasa oasis by a combined force of Arabs and Seljuk Turks. That was the end of the Qarmatians, as far as anyone knew. But in fact the movement went underground, and its power center shifted over the intervening centuries, finding more fertile soil in southwestern Saudi Arabia, near the border with Yemen. Due to common interests, the Qarmatians received quiet support from Iran.

            Bamahfuz was a slight, lean man with a full mustache. He dressed in a spotless white robe and matching skullcap. He wore a large silver ring on his right hand, with a dark red stone and obscure ancient lettering around it. He sat against richly embroidered cushions and sipped his tea from a tiny, handled glass as his agents spoke. When their business was completed, Bamahfuz muttered instructions to them and then flicked his hand, gesturing for them to leave, which they did.  Another man, dressed in a dark gray robe and bare-headed, slowly left the shadows of the room and approached the merchant. He sat down before Bamahfuz. A servant brought him tea, refreshed his master’s glass, and departed.

            “Abu Sameer,” Bamahfuz said. “Welcome. What news do you have?”

            The visitor looked distressed. Apart from his manner – his nervousness – it was difficult to focus on him. His facial features seemed slightly blurred, almost incomplete. The visitor set down his tea and leveled his gaze at the merchant.

            “The Americans have arrived,” he said, speaking through his teeth, as if cursing. “They have headed east from Najran and are now in one of the mountain caves.”

            “How many of them are there?”

            “About ten – maybe half of them soldiers.”

            “They’re looking for the entrance, aren’t they?”

            “I’m afraid so.  By tomorrow, they may find their way into the City.”

            “We must prevent that.” Bamahfuz sipped his tea, savoring the delicate flavor. “You have a plan, I presume?”

            “Yes,” said the visitor. “We will introduce into their midst the equivalent of a suicide bomber. One of our number will explode spontaneously, killing them all.”

            Bamahfuz smiled. “You jinn are so imaginative,” he said. “Will it kill your operative as well?”

            “Yes,” said the visitor, “but he is willing, and the act is justified by our cause.”

            “May God bless you and your people,” said Bamahfuz. “We must prevent the Americans from making contact with the leadership of the City. Such an encounter would endanger all of us.”

            The visitor nodded. Then he stood and bowed in respect. As he turned, Bamahfuz spoke.

            “Remember, Abu Sameer, everything is at stake! Be very careful, and, if you must, be very ruthless.”

            The visitor tilted his head in acknowledgment, and then departed.

            I remember a time when I was in Arabia, doing research for my doctorate. Aramco, in recognition of my father’s contributions to the oil business, had given me access to a small office in Dhahran, which served as a base for my interviews and research. As I worked on my notes and ploughed through dusty tomes, I suddenly realized I was being watched from outside my office window. There was a bird, sitting on the ledge outside the window, staring at me.

            It was an Indian minah, a mostly black bird with a bright orange beak and intense, rather spooky eyes. It walked back and forth on the ledge, strutting like a tiny dinosaur as minahs tend to do, its eyes constantly fixed on me at my desk. I returned its stare for a while, then went back to my work. When I looked up about fifteen minutes later, the minah was still there, drilling me with its beady eyes.

            This went on for some weeks. Every time I entered the office, the bird was there, as if waiting for me, studying me with those tiny black eyes. It really creeped me out! Eventually I stopped going to that office, and did most of my bookwork and related research in my hotel room.

            I came to think that the bird on the window ledge was actually a jinni, and that it was there to observe my research into – what else? – the folklore of the jinn. The bird’s behavior was certainly unusual. I recalled that Indian minahs usually went about in pairs, but in this case there was only one, and it seemed to take an inordinate interest in me.
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