His guides, still convinced they had discovered the cursed ancient city, dug in the sand for treasure and “came running up to me with lumps of slag and tiny fragments of rusted iron and small shining black pellets, which they took to be the pearls of ‘Ad’s ladies, blackened in the conflagration that had consumed them with their lord.” “I looked down not upon the ruins of an ancient city but into the mouth of a volcano, whose twin craters, half filled with drifted sand, lay side by side surrounded by slag and lava outpoured from the bowels of the Earth … I knew not whether to laugh or cry, but I was strangely fascinated by a scene that had shattered the dreams of years.” “Leaving my companions to pitch the tents and get our meal ready against sunset, I walked up to the crest of a low mound of the ridge to survey the general scene before dark … I reached the summit and, in that moment, fathomed the legend of Wabar. “I had my first glimpse of Wabar - a thin low line of ruins riding upon a wave of the yellow sands,” he wrote in his 1933 book “The Empty Quarter.” John Philby to a place they called Al-Hadida, or the ‘place of iron.’ (Archives/Getty) Initially, Philby - who had been granted permission to mount his expedition by King Abdulaziz, to whom he had become a trusted adviser - was convinced he had found the ancient city he sought, which was said to have been established by the legendary King Shaddad ibn ‘Ad.īedouin guides took British explorer Harry St. He followed the clues left by Thomas, and directions from his own Bedouin guides, to a place they called Wabar - but which, confusingly at first, was also known to them as Al-Hadida, or “the place of iron.” Philby was likewise intrigued by the stories of the lost city. However, he died in 1935 in England as a result of a motorcycle crash before he could act on them. Lawrence - known to the world as Lawrence of Arabia, who helped to foment the Arab revolt in the Hejaz during the First World War - made plans to search, by airship, for this “Atlantis of the Sands,” as he called it. Thomas marked the position of the ancient road on his map, intending to return but never did.Īrchaeologist-turned-soldier T. This, the guides told Thomas, was “the road to Ubar … a great city, our fathers have told us, that existed of old, a city rich in treasure … it now lies buried beneath the sands.” They led north into the sands at the southern edge of the vast desert. In his 1932 book, “Arabia Felix,” he recounted how his Bedouin guides had shown him “well-worn tracks, about a hundred yards in cross-section, graven in the plain.” In 19, British explorer Bertram Thomas had become the first Westerner to cross the Empty Quarter. He was pursuing the legend of an ancient lost city in the heart of the sands, described in the Qur’an as having been destroyed by God for rejecting the warnings of the prophet Hud. John Philby to the edge of two craters in the desert so imposing that, at first, he mistook them for the mouths of an extinct volcano. However, it was a more down-to-earth mystery that, 90 years ago, led intrepid British explorer Harry St. Having orbited the Sun for millions of years, it finally crashed into Earth’s atmosphere at a speed of up to 60,000 kilometers per hour, before plummeting to Earth in several fiery pieces. However, we can be almost certain that this ancient traveler, carrying fragments of celestial bodies that formed in the earliest days of our solar system, originated in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Geologists continue to debate exactly when the so-called Wabar meteorite fell to Earth - the theories range from 450 to 6,400 years ago.
The fire, which melted half a square kilometer of desert and transformed it into black glass, fell from the sky in one of the most dramatic meteorite strikes the planet has ever experienced. The sands in question were at an isolated spot deep in Saudi Arabia’s Rub Al-Khali, or Empty Quarter.
LONDON: It was, in the words of a 1998 report published in Scientific American, “the day the sands caught fire.”
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