The full title of this book is The Road to Ubar: Finding the Atlantis of the Sands.

Well, you had me at Atlantis!

My mom would have loved this book. In fact, I probably gave her a copy for Christmas, the year that I first read it; and I wouldn’t be surprised if I gave a copy to my dad, too. The two of them were so funny – so much alike in some ways. So different in others. They both loved to travel – for their honeymoon, they camped across the U.S., and camping was a big part of my early life – and they both traveled extensively after the divorce. And they both chose government jobs of a sort as their method for traveling. They were also both extremely shy, although they opened up after they got to know you.

And yet they chose very different means of expressing their love of adventure: Dad was more of a Bill Bryson type, I think. Mom’s greatest heroes were Beryl Markham and Isak Dinesen (neither whom I have read). When I was cleaning out the house after Mom died, I discovered a secret cabinet next to the chair she always sat in that contained a letter from a guide she must have met while living in Addis, telling her that he couldn’t continue their affair because he liked the other guy she was having an affair with too much to do that to him. (The other dope was a married man with children who fell under her spell and abandoned his family to follow her to Paris, where she broke up with him because, I suspect, she never wanted to be a member of a club that would have her as a member.)

Sorry, back to Ubar…

“He is crazed with the spell of far Arabia, they have stolen his wits away…”

Clapp quotes this de la Mare poem to open a chapter where he talks about early explorers who became obsessed with finding the legendary Ubar. Clapp himself first hears of Ubar while air-ferrying some Oryx (long-horned antelope who, in profile, look like they have a single horn) to Oman. Curious about Ubar, he begins searching for it and finds that, like Atlantis, there are many tales with people pointing different directions Mostly, in this case, into the empty quarter, the Rub’ al-Khali, the desert sands. Always pointing away – the treasure lies that way, over there, keep going – like the Native Americans did when the Spanish first landed: the gold’s that way, dudes, a great golden city, just keep going into the desert, you’ll find it someday, somewhere other than here…

You can read about Ubar in the Arabian Nights, about the wealthy city that offended the gods, and disappeared beneath the sands. And yet it was a real place, a place along the frankincense trail, carrying the precious resin from grove across the desert to the great markets. And it was indeed very rich, as many cross-road cities are, taking a cut from the value of the goods passing through them.

But where exactly did Ubar lie? Clapp starts by trying to find the famed “road to Ubar.” Being a modern sort of guy (the book is over 20 years old now), Clapp’s journey starts at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he examines satellite fly-over data. He scours old books and maps. He talks to locals. Finally, he finances a boots-on-the-ground mission, in jeeps with guys with guns to protect them from the locals. They find the frankincense groves, they follow the road past some ruins into the desert, they search for the GPS coordinates that the satellite had provided. They drive back past the ruins. They ask around a little. They drive past the crumbled ruins yet again.

Hm, it’s got to be around here somewhere…

Clapp’s journey draws you in, and makes you long for adventure, for the romance of the East. I say this, knowing I will probably never go to Oman, not having my parents’ love of adventure. Sure, I’ve been places but I wouldn’t say that those qualify as adventures: the biggest risk on my trip to Antarctica were the sidewalks in Buenos Aires which, for some reason, even if the best areas, regularly feature unexpected and uncovered holes about the size of shoeboxes. I couldn’t figure out what they were for – they weren’t drains – but I became obsessed with not stepping into them and spraining my ankle because I was not missing my boat to the white continent. The trip was totally awesome but it was on a French ship with delicious food and much wine, and Amundsen and Scott would have laughed at calling it adventure.

If you haven’t read this book, I highly recommend it. I’ve read it a number of times and it’s a delight every time.

If you have read it, here are some others from my shelf in the same vein that I also enjoyed: The Buried Book (Damrosch on finding the Epic of Gilcamesh), The Race for Timbuktu (Kryza on the search for another “lost” city), Into Africa (Dugard on Stanley & Livingston’s adventures), and The Lost City of Z (Grann, looking for the guy who got lost looking for the lost city in South America).

What have you been reading in this vein? Looking for recommendations…