![]() As we turn around, there was a stair that goes even deeper. He asked us to flash our lights into the one side of the tunnel. We descended down into where Sarin was asking us to go. He asked us to follow him even more - down into a tunnel where stairs lead to darkness. ![]() ![]() It was easy to deduce that it was the sinkhole Oman Tourism website was describing. In the little things we would come to understand from him, he asked us to follow him. There were on-going construction and excavation everywhere but in a distance, stone walls rise from the sand.Ī Bengali worker we would later get to know as Sarin would welcome us. Beside the town board is a small store where a group of guys - workers at the site- were lounging.Ī few steps away, one of the excavators’ offices shouts “Welcome to the Lost City of Ubar”. Under the hot, April sun, even the date palms are on their way to giving up.Ī large giant board that says Shisr guard the entrance to the site. Near the entrance of the town stands the mosque.įrom afar, the town looked embattled. The town of Shisr is comprised of a little more than 15 stone structures - houses and buildings that were built several years back. The images they took would eventually reveal ancient trade routes - their convergence and branches - apparently made by “passage of hundreds of thousands of camels.” As Maugh added in his story, “The radar was able to “see” through the overlying sand and loose soil to pick out subsurface geological features.”įrom the information Clapp gathered, he will soon launch an excavation reaching out to possible volunteers which resulted to the discovery of the site in Shisr. Maugh detailed how Nicholas Clapp, the leader of the expedition, convinced scientists in NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena to allow him to scan the region using the agency’s Challenger radar system. The researchers announced that months of work yielded the discovery of an eight-sided structure built on a large limestone cavern that due to the weight of the city, collapsed into a massive sinkhole. In Maugh’s report, he described that amateur and professional archaeologists based in Los Angeles worked together using a “combination of high-tech satellite imagery and old-fashioned literary detective work” to discover the fortress buried under the shifting sands of the Empty Quarter. In February of 1992, The Los Angeles Times ran a story written by Thomas H Maugh II, the newspaper’s Science writer, detailing how the Lost City of Ubar was found. Bogs will eventually punch Ubar into his phone’s GPS - found what seemingly was the right location and without any complaints from us, drove through the sun-drenched and blinding roads of Dhofar headed for Ubar. It was an interesting tale which roused their interest. I also explained that it’s a fabled city supposedly mentioned in the Qur’an and “A Thousand and One Arabian Nights.” The Qur’an referred to it as the city of Iram, its people called Ad and for all the good things that they possessed, they’ve grown wicked for which God punished them. I went on to explain that it has become popular as the Atlantis of the Sand, the nickname given by TE Lawrence or Lawrence of Arabia. ![]() Sketchy of the details, I added that based from what I saw, it was somewhere near the Empty Quarter. I shared that I saw a Facebook post from one of the media influencers in the country that talked about it. He’s been reading the newspaper for as often as he gets them, yet Ubar was also an unknown subject to him. He raised a child here and a second one is coming. Rolando Escrupolo, our other buddy, has been in the Sultanate for more than 8 years. We were parked at one of the corners of the Frankincense farm in Daykah. A fellow travelphile, he was clueless when I brought the subject of The Lost City of Ubar. Bogs Jacildo has been in the Sultanate for 12 years. It was literally in the middle of nowhere and the only semblance of modernity in that part of Oman are the on-going road construction and the patches of wide farms which I presumed were growing fodder for animals. By Yeru Ebuen - About 3 hours’ drive from Salalah, roughly 55 kilometres from the main road of Thumrait, is the small little town of Shisr.
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