Chapter Fifteen
The next morning Nate awoke with a significant headache.
He couldn’t tell if the pain was from all the beer or the punch he had taken the night before.
He supposed it didn’t matter, but was likely a combination of both.
After downing a glass of water and two Tylenol, he threw on his running shoes and headed out the door.
A run around Hyde Park, which was only a few blocks north of Wally’s flat, would work to clear his mind and burn off some of the alcohol in his system.
It would also give him a chance to scope out where he was going today, which was conveniently close to the flat and bordered the park.
Running along the green space rejuvenated him, and Nate quickened his pace to a seven-minute mile.
The air was crisp, and the temperature hovered around a perfect sixty-five degrees.
As he ran past fountains, gardens, statues, and ponds, he encountered locals conducting their morning exercises who waved as he went by.
There was something about London that Nate always found comforting.
It could have been the people, or the long and storied history, or perhaps both.
He sprinted south down Broad Walk along the western edge of the park, passing between Kensington Palace and Round Pond, before looping back to the east along the southern edge.
Across the street to the south he noted his destination for the morning, the old brick walls of the building seemingly nearly as aged as the almost two-hundred-year-old institution itself.
Satisfied that he knew where to return to, Nate turned south and headed back to the flat.
When he returned, Wally brewed him a cup of English breakfast tea.
After a shower, shave, and a change into the same suit he had worn the previous day, Nate arrived at the Royal Geographical Society several minutes early for his appointment.
The building was part of the Albertopolis, a cultural and scientific center imagined by Prince Albert in the mid-nineteenth century that included the Royal Albert Hall, the Natural History Museum, and Imperial College London, as well as several other important sites.
It was situated south of Hyde Park near various embassies and consulates, which meant that the area was populated by an eclectic mix of nationalities.
Inside, his reception was similar to the one he had received at Cambridge.
Someone from Oxford had called down to ensure the arrangements were made, and a staffer met him, this time taking him to a large room covered wall-to-wall with bookshelves.
There were several small wooden tables interspersed throughout the room, and he was led to one that had five large boxes stacked on it, much like the ones he had seen at Cambridge, which contained the institution’s collection of notes from St. John Philby.
The staffer told him to find a member of the staff if he needed anything or had any questions, then left him to his research.
Not wanting to waste a single minute, Nate took off his suit coat, hung it on the back of a chair, and dug into the first box.
The nature of the contents was similar to that of Bertram Thomas’s records.
It described Philby’s thoughts, his findings, and his musings.
The writings were intriguing, and once again Nate felt that he could have spent months combing through them, pulling out interesting bits of information.
But he didn’t have months, he had hours.
So he surveyed each document with a broad focus, speed-reading while searching for keywords and dates.
It didn’t take him long to find something of interest. The first box contained records of Philby’s expedition to the Wabar craters.
There were sketches and notes detailing the arduous monthlong trek to the location, which Nate noted as being similar to, yet slightly different from, the official route he had seen previously.
Philby discussed at great length his disgust for the Arab tribesmen who had turned away at the first sign of hardship, and heaped praise on those who had seen fit to stay the course, despite the danger.
There were two men in particular who came up several times: Ali Jahman and Salim Ibn Suwailim.
They were his trusted guides, and he seemed to hold them in very high regard.
Nate read over handwritten journal pages that relayed much of what he had previously read in Philby’s books The Heart of Arabia and The Empty Quarter.
While he attempted not to get sucked in, Nate was drawn to the man’s entries.
He felt compassion for the old explorer who described in painful detail his despair at finding only the Wabar craters, which he mistook for a volcano.
He sounded truly defeated, seeming to have lost faith in the existence of the legendary lost city, a sentiment with which Nate could relate.
The lack of the “camel’s hump” on the site, a piece of iron described as such for its shape and size, further diminished Philby’s mood.
Of course, Nate knew the hump would eventually be discovered in 1966 and was currently on display in the National Museum of Saudi Arabia in Riyadh, a fact that brought no comfort to Philby at the time but that helped Nate build a case for the city himself.
The conditions of the expedition were grueling.
By the time they reached the site they had long since run out of water, the camels that remained were on their last legs, and morale was low.
It seemed from the writings that Philby himself didn’t have the energy to rouse the troops, and the tone of the expedition was one of gloom.
Nate shuffled through the pages before something caught his eye.
It appeared to be a crude sketch. He placed the page flat on the desk in front of him, rubbed his tired eyes, and willed the last remnants of his hangover away.
Taking a closer look, there appeared to be lines drawn that indicated some type of terrain feature.
He would have thought it a stream, but it just as easily could have been a draw or a wadi system.
Then he noticed several circular shapes and realized that they depicted the Wabar craters.
“So unrefined,” he mused to himself. Philby had made several sketches of the site, but generally in much greater detail. By comparison these were the drawings of a child. Perhaps a first draft? He looked closer.
The lines were to the southwest of where the craters were marked, which was also far from where he had denoted the base camp.
Along one of the lines a tiny box was drawn.
There was no annotation for the box, but Nate found it curious.
Without exact measurements it was hard to tell, but it must have been between fifteen to twenty miles from the craters.
Nate couldn’t remember having read anything about the expedition pushing that far out.
What was out there? He turned the page over to discover a hand-scrawled note, sloppily written:
Alas, when I thought for certain that the area held no further secrets, Jahman returned to me with both a gift and a puzzle.
Having been sent out to locate a reliable water source in close proximity to the Wabar volcano, he returned having found so much more.
While searching, a tribesman fell clear into a well, nearly 10 fathoms deep, into running water that contained a current!
The poor fellow was nearly swept away by the strength of it, and returned with his clothing still heavy with water!
I had Jahman lead me to the site, nearly 20 miles west of the camp, and verified the find myself.
There did indeed seem to be a strong river underneath the sands, with water cold as ice.
Such a water system is certainly ancient in its nature.
It is unclear if such a waterway could have supported a city, though it certainly must help feed the wells within a hundred miles of this location.
Position recorded at 21 degrees, 46 minutes, 1.6 seconds north; 50 degrees, 1 minute, 53.9 seconds east.
Nate read the journal page several more times.
The entry simply ended, and there were no follow-up notes that he could find after flipping through multiple pages.
He searched for additional entries related to the deep well, even as the magnitude of what he had just read was setting in.
Philby had discovered water near Wabar. And not just any water, an ancient underground river. And Nate had the coordinates.
He tried to tamp down his excitement. Like the letter written by Bertram Thomas, this was anecdotal.
Unlike the letter from Thomas, there was no other story to corroborate this with.
Still, it made perfect sense. There were many wells in the area, that much was well documented.
The underground water sources were widespread enough that the Saudi government was able to tap into them for agricultural projects farther to the north.
A quick Google Maps search by anyone with a computer would show the circular green agricultural fields present throughout the desert where the government made use of the natural water sources in the most valuable way possible.
While there was a plethora of proven and unproven oil fields in the kingdom, water was more important in some areas.
The Empty Quarter would certainly be one of those areas; however, he’d never seen or heard of any serious water sources out that way.
They all lay much farther north or south, by a distance of at least a hundred miles.
But it made sense that a city like Ubar would need a robust freshwater source.
It was also true that the geography of the country was much different thousands of years ago, when the city would have existed.