The Road to Ubar by Nicholas Clapp

The Road to Ubar by Nicholas Clapp

Author:Nicholas Clapp
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 0395957869
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2011-12-30T19:09:49+00:00


Sunday, December 15. Day 3: searching for ghostly cities of the mind. 2:15 A.M. I woke and looked over to see that Ron Blom was also awake and up on the roof of the Discovery, "just checking" on the satellite receiver, he whispered down. "It's okay. We've got a position—18 degrees 59 minutes 16 seconds north by 52 degrees 32 minutes 16 east."

"Good! And good night."

"Good night."

A few fitful dreams later, it was 5 A.M., time to get moving. Everyone was soon up, and with dawn still an hour away, Ron unrolled our Landsat 5 / SPOT image on the hood of a Discovery. By flashlight we saw that we were about as far away as we could be from intercepting the road to Ubar.

"We know we're up here, by this dune," Ron explained, "and where we want to be is all the way over here. And it's roughly thirty kilometers between the two, but we can't go straight there. We're going to have to work our way back down this dune street, then across to here, then strike out across this rather confused area aiming for here..."

With his finger he traced a route weaving through a maze of dune streets. Inevitably, though, we would have to tackle the dunes themselves. If they were anything like what was around us, they could easily be too much for us. Ran summed up our prospects: "If Ron's doing his dead reckoning navigation very carefully, shouldn't be any bother. But when you come to these two enormous lines of heavy dunes, I can't see a way through."

We began by backtracking twelve kilometers to a junction that took us into a parallel dune street. "From looking at the image, this is the only way in," Ron dryly noted. "Short of walking, that is."

We navigated very carefully now, by old-fashioned dead reckoning. Every few kilometers we would stop and set a new course. On our space image, Ron would measure where we had been and plot where we should go. I would get clear of the vehicle's magnetic field and take a compass bearing. At the wheel, Ran would hold to that bearing and track our progress in tenths of a kilometer. A single mistake and we would be lost again.

By noon, we had taken more than thirty bearings and were still apparently on course as we approached our first big line of dunes. They were wide but not high, and we found a workable way across. We dropped into a pristine dune street, no tracks at all. We were beyond the range of wandering bedouin, drug smugglers, and military patrols.

If we could only cross the next line of dunes, we would be on the road to Ubar, close to where Bertram Thomas thought the city lay buried. At the foot of what on our space image appeared to be the most promising way across, we stopped and, with binoculars, surveyed a saddle several hundred feet above us. Mr. Gomez passed out a round of Kit Kats.



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