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The Road to Ubar

Mariner Books

CHAPTER ONE

Unicorns

Over Iran, December 1980 ... The small cargo plane flew on into astarry but moonless night.

"You cannot be up there," the voice crackled over the radio. "Weare having a war here. You are not understanding? Yes?"

While the pilot worked the radio, the copilot tried to make somesense of the scattered lights below. Were they in southern Jordan orperhaps Saudi Arabia? No. It appeared that the aircraft had somehowstrayed into Iran, which at the time was engaged in a heated war withIraq.

"Okay, okay, okay. Got it," the pilot radioed back. With a sigh, heturned to the copilot. "We'll head west then? And sort things out." Hepaused. "Hopefully."

As the cargo plane banked, the flight engineer, wedged behind thecopilot, checked his instruments-those that didn't have "INOP"stickers stuck to their faceplates. The oil leak seemed okay now, andthe port engine wasn't overheating as long as they took it easy andheld back on the throttle.

The journey had begun two days earlier in a winter storm that turnedthe San Diego Wild Animal Park into a sea of mud. In a driving rain,three of the zoo's rare Arabian oryxes -- magnificent black and whiteanimals with long, tapered horns -- were patiently coaxed into achute and loaded into large wooden crates. They were going home.

Once, great herds of oryxes had freely roamed Arabia. But in theearly part of this century, the peninsula's bedouin began replacingtheir old flintlocks with accurate and deadly Martini-Henrys. A largeoryx could feed a family for a month, and the hunt was exciting, a testof riding and marksmanship. Later, oil-rich princes joined the hunt,not on fiery Arab steeds but on military half-tracks fitted with heavy-caliber machine guns. For sport, not food, they would slaughter sixtyor more animals in an afternoon. Until there were no more. By theearly 1970s, the Arabian oryx was extinct in the wild.

Fortunately, a number of conservation groups had faced the realitythat the animal was being wiped out in its native habitat and hadinitiated an innovative breeding program. Arabian oryxes in zooswere swapped back and forth so that a genetically sound "world herd"could be created. By 1980 there were enough animals in captivity thata few at a time could be returned to the wild.

On their journey home, San Diego's oryxes would have company:Dave Malone, a young zookeeper, and a documentary film crew,consisting of myself and my wife, Kay, cameraman Bert Van Munster, and soundman George Goen. As soon as the oryxes were secured in their crates, the clock began ticking, for it would be unwiseto risk opening the crates to give the sharp-horned animals food orwater. It was essential to get them to Arabia as quickly as possible.

The freeway north to Los Angeles was partially flooded andchoked with traffic. The Wild Animal Park truck made it to AirFrance Cargo with not a moment to spare, and we and the oryxeswere on our way to Paris. There we transferred to another cargoplane, flown by a pickup crew that normally worked for British Midlands. After nightfall they veered off course somewhere over easternTurkey. The error was understandable. Of the crew, only the pilothad made the run before -- once, ten years ago.

Now I was in a jump seat behind the pilot, except the pilot wasn'tthere. He was all but on hands and knees, puzzling with the rest ofthe crew over navigational charts spread out on the cockpit floor.Gazing into the night, I thought I saw something. A glint in themoonlight.

"By any chance could we have company up here, coming ourway?"

"Doubt it. Not at this altitude."

"You're sure?"

"Actually, no."

The pilot swung up, peered ahead, didn't see anything. But hiseyes weren't accustomed to the dark. He flipped on the plane's landing lights. And in response, coming at us, another set of landing lightslit up the sky, the beams diffused by the petro-haze that hovers mileshigh over Arabia. The two planes streaked past each other. Dave,who'd been back in the cargo hold checking on the oryxes, poked hishead through the cockpit doorway.

"You guys okay?"

"Just fine," the pilot said.

And we were. A few minutes later the copilot spotted the burningflares marking Saudi Arabia's major north-south pipeline. "Flying thepipeline" took us to within an hour of our destination: Muscat, thecapital of the Sultanate of Oman, where His Majesty Sultan Qaboosibn Said had become intrigued by the plight of the oryx and hadestablished a program to reintroduce the species into the wild.

At three A.M. we banked to the right just short of the silvery ArabianSea and were on final approach to what the pilot was pretty sure wasMuscat's Seeb Airport. We landed and barely had time for a catnapbefore three winged boxes emerged from a hangar and whirred toward us. They were Skyvans, small Irish-made military planes thatcould carry a small vehicle -- or a crated oryx -- and land it almostanywhere. The pilot in charge, Muldoon, Irish like his plane, supervised the loading with inordinate cheerfulness, considering the hour.Muldoon was a mercenary for Oman's fledgling air force. He was agood mercenary, he took pains to explain, busy with worthy missions(food drop, medical flights, and so on) in a time of peace.

We boarded Muldoon's plane. He flashed a thumbs-up and hit the throttle. Despite being loaded down with oryxes and fifty-five-gallondrums of fuel for the return flight, our three planes were quickly airborne. We circled over the sea to gain altitude and greeted the dawnas we headed toward the Jebel Akdar, the rugged "Green Mountains"that rise abruptly from Oman's coast. The greenery at first was limitedto tiny terraced cornfields and vineyards. But then we flew into along, winding valley and over grove after grove of palm trees.

Beside me, Kay had her face pressed to the window, taking all thisin. Neither of us had ever been east of Europe, much less flown abarely charted desert in a tiny, mercenary-piloted plane. This didn'tfaze Kay a bit; she loved it. In everyday life, though, some things didfaze her. Raised in the South, she could become distraught upondiscovering that her navy shoes didn't match her new navy skirtor, worse yet, that her hair had become "a mop, with simply nothing to be done about it." Big things, like a crazed teenager trying toknife her or an international dope dealer threatening to have her "disappeared," didn't bother her at all. Our documentary filmmakingjaunts were breaks from her job as an in-the-trenches federal probation and parole officer. I remember her coming home one day allblack and blue.

"Mom, what happened to you?" inquired first-born daughterCristina.

"More aikido training with the FBI," she said nonchalantly. "Thismorning it was how to slow bad people down by, um, doing things totheir kneecaps."

Always chipper, immensely capable, Kay is a good partner instrange places. We unbuckled our seat belts and squeezed by a cratedoryx for a view from the cockpit. "The way to the interior," Muldoonthe (beneficent) mercenary gestured, as our three Skyvans buzzed acrumbling old watchtower and cleared a narrow pass.

Ahead now was a vast, rocky plain dotted with mud-brick villages.But soon the villages were behind us, all but one, set in a lonelycluster of palms. "Adam, the oasis of Adam," Muldoon said, thenmused, "Suppose that's where he and the missus got the gate?"

The oasis was a last landmark. Oman's interior, desolate and featureless, rolled off to the horizon. We droned on for an hour. TheSkyvan couldn't go very fast and, with no pressurization, had to stayunder 5,000 feet.

Ahead, fingers of red sand reached out for us. "The Rub`al-Khali?"I ventured, surely mispronouncing the Arabic for the Empty Quarter.

"If you want it to be," Muldoon replied. "Who knows where itbegins?"

The Empty Quarter is the great sand sea of Arabia, the largestsand mass on earth. Following the fingers of sand to the horizon, Kayand I could see -- or thought we could -- distant dunes, dancingthrough the heat waves. And then the fingers of sand were gone, leftbehind. Muldoon squinted ahead and began his descent to CampYalooni. Beyond the reach of roads, with scant vegetation and nowater (the nearest well was eighty miles away), it was the ideal placeto release our oryxes, as far as possible from harm's way. A scattering of specks became a cluster of small prefab buildings and a watertruck. No airstrip. Muldoon circled once, slowed till the plane'sstall alarm went off, and hit the rocky terrain with a bump and acrunch.

By now the oryxes had been in their crates for just over sixty hours.

Clambering out of the Skyvans, we were greeted by Mark andSusan Stanley-Price, the personable wildlife biologists in charge ofCamp Yalooni. Behind them, running across the desert, came a bandof bedouin, shouting and waving rifles. Members of the Harasis tribe,they were garbed in turbans and long robes. Wickedly curved daggerswere tucked into their belts, and state-of-the-art Motorola walkie-talkies hung from their shoulders. They were to be the oryxes' gamekeepers.

Mark Stanley-Price and the bedouin shouldered the first cratefrom the plane and carried it to the edge of a nearby fenced enclosure, the holding area for the animals until they were turned loose inthe desert. Dave Malone scrambled up onto the crate and unlatchedits sliding door. Mark nodded, Dave pulled up, and the first oryx flewout of the crate. We cheered. He slowed to a trot and circled, not theleast bit the worse for wear. The bedouin broke into a tribal chant.The two other oryxes repeated the performance.

In honor of the occasion -- or so we assumed -- the Harasis prepared a favorite meal: Take one whole, tokenly eviscerated sheep,add rice. Cook. Flavor with half a case of La Ranchita taco sauce.From the day I had been given the okay to go to Arabia, I dreadedwhat I was sure was going to happen next. The sheep's eyeballs, I hadread, were traditionally offered to honored guests. Kay had a plan, atleast for herself. She would lower her eyes, and murmur words neverto be breathed outside of Arabia: "Oh, how kind, but I'm not worthy,for I'm just a woman." Inevitably, an orb (perhaps two?) would be inmy court. Were they viscous and slimy? Crunchy?

I was relieved when, apparently unaware of this tradition, theHarasis bedouin unceremoniously dug in, the dread orbs disappearing in a melee of hungry hands. The bedouin were fast eaters -- toavoid surprise attack, it's been said, but also, I suspect, to get thebest parts and leave the gristle to the poky. When they rose from thefeast, they were in an exceptionally good mood. They unsheathedtheir daggers and broke into a wild impromptu dance that somehowturned to terrorizing zookeeper Dave. He was a good, if nervoussport. As knives swiped within an inch of his nose, he pleaded to littleavail, "Why me? I'm from New York."

"They're a little cranked up today," observed Mark Stanley-Price.

"It's a big event, the oryxes coming in," I added.

"The oryxes? Oh my, no, dear me. These chaps came back thismorning from raiding their rivals, the next tribe off into the interior.Dynamited their best well, I hear."

"Oh ..." And I got a glimmer that even if ecology was not a majorpart of the Harasis ethic, it wouldn't be a very good idea to lay a handon the oryxes they were now charged to protect.

Late that afternoon, when Camp Yalooni's drab plain turned fleetingly golden, Kay and I walked over to visit the oryxes. And we sawthat myths could be real. Here it was the myth of the unicorn.

Though unicorns appear in Persian and biblical chronicles, theirheyday was in medieval Europe. It has been suggested that a lonetraveler to Arabia spied an oryx in profile, with one horn masking theother. On his return home, he entranced his friends and ultimatelyall of Europe with the vision of a magnificent one-horned creature.This seems unlikely, though, for even minimal and distant oryx-watching will be rewarded by a flick of the head and a view of theanimal's two long spiraled horns. It is much more plausible that asingle horn (minus oryx) made its way to Europe, and a horselikecreature was dreamed up to go with it.

Either way, the Arabian oryx appears to have been the inspirationfor the legendary unicorn. As described in a medieval book of beasts,he has "one horn in the middle of his forehead, and no hunter cancatch him. ... He is very swift because neither Principalities, norPowers, nor Thrones, nor Dominations could keep up with him, norcould Hell maintain him." Only a fair virgin could approach a unicorn and hear him say: "Learn from me because I am mild and lowlyof heart."

Two of our oryxes were quietly foraging. The third was silhouettedagainst the setting sun. At a glance, the animals looked too delicate,too ethereal to survive in a land as harsh as this. They were certainlygraceful, but they were also incredibly rugged. Sixty hours in a boxwas nothing. They could go days -- a lifetime, if need be -- withoutwater, getting all the moisture they needed from scant forage. Comfortable in searing days and freezing nights, the oryx survived as if bymagic. It was hard to imagine this lifeless landscape nurturing amouse or a bird, but nevertheless ...

This was where unicorns lived.

Continues...

Excerpted from The Road to Ubarby Nicholas Clapp Copyright © 1999 by Nicholas Clapp. Excerpted by permission.
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