Chapter Twelve #2
I have scrawled my thoughts down on paper about a magnificent encounter, one that has intrigued me, and I feel is sure to intrigue you as well.
It had been only a journey of a day and a half when we encountered a group of local tribesmen, and with them their wives and children.
I had been warned that the further north we traveled the increased likelihood there existed for banditry.
Naturally I was cautious, however Salim appeared unconcerned.
He made contact with the group and we identified them as being friendly.
We sat down for a meal and to discuss the issue of items for trade (water was too scarce a commodity) and I noticed the most peculiar thing.
The Arabs of this tribe had pottery shards to offer that appeared to my keen eye to be ancient in their nature.
What’s more, they had in their possession trinkets of gold!
Rings and necklaces, some inlaid with precious gemstones.
I asked to hold them in my hands, but they were readily standoffish and had no interest in trading or even allowing me to examine their treasures, and I was only able to view them from afar but not allowed to touch.
It did not make sense that people so poor would come to possess such items of wealth.
I asked immediately where they had acquired the items, and they replied to me that they discover the items in this region from time to time.
Often a trinket would reveal itself in a bucket when retrieving water from a well.
Other times one might be lying in the sand, exposed by the wind.
They were emphatic that the treasures came from the ancient lost city of Iram!
I asked if they ever dug for these and they cautioned that they did not as the area was protected by Djinn.
They simply accepted what was given to them by the desert as they crossed the region and retained them for luck and safe passage.
Of course, this was of no great help to me.
The area they spoke of was far too large to narrow down where such a lost city might lay.
If the city had disappeared in the center of the Rub’ al Khali, we were still several days’ march from it.
The scope of open desert between our position and where the Arabs had said the roads led was enormous.
Although, it had occurred to me that if the legends are true and the lost city truly resides underground, having befallen some circumstance of calamity, perhaps these treasures may have traveled underground, or maybe were tossed by the sands a great distance over a thousand years.
In fact, they described a well several days due west where items often washed up in buckets, though the distance was more than 30 leagues from where we sat, and the validity of their stories uncertain.
But if true, does it imply a lost city? Impossible to tell for sure, yet supremely intriguing!
Still, to proceed on such a reckless course of exploration would have been suicide at best, water being scarce as it was.
Hopefully the opportunity will present itself to explore this further. It will not be on this expedition, but perhaps in the years to come.
Nate held the paper in his hands and stared at it without really seeing it.
His mind was thousands of miles away in the deserts of Arabia.
He exhaled slowly, realizing he had been holding his breath the entire time he had been reading.
This was what he had been looking for. There were rumors of Bedouin tribes with treasures recovered from the area, but never any direct evidence.
Here in his hands Nate held the words of the famous British explorer Bertram Thomas, writing his firsthand account about witnessing the treasures of Ubar, to T.
E. Lawrence. He saw the items with his own eyes and talked to those who had found them, and the Bedouins had distinctly mentioned Ubar, which they referred to as Iram, as the source.
It was an amazing find, though it was still circumstantial at best. But it lent credence to Nate’s theory and explained why Lawrence had sought an expedition to find the city.
Thomas may not have ever sent this letter, for reasons unknown, but certainly he relayed the information to Lawrence at some point.
It also bolstered the oral histories of Ahmed’s tribe, who for all Nate knew were the same people Thomas had encountered.
Ahmed had a treasure, just as these people did; a direct correlation bridged across time over nearly one hundred years.
But there was something else of interest. A meticulous man, Thomas had notes that recorded his bearings, estimated distances, and notable features, including his approximate location when he had encountered the Bedouins.
He speculated that the city was indeed underground and that the items found must have traveled a great distance.
That meant the original stories were wrong and that the city, if it existed, was much farther south.
Or the items were making their way from much farther north to the south, a distance of probably at least a hundred miles.
Either way, it was an additional data point, and Nate recorded the location.
Picking up speed, Nate searched through the remainder of the box and found hand-drawn sketches of the route Thomas had taken through the Saudi desert.
They seemed to match what he had seen previously, but he set them aside anyhow.
He returned to the letter and reread it several times, took pictures of all the pages with his phone, made a few copies, and then reread the letter again.
It definitely supported Ahmed’s story, but it also widened the search area.
Of course, Bertram Thomas never actually pursued the lost city, and never made it to the Wabar craters.
But St. John Philby did. Nate began packing up the boxes.
With any luck, Philby’s notes would hold another clue that would bring him one step closer to solving the mystery.