Clapp and his wife Kay briefly visited Oman in the mid-1980s, filming a documentary on the return of oryxes to their native range in the Rub' al-Khali. Clapp became interested in stories a lost city somewhere in "Empty Quarter" of that desert. A supposedly majestic city, ultimately destroyed by a cataclysm brought on by their pronouncing themselves greater than God, called Ubar.
Clapp takes us through his initial trips to bookstores, searching for what's been written about the desert, and how that got him on the trail of Ubar, trying to use ancient copies of the maps Ptolemy made of the known world as at least a starting point. He's able to contact someone in NASA about the possibility of their using a new satellite when it flies over to look for evidence of a road, now buried under the sand, used to reach Ubar.
There's a vast cast of people brought in, from archaeologists to English landed gentry who love to explore to anyone they can convince to help fund or supply the expedition. Clapp offers short biographies as needed, but avoids getting too bogged down in that.
The middle third of the book is the actual search, or rather, two of them. The first attempt sends them out into the desert, tracking the partially buried road. It produces mostly evidence of Neolithic habitation. Interesting, but not what they're looking for. There's a fair amount of discussion of the interactions with the locals living around the fringes of the desert, their current ways of life, their past ways of life, their beliefs and stories. Many claim ancestry from "the people of 'Ad", who were the ones living in Ubar. I was surprised by that, people proudly claiming to be part of a group of people given a reputation for having their great city destroyed for their lack of humility.
They do find a buried city, so this is not a book about the search for a lost city that goes nowhere, if you were worried about that. Clapp acknowledges that, short of finding the 400 A.D. equivalent of an "Ubar City Limits" sign, they'll never be sure they found the actual place they were looking for. But it's still an impressive find, this city partially buried by sand, partially swallowed by a sinkhole (the collapse of which could be the cataclysm that destroyed Ubar), partially buried by the earthworks of people who came along centuries later and built on top of the remains. There's also sorts of pottery remains from both the Parthians and the Romans, part of a sandstone chess set (although that's from one of the later groups of people who took us residence), dozens of unused arrows, and most of the city walls. It's kind of crazy to think they slowly unearthed all that over the course of a few years (and not even year-round work, since the summer climate is not conducive.)
The last third of the book is Clapp offering a best guess of the history of the location. Some of that is based on the evidence the archaeologists found, but some of it is extrapolated from the stories about the city, or what was going on in other parts of the world. For example, Ubar's wealth would have been based on the frankincense the groves closer to the coast produced. So Clapp hypothesizes the rise of Christianity, and a resulting reduction in people wanting frankincense for burials, might have lowered Ubar's prospects, even as more people were moving to that area as other spring-fed water sources dried up. It's a well-written section, but I don't know the history of the region well enough to know how shaky it is.
Still, I learned several things I'd never heard of before, and Clapp includes enough of the day-to-day challenges and oddities during the excavation to keep the book from getting dry. It's as much a travelogue and memoir as historical record.
'When Ran Fiennes, normally busy with logistics and government liaison, had a go at actually digging, he excavated with his hands rather than a trowel. "Now, we don't dig like that," Juri advised. But there was no stopping Ran as he hit a section of the wall and proclaimed, "I'm an archaeologist, an overnight archaeologist!"
"Stop digging like a fox," Juri pleaded, to absolutely no avail.'
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