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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