UNDERGROUND

IN ARABIA

John Pint

Selwa Press

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Copyright © 2012 John Pint

Photographs © 2012 John Pint

Published by Selwa Press

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www.SelwaPress.com

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To Susy who let me lure her into the abode of the jinns

FOREWORD

We were living in Paris when John was offered a job in Saudi Arabia, at the King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals (KFUPM) and, I must say that this didn’t make me happy at all. How could I ever have considered leaving my precious well-paid jobs as a Spanish teacher in the City of Light? On top of that, my hobby at the time was ice-skating and, during the years we had been married, I had never become interested in the lunacy of crawling around underground… no way!

It was very hard for me to decide to leave Paris in order to follow him. Fortunately, I did it putting in front of me what I had already learned from him: to open up new chapters of your life with a dash of the spirit of adventure that gives you the chance to discover to new and exciting opportunities. And that was the case!

In Saudi Arabia I learned to love the desert and the amazing beauty it involves, from the vast oceans of dunes, to the immense beauty of a little flower which suddenly appears in front of you, in the middle of nowhere – some place where there had not been a drop of rain for years. Saudi hospitality was also a delightful surprise: the early morning visit of a Bedu extending a bucket of camel’s milk, worried about us as if we had been friends for life.

Then, one day, I had the fortune of being with John and Dave Peters during the two-week camping trip when John found the blow-hole which led to what we named Dahl Sultan. At that time, it was commonly accepted that there were no important caves existing in the Kingdom. Therefore, that moment was the beginning of something new in Earth Sciences in the country. And, as for me, I continued exploring other caves with him not only in Saudi Arabia but also in my country, Mexico. Crawling through both sand and mud and rappelling into the depths of the earth became my new hobby.

Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined that I would become the first woman to explore caves in Saudi Arabia on official expeditions sponsored by the government, the only female in the company of an all-male crew. That’s a part of my life I will never forget.

Susy Pint

INTRODUCTION

It was thanks to John Pint, a delightfully eccentric professor from the United States, who went to Saudi Arabia some 30 years ago to explore caves, that I had the chance in 2003 to be invited by the Saudi Arabian Geological Survey to spend a week visiting the most interesting desert caves of that country.

Before flying to Jeddah I tried to learn as much as possible about Saudi society, which, of course, is a little bit different from that of “Old Europe.” I was ready to dress much more formally than I was used to in my University, and also to avoid any direct contact with females, no matter their age, but I would never have supposed that the hardest thing for me in that country would be, by far, the simple act of eating.

This was due not to the food, which was always very good, nor to the fact that often we had to use our hand instead of a fork. The problem was that the one hand allowed for eating is the right one, but tragically I am completely left handed! Therefore each lunch or dinner became for me a true nightmare. I tried every imaginable way to keep my left hand out of sight by inserting it into my pocket, by sticking it under my left foot and by tying a heavy stone to it. But it didn’t matter, suddenly I would realize that I was placing food in my mouth with the “dirty hand.” Moreover, my total inability to use my right hand resulted in me spreading most of the food most of the time over most of my face. The result was 1) that I often failed to eat as much as I would have liked, and 2) I was forced to waste lot of water cleaning my face.

But now it is time to speak of karst (limestone riddled with holes) and caves. If Saudi society is a little bit different from that of “Old Europe,” the karst is definitely startling. Believe me, because during more than 40 years I have visited caves in over 70 countries on four continents. In Arabia, searching for caves simply means walking around on a flat, endless, sand plain, with a GPS in your hand because there are no landmarks, searching for a small hole often even less than one meter in diameter. When the entrance of the cave has been found, a new problem arises: to what will we attach the rope and the cable ladder in this “sea of sand?” Our Desert-Cave colleagues solved the problem in a brilliant manner by connecting it to the bumper of the nearest Land Cruiser. In many caves of the world when you go down into a pit you may be completely soaked by cascading water or injured by a falling stone. In Saudi Arabia, no. Instead, you might just be buried under cubic meters of sand, which somehow gets into even the smallest pores of your skin, to say nothing of your eyes, mouth and other holes.

Despite the hot, totally dry, external environment, desert caves are magic places where the climate is pleasantly fresh and gypsum flowers or calcite helictites bloom from walls and ceiling. A true paradise for a caver who would never survive being on the surface, which in the summer is a burning hell.

Surely the best example of Saudi Arabia’s strange cavities is Murubbeh cave, which acts as a gigantic, natural freezer, expelling hot air while trapping cold air. Even a large Bedouin tribe with tents and camels might easily be accommodated in its huge chamber some 40 meters below the surface where all the year round the temperature stays at a steady 16°C (62°F), some 8-10 degrees Celsius less than the yearly average external temperature.

My three days of camping in the desert flew by rapidly and smoothly. All was perfectly organized, not only the cave explorations but also food, accommodation and even an exciting “bocce” tournament over a big sand dune at sunset. I must say that, considering my entire stay in Saudi Arabia, this experience remains, even now, among my four or five most favorite cave expeditions all over the world.

On my way back home, relaxing on the flight from Jeddah to Rome, I thought about all the caves I had visited and all the new experiences I had. I felt extremely satisfied, not only because I had ended up being the very first Italian caver ever to visit the Saudi Arabian karst, but also and perhaps even more because I had the privilege to come into contact with an extremely different society where I met a lot of simpatico persons, some of whom I now count among my true friends.

Grazie per tutto questo,  John!

Paolo Forti

Paolo Forti is a professor of Speleology and Gemology at Bologna University. His main fields of interest are cave creation and the minerals associated with underground formations. He is the co-author of Cave Minerals of the World and the former president of the International Union of Speleology.

PROLOGUE

THE BLOWING HOLE

The Summan Plateau – December 1983

250 kilometers north of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

The hardpan stretched off into the distance, as far as my eye could see. The only shade anywhere lay beneath a lonely green bush that seemed out of place in this parched and barren desert.

I walked toward the bush simply because it was there. A few moments later I came to a small hole in the ground, about the size of a dinner plate. It had been invisible three paces back. Of course, any hole is of interest to a caver and I picked up a stone to drop into it.

As I leaned over the opening, I felt a steady breeze bathe my face with warm, humid air. I dropped the stone, but heard nothing and suddenly could see nothing, for my glasses were completely fogged, an extremely rare occurrence in a desert.

More than once in history, a small blowing hole has turned out to be the entrance to a fascinating labyrinth of underground passages. I walked back to our campsite and told my wife Susy and partner Dave Peters, what I had found. Twenty minutes later, limestone chips were blowing into our eyes as we chiseled away at the blowhole, unaware that on this day, a new era in cave exploration was about to begin for Saudi Arabia, as well as an adventure that would keep us enthralled for the next twenty-five years of our lives.

Map of the Principal Surveyed Caves of Saudi Arabia. Limestone caves are located in the east and the north while volcanic caves are found in 89,000 square kilometers of lava beds covering the western half of the country.

CHAPTER ONE

FROM FRENCH MUD TO ARABIAN SANDS

The Jura Mountains, France – August, 1981

Forty meters from the drop into Pourpevelle Cave

We were all huddled together inside the tent of our leader, Gérard, president of the Spéléo-Club Hautes-de-Senne. Our esteemed chef was holding an old and well-stained sock over a battered tin pot, into which a brown liquid was steadily dripping. The sock was stuffed with coffee grounds and small squares of bittersweet chocolate. Another member of the club poured boiling water into the sock while yet another added the last drops of pastis from a nearly empty bottle.

This was not the mixing of a Druidic potion, but an after-dinner café as only French spéléologues would do it.

“Bonba, we have a little problem,” said Gérard. We had traveled hundreds of kilometers from the Parisian suburb of Clamart, stuffed inside a decrepit Citroën deux-chevaux – together with all our camping and caving gear – to explore the famed Pourpevelle Cave. We had suffered major breakdowns and had driven most of the distance without benefit of headlights, depending entirely on a caver’s flashlight, held out the window on the co-pilot’s side, to illuminate the road through the inky darkness. And now, mon dieu! – what did we find at le Goufrre de Pourpevelle but thirty some tents belonging to caving groups that had come from as far away as Belgium with exactly the same plan as ours.

Ah, but Gérard had not been elected president of the club for nothing. He had a strategy.

“The cave is now full of foreigners,” he said, deliberately not looking my way, “but they are enjoying the cave by day and will exit it by night. We, instead will sleep by day and explore the cave at night – alone – just nous and the cave, as it should be. We go in at midnight.”

Well, by then there was not a whole lot of day left for sleeping, but I got in a few winks before we made our way through shadowy tents to the edge of the great entrance hole and added our rope to the dozens of others that festooned it like party ribbons. A 50-meter rappel brought us into an impressive room beyond which we could enjoy – alone, just nous and the cave – all the pleasure of a typical French gouffre: nearly freezing waist-high water, smooth, wet walls of bare rock utterly bereft of anything interesting to look at… and beaucoup de boue: lots and lots of mud.

From the entrance room we made our way into a rather narrow river passage where we did our best to stay out of the water by walking along narrow ledges on the side walls. This proved to be only partly successful and after slogging along for quite a long time, we all ended up soaked to the waist. Eventually, we came to a hole. “This is a short passage that leads directly to a room with exquisite formations,” someone announced. This news was greeted with great enthusiasm by a new member of our group, a mountain climber who was exploring a cave for the very first time in his life. I too, was delighted because I had yet to see a single stalactite after a year of caving in France.

We crawled through the hole and found ourselves in a wide passage with a very low ceiling. At this point, it was suggested that the fastest way to get to the beautiful room was for us to leave all our cave packs right there at the entrance to this passage and – thus unencumbered – make a dash for that enchanted inner sanctum that beckoned us from afar. This we did and off we went. However, the roof in this area was just low enough so we couldn’t crawl through it on hands and knees, which cavers can do at a pretty fast speed. No, the only way to negotiate this passage was to lie on your side and propel yourself forward with a push of an elbow and a kick of a leg. Now, this would not have been too bad a way to travel because the floor was very smooth, but every once in a while we would come to a wide puddle of muddy water whose temperature was about one degree above freezing. Slip-sliding along, we were in a perfect position to channel the icy water down our necks and backs, which, of course, inspired us to wriggle forward even faster, but – Helas! – we never reached that beckoning room of delightful formations because, one by one, our headlamps began to fail and we had to consider the distinct possibility that we might not have enough lights among us for getting back to our packs, which, of course, contained our spare batteries and carbide.

Eventually, we were forced to admit defeat and Gérard reluctantly gave the command to turn back. Once again we found ourselves sliding along the “short” passage on our hips, in and out of icy mud puddles, with nothing to look forward to but plunging into the cold river followed by a hard climb up several cable ladders linked together in the entrance pit.

When we finally hauled ourselves over the lip and stood beneath the summer sky once again, the mountain climber in the group, now covered with mud and dripping wet, turned to us and said, “Merçi beaucoups, les amis. Zis was my first caving trip and I am quite sure it is also my last.”

That also turned out to be my last caving trip in France. Tired of dreary, wet weather, I had signed up for a teaching job at the University of Petroleum and Minerals in Dhahran, on the east coast of Saudi Arabia. “I’d do anything for a little sunshine,” I told myself.

CHAPTER TWO

THE GOOD OLD DAYS OF CAVING IN THE DESERT

I naively imagined Saudi Arabia to be a vast sandbox where I would never need my helmet, lights and other gear, which I put into a box and stored in the wine cellar, appropriately called cave in French, of a friend in Paris. However, only days after arriving in Dhahran, I received a phone call from Bruce Davis, an old caving buddy from Los Angeles and a fellow member of the NSS (U.S. National Speleological Society). “I’m here in Dhahran,” he announced. “In fact there are three cavers here altogether and we’ve found a local guy who’s going to take us to some very interesting holes out in the desert.”

This informant was Will Kochinski, a wiry adventurer who worked for Saudi Aramco (Saudi Arabian Oil Company) and who had been exploring remote areas of the desert for years with several old-timers who had taught him many of their tricks for survival in one of the world’s harshest climates. In 2003, I interviewed and taped Kochinski on “the joy and terror of caving in Arabia in the early days.” He had quite a story to relate and here it is in his own words.

“In those days, before the GPS, we would find our way around the desert by using the triangulation stations that Aramco had established on various promontories and from these we would know exactly where we were. We would set up a compass and one of the cars would take a direct bearing along the route and the other person would direct him with hand signals and we would go two or three kilometers, as far as we could, until the car was going to be out of the line of sight and then he would stop along the bearing and we would catch up with him and we’d repeat the process. We could navigate 20-30 kilometers (12-18 miles)on a dead line and that was the only way you could really find these caves because the ones that were not well known or established were often impossible to see until you were right on top of them.

“One of the most difficult to find was Jibu Al Kaliqa, an enormous pit approximately 75 meters across (225 feet. Note: Multiply meters by 3 for approximate conversion to feet), which was cleverly masked by the terrain. There’s a 10 to 15 meter drop down to the bottom with cave entrances at both ends. In order to get to the bottom of this pit and most of the others, we built ourselves a rope ladder which was made of several hundred feet of discarded polypropylene rope and we cut 60 or 70 steps out of plywood. Now, the way we secured them to the rope was just by putting a nail through the twist in the rope into the end of the step and then we rolled it up. So if you didn’t get killed by the fall, you’d at least get stuck with the nails. Now sometimes, those nails came out, but fortunately, there were so many of them that you could always go to the next step. Still, it was fairly common that you would grab the rope and get stuck by a nail. It was a big, ungainly contraption that took up half the truck and when it was rolled up, it would bounce around and punch holes in everything.

“One of the two caves in Jibu Al Kaliqa was filled with hundreds, maybe thousands of bats, all flying around like crazy. And I remember standing deep in bat guano, climbing around and having a great time until one of my companions, a veterinarian, casually mentioned something about rabies. So I said, ‘What? They might have rabies?’

“ ‘Oh yes,’ he replied, ‘we’ve identified many bats with rabies – I’m sure glad I’ve had my vaccine!’

“And after that, it was never quite so much fun to enter the bat cave.”

While Will Kochinski’s rope ladder got him and his friends in and out of shallow pits, it was clearly unsafe for getting to the bottom of several really deep holes they eventually located. Elsewhere in the world, “Single Rope Techniques” had been developed for solving this problem. Speleologists would rappel down specially made nylon ropes and come back up using mechanical ascending devices which would allow them to “rope walk” under their own power and at their own speed. Having no knowledge about such devices, Kochinski and his friends worked out their own system.

“Once, we discovered a deep pit up in the north. It was a tube heading straight down for approximately a thirty meters. This was too deep for our rope ladder, so we rigged a system with an I-beam lying across the cave entrance, to which I’d welded a pad-eye or attachment point. From the pad-eye we suspended a block and tackle pulley system with four pulleys and a sling below the bottom pulley, which we would use to lower ourselves down. And I did that. I started lowering myself down, using this green clothesline that had been quadrupled as it went through the pulley system. But, unfortunately, about half-way down, because of the twist in the rope, the whole assembly took about 20 or 30 turns and froze.

“Well, I couldn’t communicate very well with the people upstairs and I had myself a little problem but eventually we got it sorted out and I continued to head down to the bottom. Another problem was that the clothesline was so thin that it was difficult to grip and after a while it began to slip because my fingers were cramping, but the worst thing was that as I got near the bottom I realized that I had run out of rope.

“So, there I was, holding on to this clothesline which I had now wrapped around my wrist because I couldn’t hold it with my hand anymore and it was completely cutting off the circulation and I was still about 10 meters from the bottom and it looked pretty rocky down there…

“So I started yelling! I was still spinning at this point and at the same time I was screaming to the people up top through this tube 25 or 30 meters long and they’re saying, ‘What? What? What did you say?’

“Eventually I got them to understand that they had to take the rope and put tension on it so I wouldn’t fall to the bottom. So they started a discussion: ‘Which one is it? Is it this one or that one?’

“Finally, I got to the bottom and I was never so glad to put my feet on the ground in all my life.

“Later, another person came down to join me. Of course, we had to leave one person at the top to hoist us out, otherwise it was going to be hand over fist all the way back up, which would have been impossible. It was very dangerous and very stupid and I would never, ever, do something like that again. Fortunately, when you, Bruce Davis and other NSS cavers arrived on the scene, we learned the proper techniques for using caving rope and jumar-type ascending devices.”

The Early Days of Caving in Arabia. Explorers using a ladder made of polypropylene rope and plywood rungs. "If you didn't get killed by the fall, you'd at least get stuck by the nails."

CHAPTER THREE

IN SEARCH OF MA’AQALA

During the ensuing months I visited several desert caves with Will Kochinski and friends. Some of these were horizontal, some vertical, but in none of them did I see a single stalactite or stalagmite. In fact, the most interesting “cave formation” we came upon was a large truck tire jammed between the roof and floor of a room in Abu Sukhayl Cave, some 60 meters below the surface. Saudi Arabia had caves alright, but, like the harsh desert itself, they seemed Spartan, to say the least.

A few months later, something happened that turned this picture upside down. It all began when we bought a used Toyota Land Cruiser from someone at Aramco and discovered a faded, twenty-year-old topo map in the glove compartment. In those days, good maps were just about impossible to come by, and this one was not only accurate, but very detailed, showing a section of the Summan Plateau, some 250 kilometers (155 miles) west of us. The fascinating thing this map revealed was a concentration of dahls around a tiny village on a desolate plain near the edge of the Dahna Desert. Dahl is a Bedouin word for a natural – and often deep – pit that just possibly might provide access to water. The village at the center of all these holes was a place called Ma’aqala.

On paper, Ma’aqala looked like a caver’s dream, and I made several unsuccessful attempts to reach it before teaming up with Dave Peters, a biologist with an amazing talent for finding his way around desolate deserts. One blistering day in April of 1983, we decided to “find Ma’aqala or bust.”

With a five-gallon desert waterbag sloshing behind, and a cooler full of non-alcoholic “Near Beer” sloshing within, our Land Cruiser roared up a beautiful new divided highway leading to the old Trans Arabian Pipeline (Tapline) road 150 kilometers (93 miles) northwest of us. By the time we reached the unpaved town of Na’ariya, it was time to have dinner.

In most parts of the world, travelers are used to stopping at roadside restaurants. I wasn’t. It was my first such experience in almost two years of living in Arabia. The reason, of course, was that there had always been one or more women in the party, and, back in those days, anyone introducing a woman into so public a place as a truck stop would have been in danger of losing more than his Diner’s Card. (This is no longer the situation. Today a network of good restaurant-motels for the whole family spans the entire country.)

We stepped inside. Instead of oriental rugs and plush pillows on the floor, there were bare tables and chairs. But the walls were plastered with the gaudiest, floweriest wallpaper a trucker could ever wish for. In a nook at the left, we found a small sink with a bar of soap and a box of Tide. “They use the Tide for washing out their mouths after eating,” Dave explained, but I couldn’t believe it until I actually witnessed several hearty Bedouin truckers working up a mouthful of suds. Fortunately, as foreigners, we were not obliged to participate in this blend of an ancient custom and a modern detergent.

Dave informed me that a menu would not be necessary. Truck stops served more or less the same thing all year round. “Kabsa d’zhuzh!” he shouted to the waiter, pointing, for my sake, to the plates of steaming hot saffron-flavored rice that everyone else was enjoying. On top of each heap of rice, there was either a whole or a half chicken. If you don’t specify nusf, you get a whole one just for you!

We sat down at one of the long tables and asked for shai, which is heavily sweetened tea. Water or Pepsi were the only other choices. Then we dug into our kabsa, literally, our fingers doing the work of spoon, fork and knife. Dave had already developed an “asbestos hand” and, in five or six squeezes transformed a handful of the not-so-sticky yellow rice into a lumpy wad which could be daintily tossed into the mouth. I quickly learned to sit on my left hand to keep it out of action while struggling with my right. In Arabia the left hand is only used for things better left unmentioned.

Once we left the Tapline highway, we found ourselves on a rough road heading in the general direction of fabled Ma’aqala. Actually, it wasn’t a “road” in the usual sense, but a series of parallel tracks, one of which had recently been scraped by a grader. The “improved” track was the roughest of all, a kind of rocky washboard, so we kept to the sandiest routes we could find. Amazingly, all the parallel tracks got back together every time the terrain grew difficult. This phenomenon is called a kula wahed or all-is-one road. After a while you learn to distinguish the many versions of the main drag from similar roads leading elsewhere.

We continued southwest, through a broken escarpment rich in bright, earthy colors. Soon it was evident that whatever we were following was not the track on our map! Hours later, it took a mysterious jog to the north, and we began to feel a bit concerned. Fortunately, we had just spotted a bedouin tent in the distance, so we decided to seek assistance.

It was a classical camel-and-goat hair tent and all the side panels were up. We approached slowly, to allow the women folk time to hide. Our salaam aleicum was answered in kind by the master of the house, who, with a gesture, invited us to enjoy the cool breeze and shade of his tent. So we sat down upon a soft, hand-woven rug, dipping pieces of flat Arab bread into a butter-like liquid called saman, and started discussing the road ahead. Finally we bid our hosts Fi Aman Allah (Go in the care of God) and continued on our way.

Many hours of following our noses rather than the map, brought us to a tiny village whose silhouette is dominated by a large mud-brick fortress, a remnant of former glory. We had succeeded. This was Ma’aqala, in bygone days the last source of water for caravans traveling along the Darb Al Kunhari caravan trail and about to enter the red sand dunes of the Dahna Desert.

The Red Sands of the Dahna Desert near Ma'aqala. Under the dunes lie extensive beds of limestone honey-combed with caves.

The first thing we did was to present our credentials to the local Emir (excellent preventive medicine against an unexpected weekend in jail). The Emir was a distinguished, wise-looking man. He wore the same simple dress that all inhabitants of Arabia – rich and poor – have worn since Mohammed taught them the vanity and divisiveness of ostentatious garb. His spotless white, long-sleeved thobe reached almost to the ground. His head was covered with a ghuttrah, a triangularly-folded square of white cloth that protects the wearer from cold, heat and stinging sand. This is held in place by an agaal, a loop of black rope, twisted into a figure-8 and folded over on itself. His sandals, too, were the ideal thing for desert living. Try climbing a sand dune wearing anything else, and you’ll soon see why!

The Emir sat us down on the thick carpet of his living-room/office and offered us tea while he and the elders of Ma’aqala carefully inspected our documents. Once they were satisfied, we cautiously produced a photograph of a typical dahl entrance. Were such places to be found around Ma’aqala?

“Na’am” (yes), replied the Emir. Such places did exist.

“Kwais” (great!), we said in our halting Gulf Arabic. “Could we visit a nearby one called Dahl Abu Tuqqah, before the sun goes down?”

“But there is no water in it,” said the Emir.

“Kwais!” we replied.

Thinking we had misunderstood, the Emir again pointed out its lack of water. When we enthusiastically reaffirmed our desire to see that dry hole, he and all the others gave us a look that said, “these are odd men indeed, that would go to visit a well without water.” But, in the rapidly descending twilight, we were herded into a pickup and driven two kilometers to Abu Tuqqah, a small hole less than one meter in diameter, in quite solid limestone.

We removed the oil drum blocking the entrance and peered inside. We could see a floor about 8 meters below. Though he was wearing sandals, Dave began to climb down. “No! No!” shouted our companions, “you will die if you go inside!”

That was one of who knows how many ancient myths that we quickly disproved, for the pit was easy to climb, and at the bottom we made a discovery that reimbursed us a hundred-fold for those months spent searching for Ma’aqala. There were two horizontal passageways leading straight back into the darkness and one of them was blowing!

We were dying to explore these passages, and the Emir was insisting we stay the night, but we had already used up 24 hours of the Thursday-Friday weekend, and there was no way we’d be back in our classrooms Saturday morning if we didn’t leave immediately.

Wondering at the incomprehensible foreigners who had driven over 450 kilometers of bone-joggling desert just to spend 20 minutes in a dry well, our hosts bid us Ma’ salaamah (Good bye), and thus ended our first visit to what would become the richest caving grounds in all Arabia.

The Tallest Caver in the World. Speleo-biologist Dave Peters checks out holes on the Summan Plateau north of Riyadh, hoping to find the entrance to an underground labyrinth.

CHAPTER FOUR

“SISTER” EXPLORES THE HAREM

The following winter we decided to dedicate our entire mid-semester vacation to exploring the caves of Ma’aqala. This time we tried an approach from the south, along an Aramco rig road that led us to an enormous derrick surrounded by a “portable town” swarming with oil men. From there we four-wheeled it across the desert. Bouncing over sandy hummocks called dikaka mixed our food with our equipment as efficiently as a washing machine, and the prickly rock near Ma’aqala nearly made mincemeat out of our tires. By the time we reached the Emir’s house, we were ready to drop, and gladly accepted his invitation to stay the night. We were elated that our new but tortuous route had taken only eight hours instead of 24!

We had been somewhat taken aback when the Emir first greeted us. He was much slimmer and younger than he had been eight months earlier. In fact, he was a different man altogether, the son of the Emir who had previously befriended us. This meant many hours of scrutinizing our documents, drinking tea, asking questions, drinking tea, conferring with the elders, drinking tea, going off to pray and more drinking tea. We would, in fact, probably have drowned, if my wife, Susy, had not been along.

A woman, of course, does not sit in the same room with a group of men. Susy, therefore, had been shuttled off to the harem, the women’s quarters of the house. We had to drive her to a side door where, wrapped in her black abaya, she had been utterly swallowed up as hands reached out for her through the partly opened door. Unbeknownst to us, she quickly became the focal point of entertainment for the Emir’s wife and the other women, as she laughed, joked and danced for them. Unlike the men, the women soon dispensed with all formalities and renamed Susy “Seestair,” one of the few “English” words they knew. Eventually, news of her exploits reached the Emir’s ear. If Seestair was such a hit, those two dry-well explorers escorting her might have to be humored after all.

The next morning, after a breakfast of omelettes, olives, cream and cheese, we found ourselves once again in front of the electric heater, still sipping tea and waiting for something to happen. By now the children were getting used to our strange faces and ways. They were the only ones that could freely move back and forth between the men’s part of the house and the women’s. “Are you Muslims?” asked one little boy wearing a light grey winter thobe. “No, we’re Christians,” we answered, not at all thrilled to be drawn into such a delicate topic. “Why aren’t you Muslims?” asked the boy innocently, and we stared at each other, wondering how we were going to get out of this one with our Me-John-You-Abdullah command of Arabic. The boy’s older brother came to our rescue and proved to be wiser than his years: “They might just as well ask you why you’re not a Christian,” he told the little one. With smiles of relief, we then steered the conversation to more mundane subjects.

The best English speaker among the natives of Ma’aqala was an old man with a grey beard and a sparkle in his eye. He had worked for Aramco years before and had acquired a colorful, if not always practical vocabulary. His favorite expression was “Shut yer mouth!” which he always pronounced with an endearing smile. Sultan was his name (not his title) and he was the one the Emir finally appointed as our guide.

Sultan first aimed us in a southerly direction, along a series of dusty trails that would eventually lead us to a hole called Dahl Hashami. Within a few minutes of leaving Ma’aqala, we spotted five very promising caves which, Sultan informed us, were mere nothings. “I’ll show you where there are many, many more!” And, in fact, a few minutes later, we came upon a place which could only be called the Plain of Many Pits. Here one could scarcely walk 50 paces without falling into a hole ranging from one-half to three meters across. “Wajid duhul! (Many dahls!) Wajid! Wajid!” Sultan repeated again and again. Although we had the impression that none of these was deeper than 10 meters, we were overwhelmed by their number. The whole area was, in fact, much like a giant piece of Swiss Cheese.

Suddenly Sultan announced we had come to Abu Hashami. It was obviously different from anything we had seen previously. For one thing, it was too deep for us to see bottom from its two large openings – each three meters wide – connected by a kind of natural bridge. Sultan explained that this had once been a famous well, but was now dry. He then showed us a set of grooves that had been made by ropes raising water from the well. Although the rim was solid limestone, some of the grooves were deeper than two inches. We wondered how many years or centuries had been required to produce them, and decided that Abu Hashami, and whatever lay at its bottom, would definitely merit a return visit.

Now we were racing northwest, with a long series of sand dunes on our left and flatland, low hills and scrub on our right. Soon we were speeding back the other way. Sultan was having problems locating Dahl Abu Marwah, which was not surprising, since most dahls are invisible three meters away. After a bit of aimless wandering, we stopped near the base of the dunes. There wasn’t a cave to be seen anywhere. “Abu Marwah hallas! (finished)” announced Sultan, spreading his arms to indicate that the cave was completely buried under the sand. This we found hard to believe, and, in fact, a few minutes later Dave drove to a low spot surrounded by shrubs, and there in the middle were two smallish holes. “Abu Marwah! This Abu Marwah!” cried Sultan. Relieved that Abu Marwah had so easily been saved from eternal obscurity, we went over a rise and came upon a hole at the bottom of a small, sandy wadi. It was about four meters in diameter. “If the last set of holes were Abu Marwah, what’s that? we asked. “Why that’s Abu Marwah, too,” said Sultan with a toothy grin, and he leaned over to pick up a smooth piece of milky white chert. “See this? This is marwah.” And we concluded that Abu, or Father of Marwah was this whole region where chert is found lying on the surface. Only much year later did we discover the Abu Marwah that Sultan had been looking for: a large collapse some 35 meters in diameter, which, unfortunately, doesn’t have much in the way of cave passages.

Eventually, we brought Sultan back to Ma’aqala and picked up Susy from the Emir’s house, which turned out to be an unforgettable event. I discovered she was not in Ma’aqala, but picnicking out in the desert, which, she told me later, was a favorite treat for the ladies, who normally spent all their time indoors.

We approached each other in an open place, in full view of all the females of the village, who watched us from the top of a low hill. “Ahem,” said Susy. “The women have a request. They actually took a vote about this and their unanimous decision was that when we meet, we should kiss…like right now.”

Well, we kissed, hamming it up in true Hollywood style, which our audience apparently found delightful because all of them let out with loud ululations – their equivalent of clapping and cheering – which we could still hear as we drove off toward our camp at Abu Marwah. Something tells me they may be talking about that event even to this day.

We set up camp in the little wadi at Abu Marwah Pit Number Two, which immediately became “The Foxhole” due to the tracks we found at its sandy bottom, eight meters below. This cave and several others we casually discovered while playing Frisbee, turned out to have horizontal passages, every one of which ended up plugged with sand after only a few meters. We decided to call such cavers’ disappointments “sand sumps.”

CHAPTER FIVE

DAHL SULTAN

It was near our campsite next to the Foxhole that we discovered the entrance to a maze of limestone passages, a cave that convinced us that speleological exploration in Saudi Arabia was well worth the effort. We eventually named the cave Dahl Sultan after the colorful guide who had brought us to this marvelous place of many holes.

The small, blowing entrance hole I described at the beginning of this book was only 100 meters from our tent, in a perfectly flat, featureless plateau, beyond which we could see the silhouette of an irq, a long “finger” of dunes topped with whipped-cream-like waves.

After an hour or so of chipping at the ten-inch-wide hole with hammer and chisel, it looked just wide enough to squeeze through. Dave backed his Pajero up until the towing hook was right over the hole. We then attached my home-made cable ladder to it, hoping its seven meters would be enough to get us to the bottom. The only way you could squeeze through the enlarged hole was by letting out your breath and lifting your arms straight above your head. Even then, your helmet would catch as you eased yourself downwards, your feet swinging to and fro on the free-hanging ladder only six inches wide.

Squeezing into the entrance hole of Dahl Sultan

Seeing the problem Dave had telling his invisible feet what to do, I decided to rappel down. A few inches below the surface, I was hanging in space at the top of a large bell-shaped pit that turned out to be nine meters deep, but close enough to one wall to allow us to get off the ladder and scramble to the bottom. The room was seven meters in diameter and – Al Hamdulillah! (Thanks be to God) – did not have the sandy bottom that characterized all the other pits we had explored.

We began to move along the rough, irregular walls, searching for a passageway. There was a crack on one side and Dave squeezed through a narrow opening in it, almost as tight as the entrance hole above. “It goes!” he shouted a moment later, and I joined him in a small room approximately 11 meters below the surface. There was an opening to the left and another to the right. We went right, squeezed under a low ledge and carefully stood up. We were in a rather large room, maybe four meters high. Grotesque, twisting “arms” of rock reached toward us from every direction. The beams of our flashlights revealed at least three directions in which we could walk. “We’ve got ourselves a real cave!” shouted Dave and we shook grimy hands, slapped each other on the back and wished for a bottle of champagne, not only to celebrate, but also to quench our thirst, for it was exceedingly warm and humid in that room and we suspected that we were only at the beginning of the tour.

A quick look around told us that this was the sort of cave in which people could easily get lost while blinking. There was nothing smooth or tunnel-like about it; in fact, it had the wildest, most unpredictable surface imaginable, as if we were inside a gigantic, hollow piece of chert. So, the first thing we did was build a cairn out of chunks of breakdown, to mark the way out. There is, after all, no cave rescue team in Saudi Arabia!

The more we looked around this room, the more we saw. On one wall there was a cascade of white flowstone, dripping with stalactites. In a little niche we discovered a collection of pure white curlicues that looked as if they had just been squeezed from a toothpaste tube: gypsum flowers! And just above the foot-high entrance, I noticed an oval-shaped object attached to the wall. It was about a foot (30 centimeters) long and at first I thought it was a bird’s nest. But a closer look showed it had a chert core covered with carbonates. There were four or five bird-sized holes at odd places on the smooth outer surface. It could have been a freak of nature, but only a few meters away, there was another, smaller one. These “bird’s nests” were obviously natural formations, but a type we had neither seen nor heard of before. Eventually, we found a broken half-nest on the ground, and we had the proof that the things are as hollow as they appear to be.

Stalactites! Gypsum flowers! Flowstone! Our heads were spinning because the few existing articles on Saudi caves stated that such things had never been found; findings backed up by the investigations of geologists at the University of Petroleum and Minerals and Aramco as well as pioneer cavers like Bruce and Anna Davis and Will Kochinski. But now we had abundant proof that the caves of Saudi Arabia contained more than weathered popcorn, which, up until this moment, had been the most spectacular decoration anyone had encountered. There was plenty of that here, too, but we hardly noticed it as we moved back to the entrance to tell Susy the good news.

The next day our little hole was “really blowing” according to the opening entry in my log book:

-The air is perfectly still, and miserably humid, even though the ground is dry. Temperature: 80° F. Every movement starts a river of sweat down my brow. This is definitely a T-shirt cave. Without Dave’s anti-fog spray for glasses, I wouldn’t be seeing any of it.

-We come upon room after room, each more spacious than the last. There are usually several possible ways to go, and almost always the first one we try leads to somewhere interesting. We don’t even bother with the others. Much time consumed piling up rocks so each station will be within sight of the last. We don’t talk about it, but we both realize the consequences of making one error in this maze of passage-ways.

-Almost every room is decorated. One has a stalagmite smack in the middle, standing on a small hill, like a lonely watchtower. On the right there is another stalagmite, a fat one which turns out to be hollow and extremely fragile. It is guarding the tiny entrance to a small room about 3 meters wide. We peer inside and gape at what appears to be a giant pink tulip hanging upside down from the ceiling by a thin stem. A nearby room has no formations, but the entire ceiling is a rich, vibrant red. We move on to discover a fountain of stalactites hanging from above like a chandelier. And here is another gypsum formation: not flowers this time, but long, thin, white hairs that are invisible from a few feet away. The whole area around them is alive with sparkles. In a corner of the next room, we find a lovely white stalactite just touching a stalagmite – the birth of a column! In another, a lone, squat stump, less than a meter high.

-The passage suddenly gets wider. I thread my way around huge, jagged blocks fallen from the now rather high ceiling. I take another step and feel as if I have just walked out of the cave onto a seashore on a moonless night.

I am standing at the edge of a great stretch of sand. And running diagonally across the wide, spotlessly clean expanse is a dry stream-bed cut 10 centimeters into the surface. At the far end of this large room, we find a wondrous sight: a high curtain of flowstone, with a glorious display of stalactites and thin, striped, “breakfast beef,” which is what they call this particular product in Arabia. The formation is white, cream-colored and tan; it is translucent and when we fire the flash through it, the spot thermoluminesces for a few seconds... an eerie green glow.

-I experience a rush of joy at feeling “out in the open.” Helmet and gloves come off and leisurely I set up the tripod, feeling as though I am at the beach, taking time exposures at night. The photos require six or seven flashes from my small unit. We take advantage to make funny shots of Dave watching Dave fighting Dave.

-Running out of time. Told Susy we’d be out before sunset. Reluctantly, we decide to turn back, leaving this beautiful room only partially explored. We allow an hour for our return, hoping we won’t miss any of our rocky markers and signals.

Six minutes is all it actually took. A survey we made later showed that the hours of cautious progress we had made during our first exploration had brought us only 130 meters from the entrance. Dripping with sweat, we pop out of the tiny entrance hole and excitedly describe everything we’ve seen to Susy.

On our next visit, Susy and Henri, a French geologist, joined us in our exploration. When we reached the Beach Room, I turned my attention to taking more photos of our most stupendous discovery, while Dave and Henri checked out some of the leads. In the meantime, Susy wandered about admiring the room’s many treasures. This was, after all, her very first experience as a “vertical” caver!

About half an hour later, Henri quietly entered the room and tapped me on the shoulder. “Sorry, John, but zees room eez nothing; eet eez merely a TOILET.” He and Dave, it seemed, had followed a sandy path out of our “enormous” Beach room and had discovered a long chamber 3 or 4 times its size.

That room led to another big one and to more passages adorned with bizarre stalagmites, and weird formations like the eerie Fickle Finger of Fate which points to a frozen whirlpool of mud, suggesting the possibility of another level below the present system. But, by far the most beautiful decoration we found was the Ice Dancer – a milky, white helictite, which looked like a skater forever frozen in a graceful leap.

Helictites are among the most bizarre of cave formations. Instead of pointing straight up or straight down, they seem to have been grown in zero gravity, going off in any direction and frequently shaped like spirals or helixes. Exactly why they do this has been the subject of much discussion among speleologists with no theory yet declared the winner.

The Ice Dancer. A stunning helictite defying gravity.

Inside Dahl Sultan. We chiseled our way into this cave in 1983, discovering formations no one had suspected might be found in Saudi Arabia. Here, Mexican explorer Susy Pint is shown with "The Tooth," one of the first speleothems ever seen in the Kingdom.

LOST IN THE DARK

On one of our trips to Sultan, we decided to pitch our tents among the undulating dunes of the Dahna Desert. We set up camp in a well-secluded spot and then drove off to the tiny cave entrance. By now, Susy had succumbed to the lure of Sultan’s mysteries and had developed into a regular caver.

Down the cable ladder we climbed and became so absorbed in our exploration of new cave passages that we forgot all about the passage of time. When we surfaced once again, it was dark. I popped my head out of the entrance hole, which was barely wide enough for my shoulders to fit, and found myself eyeball to eyeball with a camel spider. These solifugids have the largest mandibles – in relation to their body size – of any creature on earth. The camel spider seemed to be as surprised to see me as I was to see it, and shot off instantly.

A few minutes later, the three of us were in Dave’s car, racing along the track that parallels the Dahna sand dunes. Unfortunately, the landmarks we had noted by day seemed to have vanished by night and we had no idea where our camp was, having deliberately chosen a hidden spot where “nobody would bother us.”

Now, Dave Peters prided himself on his navigational skills and with good reason. He had never before failed to relocate a place he had found previously and he was not about to let his reputation go to pieces because he couldn’t find his own tent! Therefore, we cruised up and down the track paralleling the dunes until we were all very hungry and even sleepy. Finally, Susy and I suggested giving up the search and resigning ourselves to a miserable night with no food.

At this point, Dave mumbled something under his breath that sounded like, “OK, OK, I give up.” But, instead of parking, he started driving directly toward a faint, distant light on the horizon, a light neither Susy nor I had even noticed. We drove in complete silence until we arrived at several large Bedouin tents.

With an abashed look on his face, Dave stepped out of the truck, greeted the first man he saw, and said, “Minfadlak, wein beitna?” (Please, where is our tent?)

The Bedu was taken aback for about half a second, then said only one word, “Yalla!” (Let’s go!) and walked over to his little pickup truck. In the typical fashion of a Bedu guiding a bunch of greenhorns, he took off at high speed and never slowed down for a second as he shot straight up and over a high sand dune behind his camp. Here, Dave’s desert driving skills came into play as he tore after the fleeting pickup, which raced up and down dune after dune in a beeline, until, of course, he jerked to a stop right in front of our tents.

As we repeatedly and profoundly thanked this man, I could see a little glint of amusement in his eye. We had never met, yet he knew who we were and where we were camped. This was just one of many times Bedouins befriended us in the desert, inviting us to eat, bringing us camel’s milk in the morning and even insisting we come stay with them “for at least a month.”

CHAPTER SIX

MISSING WHILE MAPPING

Since Dahl Sultan was our first big discovery, we naturally wanted to survey and map it, so we set up a special trip for this purpose with enough volunteers to form a survey team plus explorers who would investigate where the cave’s many side passages led.

One member of our team was Ron Kummerfeldt, an instructor in desert survival, born in Kenya. While the rest of us fussed over compass, clinometer and measuring tape readings, Ron came upon a side passage no one had ever entered. "I'm going to check this one out," he told us. "See you in a few minutes."

The passage was typical of Dahl Sultan: rock projections reached out from every side like thick tentacles trying to catch or trip up the unwary visitor. Ron made his way carefully. Because no other entrance to Dahl Sultan had ever been found, apart from the small hole we had opened with hammer and chisel, he knew he was the first person in history to step into that dark gallery. Then, for some reason, he happened to glance upward. There was a hole in the ceiling above him. Could there possibly be a room up there?

Ron took off his backpack, placed it on the floor, and began to climb. An instant later, his head popped into a low passageway. It looked like he'd discovered a second level to Sultan – a cave above the cave.

On hands and knees, Ron Kummerfeldt crawled forward, hoping the small tunnel might open up into a large chamber. A moment later, it did open up, but not as Ron expected. With a rumble, the floor beneath him gave way and the surprised caver found himself falling into darkness – quite literally, because his headlamp had gone out the moment the floor collapsed. Now, he lay who-knows-where, only slightly bruised, but surrounded by an inky blackness that is never experienced on the surface, even on the darkest night. As you would expect a survival trainer to do, he remained calm, did not move and methodically took stock of the situation. "My headlamp seems to be broken, but the torch that was in my hand when I fell has to be somewhere around here." Not wanting to move for fear of another collapse, Kummerfeldt collected a number of pebbles and began to toss them in every direction. After a long time, he finally heard a metallic ping. He reached out, picked up his flashlight and made the unpleasant discovery that it, too, had been broken in the fall.

Ron sat there in the dark, waiting for help. The rest of us were so taken up by our survey, that it was only hours later we remembered him, backtracked to where he had gone off and found Ron sitting on the floor of the passage he had originally entered. The moment our lights illuminated the shadows around him, Ron spotted his backpack – which contained the spare bulbs he needed – only a few meters in front of him.  This incident alerted us to a Rule of Caving we have paid attention to ever since: never separate yourself from your cave pack.

By May, 1985, over 600 meters of passage had been explored in Dahl Sultan, with countless leads still to be checked, and no end in sight. But for all we know, the entire area we mapped may someday turn out to be, like the Beach Room, “merely a toilet.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE BOTTOMLESS PIT

One day in 1985, we were wandering through Scribner’s Canyon near Hofuf, admiring the strange beauty of the canyon walls, which were overhung with a caramel-colored substance that baffled us. “What you’re looking at is called duracrust,” explained a geologist in the group. “It’s formed when capillary action lifts water up to the surface where it evaporates, and in the process toughens the highest layer of the rock. This accounts for the overhanging layer in this canon, and also the mushroom shaped formations in the desert all around here.”

Naturally, being conscientious cavers, we asked our informant if he had come across any caves in the course of his desert explorations. To our surprise, he told us the story of a curious hole he had seen somewhere north of Riyadh. Many of the local people claimed the hole was bottomless, he mentioned, while others held there was a river far below and that a tree trunk thrown into it had surfaced in Hofuf, 500 kilometers away.

I might have scoffed at the tree-trunk tale, knowing that desert dwellers wouldn't throw such a valuable find down a deep hole, but what of my informant's claim that a stone-filled Pepsi can had continued clattering and bouncing for a full sixteen seconds after he had dropped it into the void?

At this time I was an English teacher at the University of Petroleum and Minerals in Dhahran, now called KFUPM, but on weekends, Susy and I would roam the desert, usually in search of caves. So my students were not surprised when I queried them about the bottomless pit near Riyadh and one of them immediately replied that a friend of a friend knew the location of this very place and he would be happy to make arrangements for the trip – How about next weekend?

My student, Abdulaziz Al-Agili, would be our guide. Accompanying Susy and me would be our friend Ron Kummerfeld, the survival trainer, and his dog Cricket, a Vizsla pointer from Hungary. All of us were packed into a new Land Rover that was soon speeding past the sand dunes, escarpments and barren wastes found along the road from Dhahran to Riyadh. Our precise destination was Majma'ah, a town 186 kilometers northwest of the capital. There, on the following morning, we were to meet Aziz's contact who turned out to be none other than the mayor of the town.

At 1:00 AM we rolled into brightly lit, but soundly sleeping Majma'ah and located our meeting place, the second gas station on the left. The only problem was that Abu Nassar, the mayor and our guide, wouldn't be coming until 6 AM. We camped in a dusty spot on the outskirts of town, caught a few winks of sleep and somehow managed to creep out of our tents at sunrise. Little did we know it was going to be one of the longest days of our lives.

While Susy and I prepared coffee, Ron and Aziz went to meet Abu Nassar, a man who was both friendly and very practical. He took one look at our puny cook stove and cold-cereal breakfast, turned around and drove back into town. In no time at all he was back with an enormous barbecue grill, charcoal, two legs of lamb and several large sacks of tomatoes and onions. He had no intention of letting his guests starve on his turf.

We drove out of town for about thirty kilometers and then headed off into the desert until we reached a picturesque, grassy spot, just beside a low escarpment. "This we call a rawdah," said Abu Nassar. "For us, this is a woods."

It was a rich green meadow with hundreds of low trees, just tall enough to provide shade. We were now more disposed to believe the tale about the tree thrown into the pit, which we assumed was somewhere nearby. But Abu Nassar informed us this little corner of paradise was merely our camping spot (who could argue) and that we should unload our gear and set up our tents. We'd then be off to the hole in no time. This said, he drove away and we unloaded.

Just a few minutes later a Datsun pickup appeared. It was Abu Nassar's friend Sa'ud. "Are you going to leave all these things here?" he asked. "They'll be stolen! Better put them into my truck." Only later did we discover that Sa'ud was the top police official for the area and knew what he was talking about. So we picked up our scattered gear and dumped it into the back of his truck, jumped into the Land Rover and followed Sa'ud along a track that parallels the escarpment.

Suddenly we came upon the last thing we ever expect to see in a desert – a lake! It was only 20 meters or so in diameter and its water was slightly salty. This hole, we learned, was associated with a sudden collapse which occurred while a camel herder and his animals were crowded around a well that used to be where the center of the lake is now. The herder didn't survive and the twenty-foot hole slowly filled with the water that had fed the well.

When we finally came to The Pit, we immediately knew it. First of all, someone had gone to the trouble of bulldozing a dirt rampart all around the place, an enormous circle about 50 meters in diameter. Then, there was the stillness. It felt menacing. We climbed atop the wall of dirt and gazed at an open maw a good 25 meters across. You couldn't really see into it from there or from any safe vantage point, so we cautiously crept to the fragile looking rim, lay down flat and peeked over the edge. We were peering down into what looked like a great crater with steep, nearly vertical sides. In the middle of the crater's floor, we could see a big, square hole and beyond the hole, nothing but inky darkness.

Dharb al Najem, the Place of the Fallen Star. Saudi Arabia's deepest cave is a single chamber about 100 meters high and wide, home to countless rock doves.

"You're not going down there?" exclaimed Susy. Ron and I put on our best macho fronts, gulped down any second thoughts about how much bigger this was than what we had expected, and began studiously to check each side of the hole for the most advantageous rigging point. Since cavers in Arabia normally tie their ropes to their vehicles, our first plan was to drive over the rampart in order to get closer to the edge. But for some reason, we changed our minds. It turned out to be a wise decision.

We had no idea what lay beyond the ledge overlooking the square hole, so we tied our longest rope of about 100 meters (330 ft.) to the Land Rover's towing hitch and threw just enough out toward the center to get it into the fifty-foot square hole. Then we eased the rest of the rope over the side, hoping the other end would reach the floor of the "bottomless" pit.

We now had an audience of young boys who seemed to have appeared out of nowhere and who gaped in wonder as we put on our harnesses and snapped on carabiners and various pieces of clanking climbing gear. Next, we padded the spot where the rope passed over the crater rim and put a short line or "tail" alongside, to make it easier to get over the lip on the way back up. Everything had to be perfect, as our lives would depend on this one rope, at least that's the way cavers usually do it, but when Ron suggested we use a belay or safety rope, I couldn't think of any good reason not to, although I've heard cavers say they just get in the way. So, when I leaned over the edge, ready to jump off, a brightly colored mountaineer's rope was attached to the sturdy triangle on my harness.

I took the final step into nothingness and began to fall slowly into the abyss. The rope was sliding through the aluminum bars of my rack, a favorite rapelling device of American cavers, and I glided down to the floor of the crater. I made my way to the edge of the great, square hole and peeked over. I could barely see anything. This lip also got padding and a tail, after which I slipped down into the shadows of the deep void.

I expected to be going down a shaft about twelve meters wide, but I had barely got over the edge when I discovered where I really was. As I descended, the walls began to move away from me and as my eyes got used to the weaker light, I saw that I was hanging in free space at the top of an enormous, nearly spherical room, as wide as it was high. I was the size of a tiny spider coming down through a knothole in the ceiling of a vast basement. Suddenly, I heard a great WHOOSH and the flapping of wings all around me as a flock of grey rock doves shot up out of the hole, indignant at being disturbed in the intimacy of their private chambers.

I continued down, reflecting upon the relative thinness of this big room's ceiling and how lucky we were not to have parked the Land Rover any closer to the crater's edge. Then Ron shouted: "How much further to go? I have about fifteen meters of safety line left." I peered down at the chasm below me. It seemed we had greatly miscalculated the distance. I was at the top and the bottom was nowhere in sight! I slid down another ten meters, stopped and disconnected the safety line. I began to understand why cavers don't bother with them. I ventured another look at the bottom and my heart skipped a beat. At last I could see the floor, but it looked like the rope did not reach it. I glided down a little more, looked again and seemed to make out a foot or two of rope lying on the bottom. I stopped holding my breath, relaxed and looked about me.

I was halfway down a vast cavern that looked a good hundred meters in diameter, with walls made of crumbly dirt. No limestone or rock of any sort visible. As I lowered myself down, I was very slowly rotating and along the distant walls, I could see doves nesting in long, horizontal fissures which looked ready to fall at the flap of a wing. Most of the floor was covered with rocky rubble, forming a sizeable hill. I assumed this had originally constituted the missing portion of the ceiling. When I finally touched bottom, it felt as if a great weight had been lifted from my shoulders. I was delighted that, by sheer luck, the rope was exactly the length we needed, plus an extra meter to spare.

Then I looked up. This was the most overwhelming moment of the whole trip. The wide gap I had come down through, now appeared like a tiny white square, miles above me. A shaft of sunlight was streaming from it, all the way down to a spot on the floor of this huge room and dozens of doves were soaring in and out of the long, slanting beam. I stood transfixed, unable to believe I had come from 'way up there. Then a few stones came trickling down from the surface. Whether they had been dislodged by the doves or tossed in by the kids up above, I didn't know, but I decided to get away from the center of the room. I detached my rack from the rope and clattered towards the wall, making my way over and around large boulders which obviously had fallen from above. Only now did I notice how cool the place was. I also noticed that my knees were shaking, so I sat down for a few moments, once again gazing up at the incredible height and size of this cathedral-like chamber.

I made my way to the wall and found myself standing on a smooth, dirt floor. I started walking and, every few steps, would jump back in surprise as a startled dove rose up out of nowhere in a wild fluttering of wings and shot past me. Apparently they felt so secure in this inaccessible spot, they had taken to nesting on the ground. Soon, I came to a muddy area, obviously the lowest part of the pit. The water that had stood here had never risen above an inch or two in depth and nowhere could I see signs of drainage.

So how was this hole formed? This was the question I pondered as I made my way along the almost perfectly round perimeter. If this room had once contained dirt or some mineral, where had it all gone? Maybe the place was just a large version of the collapses we had seen earlier, but how had it come about and how could such a gigantic empty space sustain itself with only dirt walls and ceiling?

I heard a tiny peep of a voice far above me. Ron had just come over the edge and seeing him up there brought the whole room into proper scale. He looked the size of an ant! It was a spectacular sight and I stared in awe.

I couldn't wait to see Ron's reaction when, after making a safe landing, he first looked up at the far-away ceiling and the tiny looking hole he had come through. When he hit bottom, before he removed his harness, Ron slowly turned, taking in the whole panorama. "John this isn't just big, it's BIG."

We continued my tour of the perimeter and came upon one of the few snakes I've ever seen in a cave over forty-some years of exploring. Of course, according to Saudis, not to mention Hollywood, there ought to be at least a dozen snakes per square foot in any cave worthy of the name. This lonesome creature was about two feet long and beautifully mummified. The only other creatures – aside from the omnipresent birds, which we now estimated to be in the thousands – were prickly little hedgehogs or what was left of them. Their porcupine-like quills were in fine condition, but not the rest, which had been completely devoured by whatever predator had dropped them there. We suspected there were more than just doves living in the crevices far above us.

We made a complete circuit of the well-lit room, peering into every crack for signs of a side passage, but all we found were more flustered rock doves. Had we found a passage, each of us was generously prepared to give the other the honor of crawling into it through the thick layer of bird droppings plastering every nook and cranny.

But no passages appeared and, having done our duty as cavers, we headed back towards the rope with only an occasional nervous glance at the millions of tons of soft dirt being held up above us by forces beyond our comprehension. We picked our way among the boulders, bald tires and rusty basins, carefully stepping on every Pepsi can to see whether it might be full of stones and sixteen seconds' worth of dents. No luck. Though neither of us is an archeologist, we both had a strong suspicion artifacts like these were not going to require carbon dating.

I prepared myself for the trip back up. I put on my harness and snapped three ascending devices onto the rope. Alternately lifting my legs and pushing down with my feet, I began to climb the rope, "frog style." Twenty meters up, I heard Ron utter a word not fit to print. He had just discovered he was out of film. "Susy can throw you one of our rolls," I suggested. Then, as I slowly made my way up, I heard this conversation:

Ron: Hello, Susy!

Susy: What?

Ron: I'm out of film. Would you mind throwing me…

Susy: What?

Ron: I – am – out – of …

Susy: What?

Ron: FILM. THROW. DOWN.

Susy: What?

You'll have to believe my version of this conversation, because I was the only one able to hear what both parties were saying! Yes, this was a mighty deep hole and the dialogue sounded like two people trying to shout through a brick wall. I made my way up a bit higher and called down to Ron that I would solve the whole problem by speaking to Susy in her native tongue.

John: Hola, Susy!

Susy: What?

John: Tira una película... (Throw down a film...)

Susy: What?

John: Una película. UNA PELICULA!

Susy: ¿Qué?

John: (a few feet higher) PE - LI - CU - LA

Susy: ¿Película?

John: Sí sí sí sí sí sí – ¡Película~ ¡Envuélvela en algo suave! (Wrap it in something soft.)

Susy: ¿En qué?

John: Algo suave ... SU - A - VE !

Susy: ¿En un TOMATE? (In a tomato?)

John: ¿Qué? Un tomate? (What? A tomato?)

Somehow, part of the message must have got through, for, a few minutes later, a plastic bag came whizzing through the air and disappeared into the shadows below. Ron's voice was barely distinguishable: "...only slightly exposed, I think..." were the few words I caught. Apparently, the film magazine had exploded on impact and Ron was trying to put it back together in a desperate attempt to get at least one shot of the spectacular view from the bottom. Unfortunately, we had decided to take only one camera down. Ron was to get pictures from the bottom and Susy from the top.

I kept inch-worming my way up until suddenly the safety line was beside me. Although emergency ropes "just get in the way," I found myself snapping this one to my harness with a sigh of relief. Now I could relax for a few moments to take in the magnitude of this impressive pit and enjoy looking down at Ron, who once again appeared the size of an ant.

With Aziz belaying, I reached the first lip and discovered that the rope my life depended on had been rubbing against a rock throughout my ascent! Apparently, it had slipped off its padding when Ron went over the edge. Part of the outer sheath was gone, but the inner fibers seemed okay. I got up and over the spot in a flash, padded it and told Ron to climb "as lightly as possible."

Then I looked up and saw a sight I had never seen before, a scene I would immediately have described as sheer fantasy had anyone ever suggested such a ridiculous idea. I saw my wife Susy standing in a crack at the very lip of the crater, high above me, leaning over the edge, snapping pictures like mad.

"Hey," I shouted, "I didn't know you had a twin! If that's you, what happened to your vertigo?"

"It's gone," she replied, she who used to clutch the nearest tree with both arms and legs at the slightest hint of a drop four meters away. And though she didn't descend that particular pit, from that day on, Susy has been the most ardent rapeller in our organization and usually needs to be restrained whenever we drive over high bridges, so strong is her urge to jump over the edge.

Susy, Aziz, Sa'ud and his little daughter all welcomed us enthusiastically as we came over the crater rim. They had been languishing in the heat while we had been strolling around the cool bottom of the pit. So we immediately got to work pulling up our ropes and gathering our gear. Meanwhile, I asked Aziz, "Just what is the name of this hole and has anyone ever been down it?"

"The local people call it Dharb Al Najem," he replied. "Dharb means a hit and Najem is star, so you could call it The Hit of the Star or The Place of the Fallen Star and you are definitely the first to reach the bottom and come back up alive."

Sa'ud brought us back to Al Nadhim, "The Grassy Place," where we immediately set about the task of roasting the half-ton of meat given to us that morning, as well as cooking eggs, hot dogs (made of beef, of course), potatoes and other foods we had originally planned to eat. Aziz guaranteed he'd be able to eat anything left over. There is something universal about the size of teenage appetites.

All around the oasis, there were other groups of picnickers gathered around smoky fires. It was, after all, a beautiful Thursday night, the end of a long working week. Somehow, word of our exploits must have spread among the barbecuers. A tall, heavy set man came toward us carrying a big metal pot and shouting, "Eat! Eat!" He had noticed we lacked the traditional mountain of rice to accompany our half ton of roast lamb and so, here was a pot of kabsa to help us scrape through. A pot of salad soon followed and, eventually, a visit by our mysterious benefactor's entire party, all of them dressed in flowing white thobes.

One of our four visitors spoke excellent English and well he should have, for he introduced himself as the local Minister of Education. He and the entire group were most interested in the depth and size of the Dharb Al Najem and, of course, the amount of water that might be in it. As we talked, we discovered that the man who had brought us the kabsa was no one less than the regional governor. Another member of the party was the local Minister of information and even the cook turned out to be the local Minister of Water.

The Ultimate in Cave Security. The police chief of Majma'ah guards the rope used by John Pint and Ron Kummerfeld on the first descent into Saudi Arabia's deepest cave.

In the course of that evening, we had to decline numerous invitations to tea and further dinners. Someone brought us a pail-full of laban, the watery yogurt that is popular as a refreshing drink in this part of the world. The donor was urging us to drink more (We still had three-fourths of a bucket to go), when the first drops began to fall.

In Saudi Arabia, a sprinkle of rain is a real treat, but we had been so busy entertaining guests and stuffing ourselves that all of us had neglected to put up our tents. The rain pattered on as we hurriedly set them up, threw our belongings inside and jumped in to escape what was now a genuine drizzle.

No sooner were we inside the tents than we began to feel that drowsiness that follows a long and strenuous day. Time for bed, no matter whether our watches – so out of place in this natural paradise – insisted that it was only 8:00 PM. After a little while, the drizzle subsided and the stars came out, but Susy was already asleep, Ron was snoring in his bag, stretched out beside his car and Aziz had just crawled into his gently flapping tent. All was quiet, except for an occasional clap of distant thunder.

Thunder? In Saudi Arabia? Yes, it's true that it rains only rarely in the desert – all the more reason for nature to put on a real first-class show. In seconds, the far-off flickers turned into lightning bolts right over our heads. Then the gale hit us full force. First, the northeastern side of our dome tent bulged inward until it touched the southwestern! Then a ton of water hit us like a tidal wave. Both of us leapt up and pushed back the sail-like wall, which was already soaked through and dripping. I reached through the fabric and grabbed two of the fiberglass poles that had been bent almost to the snapping point. We leaned against the bulge and our combined strength was barely enough to keep the wind from turning over the tent, which, of course, we hadn't pegged to the ground. Dome tents don't need it, right?

For ten minutes we held on, rainwater streaming down our arms. Both flashlights had perversely decided to quit on us, but I could feel what was happening to the floor of the tent: sleeping bags, clothes, books, shortwave radio and cosmetics were all floating in a cold, wet, muddy soup. KRRRACKK! A bolt of lightning exploded an inch from our bedraggled shelter, scaring the daylights out of us.

"Abandon ship!" I yelled to Susy. "Grab anything that's worth saving and get it into Ron's car! I'll try to keep us right side up a few minutes more!" Trembling, Susy unzipped the tent door. Outside, the storm was raging. Lightning flashes showed camping gear flying every which way. Ron and Aziz, safely inside the truck, understood our need at once. Ron started the engine and drove closer to the tent, unknowingly squashing the boxes we had stored beneath the Land Rover.

One hour later, four wet cavers and a ton of gooey, flattened equipment, all mixed into one great heap, were rolling in the open desert. It was 9:00 PM. Somehow we found our way that dark and wild night across thirty kilometers of rough wasteland and actually came upon the Majma'ah road. After that, we drove in shifts until, bleary-eyed, we pulled into Dhahran at sunrise, Friday morning. The entire Dharb Al Najem adventure had taken place on one very long Thursday, but some of us didn't recover for a full week. And, of course, we realized that the pit we had bottomed couldn't have been the deep chasm the geologist had spoken of. If we had had our fill of adventure exploring a hole only 100 meters deep, what awaits the lucky cavers who will someday descend the real Sixteen-Second, Stone-Filled-Pepsi-Can Pit?

CHAPTER EIGHT

THE MOURNFUL WAIL OF THE WHISTLING TEAPOT

Riyadh 1994

I left Saudi Arabia in 1985 and spent the next nine years exploring the natural wonders of western Mexico. Still, I could never forget those intriguing desert caves we had discovered and eventually I applied to teach English at an institute in Riyadh, which, by pure coincidence would place me only a few hours’ drive from Ma’aqala. My arrival at King Khaled International was something I’ll never forget.

I’m standing at the end of a line so long I can’t believe I will ever get through immigration. A plane from Pakistan arrived at the same time as mine, crammed with workers who look just as worn out from their flight as I am. If there’s air conditioning in this room, I can’t notice it and we are all dripping with sweat.

I finally get my passport stamped and clear my suitcase through customs. It’s now the wee hours of the morning and I hope the person from the institute who is supposed to meet me hasn’t given up and gone home. Then I see a sign with my name on it. I walk up to a tall Arab who is not smiling. “I’m John Pint,” I say, “and thank you so much for waiting for me.” The man looks me in the eye and extends his right hand, not in greeting, but palm up. “Passport!” he says gruffly and that’s all he says.

I hand him my passport and he checks whether I look like the guy in the picture, then spins around and walks away quickly. I attempt to keep up with him, pulling my big suitcase behind me. In the car, I discover that my pick-up man doesn’t speak a single word of English – a bit of a surprise since he represents the large English school that has hired me.

At about 3:00 AM, we walk into the lobby of a building. There’s a desk and a sleepy-looking clerk who has me sign my name in some kind of ledger. I try to ask him whether this is housing for the Institute, because I’m still not sure I’ve been picked up by the right guy, but this man doesn’t speak any English either and simply hands me a key.

I open the door to my room. That’s all it is, just one room. This is where I’m going to live? It’s grim. There are no windows. It has an air conditioner right above the bed, but there are no bedclothes. No towel. No toilet paper. No drinking water! Amazingly, I don’t feel depressed by all this. All I want to do is turn out the light and sleep. It feels heavenly.

The next morning I go down to the lobby and find a Filipino sweeping the floor. He speaks English and assures me that I am exactly where I’m supposed to be. “You shocked them by arriving without your wife,” he says. “They couldn’t put you, a lone male, in the Married Housing, where there’s an apartment waiting for you, so they put you in a spare room here, where the bachelors are housed. The Institute is only a few blocks from here. Would you like me to show you the way?”

At the Institute, I meet the genuinely friendly Director who, nevertheless, has some bad news for me.

“I know you were promised a thousand dollars settling-in allowance,” he says, “but the accountants discovered you’ve worked in the Kingdom before, meaning you’ve already received the allowance.”

“But that was thirteen years ago.”

“I understand. But these are accountants we are talking about.”

The Director lends me a little cash from his own pocket, but surviving for a month until my first salary payment requires all my ingenuity. I discover cheap restaurants where the Filipinos go. I learn how to make my own “tubs” for washing clothes out of two discarded paint buckets lined with garbage bags. I scan the city’s empty lots for wire coat hangers. I survive.

Several months later I’m receiving a salary and feeling relatively rich. I start hunting for cavers and find three in Riyadh. One is French, one is Puerto Rican and one is American. The Puerto Rican has a friend who loves climbing. The Saudi Arabian Cave Exploration Team is back in business.

When I told the American caver, mining engineer Dave Canning, about Dahl Sultan and its marvelous formations, we started making plans for relocating it and finally recording its location on a new-fangled gizmo he introduced me to, called a GPS. Joining us on the expedition would be Husam Al Madkhali, a Saudi English teacher at the Institute who had been fascinated by the very idea of caves under the desert, and French cave documentary maker, Christophe Delestre, driving a Russian-made Lada 4x4 in which no one (not even he) had any confidence.

Early one Friday (the Muslim holiday) we headed northeast out of Riyadh hoping we might be lucky enough to relocate our blow-hole on the first try, an unlikely proposition since the sand dunes we had previously used as landmarks would surely have shifted. But, if we could reach this spot just once and get a GPS reading on it, we'd no longer have to waste precious time every trip, just trying to find the hole.

Less than two hours from Riyadh, we reached the little town of Rumah on the edge of the Dahna Desert. All we had to do was figure out how to cross its treacherous sands which consist of extremely long, parallel dunes known as irqs or "fingers." At the camel market at the far end of town, Husam picked up an incredible piece of news. Only minutes from Rumah, a new road had been built, a road stretching straight in the direction of Ma'aqala, a settlement quite close to the cave. Minutes later, we were speeding along a pristine ribbon of asphalt. "We'll be in Ma'aqala in fifteen minutes," exclaimed Dave. Unfortunately, no sooner had these words escaped his lips than he had to screech to a halt. Without warning of any sort, the marvelous highway to Ma'aqala suddenly ended.

There we were in the middle of a flat expanse of extremely loose sand, the home of the scorpion, the hairy camel spider and the dhub, a spiny-tailed lizard the size of an iguana that only feels comfortable when the temperature tops a hundred degrees. Unfortunately, this spot, like many other parts of the desert, was also favored by swarms of so called "house" flies which particularly savored crawling about on one's eyes, ears, cheeks and lips. These flies were so numerous that we had to cover our mouths with handkerchiefs when speaking to avoid getting a mouthful.

Our maps showed us that there ought to be an Aramco pipeline road only a few kilometers east of us. So we took a GPS reading at the end of the blacktop and merrily drove off – only to get completely stuck in the sand just three minutes later. Well, I must admit it was only the "amazing Lada" which got stuck, but I should probably mention that Christophe was a complete novice at driving on sand, which requires skills not unlike those learned in climates of ice and snow.

After rescuing the Lada on several occasions, we bounced along the rough pipeline road and finally cleared the last irq of the Dahna. Here we turned right onto the flat, hardpan of the As-Sulb plateau and drove along the edge of the dunes.

Bedouin Tea Party

Everything looked familiar and everything looked the same, for kilometer after kilometer. It would take a miracle for us to come upon that little hole purely by chance. But – Al Humdulillah! as they say– our wish for a miracle was fulfilled that day. Spotting a Bedouin tent in the distance, we sent Christophe and Husam over to talk to them. Christophe was back in a few minutes, telling us that we had just been invited to tea and soon, there we were, seated in the cool shade with several men and two veiled but uninhibited women, laughing and joking thanks to Husam's instant translations (into both English and French). The tent was of faded green canvas, very sparse, with none of the luxurious hangings and trappings of Hollywood movies. We learned that these Bedu had no idea where Dahl Sultan was, as they had just come to that place from somewhere far away and in a month would be off again to who-knows-where. Just as we were in the process of saying our ma'salaamahs (good-byes), a pickup pulled up and a young man in a flowing white robe joined us. He had just stopped by for a visit, but of course we asked him about Dahl Sultan.

"That blowing hole?" he said. "Yes, it's right nearby; I know exactly where it is; I'm the one who guided the son of the Emir of Ma'aqala to that dahl and I've even been inside it." This must be one of those coincidences that only happen once in a millennium. Anyhow, off he drove to show us the way... only to stop, after barely a minute, right next to a small opening which was blowing lots of air. "Just thought you'd be interested," commented our guide. Well, I was dumbfounded. Our famous blow-hole was not the only one in the area.

This little hole looked deep, so I tied a flashlight to a string and lowered it down the narrow tube and about a meter below the surface, it appeared to open up. I got the flashlight oscillating and it was soon swinging in a wide arc, touching nothing on either side. At about 10 meters, it came to a rest on a sandy bottom. Prospects for a fine new cave were looking good.

We took the coordinates for this little hole, which was promptly named the Teapot, because without that invitation to tea we'd never have found this pit, which the British, of course would call a "pot."

Our guide had claimed Dahl Sultan was "right nearby," but we had to drive 13km to get there. That's how far our search had been off the mark.

From Virgin to Violated

At last, I was peering once again down the entrance to Dahl Sultan. It was interesting and maybe alarming to note what had happened to a previously virgin cave over a period of ten years, even though its entrance was unmarked and it was located in the middle of nowhere. The first difference was that the entrance hole was no longer just wide enough to admit an adult of medium build. Someone had worked hard to enlarge it enough for a Santa Claus to fit through. As a result, sand had been trickling in steadily for a decade, raising the floor by well over a meter. We descended our cable ladder, slid down a sandy slope, gingerly passed over a very foul-smelling, "ripe" sheep carcass and entered what had once been a tunnel leading off in two directions. Now it only went to the left. The room that had once been on the right, noted for a large number of hollow "bird's nest" formations covering its walls, was completely sealed up by sand.

The rest of the cave was still accessible, but empty film boxes and many meters of strung-out audio tape told us a sad story about those who had visited the cave over the years. We even found several cracked off stalactites that someone had carried to the entrance room but had apparently forgotten to take out. To remove any doubts about who these visitors were, they had spray-painted their names in large letters all over several walls.

This was particularly hard to take, as Dahl Sultan had been “our baby,” but as time went by we saw the same fate befall many other caves in the Kingdom and try as we did, we were never able to get the powers that be to protect these marvels of the Saudi Underground.

Down the Tube

Having ascertained that Dahl Sultan was still there, though considerably worse for wear, and having determined its location by GPS, it was time to get to the bottom of the vigorously blowing Teapot.

On our next trip, I navigated, shouting "left!" and "right" with the GPS unit in my hand as Dave Canning roared over sandy hummocks and between towering dunes until "approaching Teapot" suddenly appeared on the screen, accompanied by a loud series of beeps. This seemed odd, because not one of us could see any sign of the little barrel end that had covered the hole last we'd seen it.

"Left – left, steady," I shouted, watching the countdown: 50m, 30m, 10m and finally exactly 00.0m, whereupon Dave brought us to a complete halt.

We looked left and right and saw no barrel. Then I leaned out my window and looked straight down. I couldn't believe it – the hole was right there outside my door! We all let loose a spontaneous cheer for technology. This was, in fact, practically a miracle, because in those days the US military was deliberately distorting the GPS signals received by ordinary, everyday civilians.

I jumped out and removed the sand-filled barrel end from the hole. "Nobody could possibly have stuffed a dead sheep down this one," commented Dave, perhaps a bit prematurely. This brought up the question of whether any of us human beings could actually squeeze through that opening, which turned out to be only fourteen inches wide and, to make matters worse, wasn't straight. We would have to wriggle past a sharp bend in the tube, which was over a meter long, too long to even dream about widening with a chisel.

We attached our cable ladder to the truck and I slipped into the opening. Surprisingly, the kink in the tube caused no problems as gravity helped me past it. But what would it be like trying to get back up?

The cable ladder came to an end nearly a meter above the floor. I jumped off and looked around me. I was amazed. Every other dahl I had been in had wildly contorted, highly irregular walls. But those of this well-shaped room, which was nearly circular, were unusually smooth. There was no water in it, though there surely had been in the past. Now, only a few black beetles scurried about in the sand, trapped forever in the darkness. At last the beam of my headlamp came upon a triangular opening in the wall, maybe 75 centimeters high. The cave continued.

The Whistling Teapot. A strong current of air from this blowhole convinced us we had to squeeze through the tight tube into the cave below, because in Arabia, "little holes lead to big discoveries."

The Howling

As I prepared to crawl into the small tunnel leading out of this room, I became aware of a very strange sound coming from wherever this passage led. At first, it was like a soft whistle, rising and falling. What in the world was that?

As I moved along the low, narrow passage, which almost seemed coated with whitewash, the weird warble grew stronger until it was a wavering howl that brought visions of graveyards and banshees. Didn't they say that genies – known here as jinns – lived in caves? What lay at the end of the tunnel?

Little did I suspect, as I turned two sharp bends in the unadorned passageway, that at the end of it I would enter one of the most beautiful chambers in the whole country. I turned the last corner and there they were, covering the walls and ceiling: hundreds and hundreds of shimmering, milky-white helictites. This display looked very much like a company of ballerinas, frozen in the midst of an ecstatic dance. To add to the beauty of the scene, the floor of this room was covered with a smooth layer of rich, red Dahna sand which contrasted with the shining formations.

Nothing so elaborate had ever been found in any other Saudi desert cave and I was delighted to point out my find to mountaineer Dave Black who had squeezed through the entrance hole and found me admiring that wonderful display.

There was, however, still the wailing of the banshee to deal with. We continued on, following the spooky noise until we found a small alcove at the very end of the cave. In its wall was a round hole about six inches wide, through which a strong wind was blowing with enough force to produce the strange sound that reverberated through the passages of the cave. It was a sort of natural whistle! However, while one mystery was solved, a new one was born, for beyond the small hole, the beam of my flashlight revealed an intriguing room. Were the 30 meters of passages we had found merely extensions of a much bigger cave that lay on the other side of that final wall? Was there any way we could get inside?

The Howling. Having passed through the tiny entrance hole, mountaineer Dave Black hangs from a cable ladder listening to a mysterious wailing which reverberates throughout Teapot Cave.

The Desert-Cave Self-Extractor

Unfortunately, there was no time to dally, for it was getting late and we wanted to re-cross the treacherous sands of the Dahna while we still had light. However, in my enthusiasm, I had forgotten one small detail: would it be possible for me to squeeze back up and out of the hole we had come in?

I climbed the swaying cable ladder and soon had the upper part of my body inside the wickedly curving tube. My shoulders fitted the space entirely and I wondered how Dave Black, who is bigger than I am, had managed to get through it. I continued moving upward until I could see faces up above, peering at me. At that moment, I discovered a major drawback to cable ladders. If you are in a tight enough spot, there is no way you can bend your knee, so it was impossible for me to lift my foot to take another step!

This was a very frustrating experience, being able to see the outside world, yet unable to reach it. Sheepishly, I grinned at Husam and, with some difficulty, raised one arm above my head. "Can you pull me out?" Instantly, several strong Bedouin arms were thrust into the hole – along with a few kilos of sand – and I was lifted straight up into the air, coughing and sputtering, but free.

Dave Black had been extracted in the same undignified but well-appreciated manner. As we pulled up the cable ladder, he suggested that next time we could rig a system of pulleys, by which each climber could extract him or herself, without the need for outside help.

Thus was born "Dave's Autohaul" and it proved to be a true blessing on our further visits to the cave when no Bedouins could be found in the area, our friends having picked up their tent and moved on. Here's how this desert-cave self-extractor works:

First, you drive your vehicle right up to the edge of the hole. So far, this has been possible for just about every pit we've found in Arabia. Now, from the highest point on the back of your truck, you use webbing and carabiners to create a two-to-one advantage (or better) pulley system. Both ends of this system are left inside the tube into which you plan to disappear. On your way back out, all you have to do is wriggle your way up far enough to clip the "weight" end to your harness. Then, your only problem is to get one arm above your head (in the Teapot, that's the best you can do). Finally, pull on the other end and up you go.

On this occasion, we surveyed the cave with Mike Gibson, who also produced an unforgettable video on the Teapot, the Autohaul and desert caving in sand storms. Since our map of this cave got lost somewhere between Arabia and Mexico, the video is even more valuable as a documentary.

Sand Sump

Now we were calling the cave The Whistling Teapot and thinking about how to get past that wall separating us from The Closet of the Jinn. We decided to try a dig. Christophe Delestre and I would be the excavators while my wife Susy would carry tools and messages from our outside support man, David Canning, who had obviously grown so fond of Saudi kabsa (a mountain of spiced rice often topped with a whole sheep) that not even a liberal coating of Slick 50 could slip him through that little entrance hole. Since most communications got translated in and out of French, English and Spanish several times along the way, Dave on the surface was sometimes more in the dark than the rest of us underground.

Perhaps if we had had some experience in escaping from prisons, we might have known how to dig a proper hole under a wall. We soon discovered you couldn't just go straight down one side and come up the other. The human body simply doesn't bend that sharply, even though we did our best to get Christophe through just such a siphon-like tube. Eventually we accepted the fact that we would have to dig a "bath tub" on our side of the wall, big enough to hold the trunk of a person in a prone position. This meant a whole lot more digging – all by hand, since there was no room for a shovel – and consequently swallowing copious amounts of the sand which was now fiercely blowing through the new hole we had made.

Eventually, all three of us wriggled our way under the wall and into the Closet of the Jinn. The walls of this little room were covered with flowstone of various colors and strangely contorted formations. It was a great place for a Jinn to hang out, but apparently he wasn't home that day. We did find, though, what may have been his lunch: the head and backbone of a small lamb with flesh still on the bones, and smelling none too nice. Knowing no animal could have reached this room the way we had come, we realized that one of the many small passages leading out of the Closet must reach the surface. In fact, one such hole proved to be the source of the airflow moving through the whole cave, but, like the all the others, was too small for a person to fit through. Where all this air comes from we never learned, but a large cave system may still be awaiting discovery somewhere beyond the mysterious Closet of the Jinn.

Hidden Beauty of Whistling Teapot Cave. Lying on a bed of red sand deep inside the cave, Mike Gibson admires a lavish display of gravity-defying helictites.

CHAPTER NINE

THE SECRETS OF MURUBBEH CAVE

Our next project was to look for a “Bat Cave” shown on a rough sketch of the Ma’aqalah area by my old caving partner, Dave Peters. “Do you think you could find it? I asked GPS Wizard Dave Canning. "Humph!" was his only reply, but a pained look betrayed injured pride. A week later, we were back in the desert, peeking over the edge of a deep, dark collapse about 15meters wide. "Looks like a good place for bats, doesn't it?"said Dave with a triumphant smile.

Picking our way down the steeply sloping breakdown, we found ourselves in a large room 50 meters across. Sunlight streaming from the entrance showed us patches of picturesque red sand beyond a field of broken rocks. The far wall immediately attracted our attention. "It's like a giant tostada floating in the air," shouted Susy. What she had found appeared to be a thin, lacy layer of gypsum that had separated itself from the wall ages ago. It really did appear to be suspended there and, of course, it was extremely fragile. This Tostada Curtain covered many square meters of cave walls.

By now, Dave and Carol Canning were well into a side passage from which we could hear shouts of "lots of bones" and "recording tape." As for the bones, there were at least three collections of them and no way to tell how deep the deposits might go. They looked like camel bones to us, but no one could imagine how or why a whole herd of camels could have or would have negotiated two very long and steep climb-downs (one in complete darkness) as well as the narrow passage leading out of the big room. Without a doubt, an archeologist could have a field day reconstructing what actually transpired in this place and when.

The tape, similar to that left in Dahl Sultan, possibly left there by Dave Peters, stretched off into the darkness, reinforcing our belief that this might indeed be Bat Cave. But where were the bats?

Frosted Feathers

Once again, I heard shouts up ahead. "Incroyable! Extraordinaire!" exclaimed Christophe, while Dave Canning's voice echoed from a small passage on the right: "John, you've got to see this."

Moving forward, I found more walls covered by the gypsum "tostada facade” while in other places, thin wafers of this stuff, maybe 10 centimeters around, were perpendicularly "glued" to the wall or ceiling, that is, sticking straight out from it. How they got themselves into such a position, I could not imagine.

Christophe and Susy's "incroyable" find left all of us gasping. The low ceiling was covered with hundreds of aragonite crystals which resembled feathers dipped in frost. They were only six centimeters at the longest, but the heaped up breakdown permitted us to get as close as we wished.

None of us had ever seen crystals like these before and all our attention was focused on the nine square meters or so of ceiling where this curious crop of "feathers" had grown.

Cavers in White Robes

Then we noticed the fireflies. At least, that's what they looked like at first: three or four tiny pinpoints of light bobbing around far down the passageway. But after a moment or two the fireflies turned into candles and we could hear the voices of their owners.

Never having encountered anyone but ourselves in a Saudi cave before, we were a bit apprehensive. What was this approaching party after? Would they look upon us as intruders?

As the candle-lit figures drew near, we saw the happy faces of several laughing and joking teenagers dressed in long white thobes and sandals. These boys appeared delighted rather than annoyed by our presence in "their" cave, and we soon learned they were from the nearby community of Shawiah. This cave, a perpetually cool respite from the outrageous heat of summer as well as the cold winds and sandstorms of winter, was their favorite weekend hangout. They called it Murubbeh, or "The Square Place" according to British explorer Andy Thompson, who did an excellent job as translator.

While the Saudi "cavers" enjoyed themselves posing for pictures with the (unveiled!) ladies in our gang, Christophe and I finally made our way over to the side passage Dave Canning had been raving about.

Hypnotic Sparkles

You shine your light into this tunnel and you're immediately dazzled by the sparkling reflections of light. Both ceiling and floor are made of what seems like gypsum flowstone and stalactites with plenty of thin "tortilla chips" glued on. We carefully maneuver our way through the delicate ceiling appendages, but every footstep we take sounds like an elephant tiptoeing through a bin of broken champagne glasses. At the end of the short passage, Dave invites us to enter two little rooms the size of telephone booths.

Standing up in one of these Starlight Chambers was like finding myself inside a geode. A universe of twinkling lights are reflected from my headlamp: 360 degrees of mesmerizing, tantalizing sparkles that make me feel I've been beamed to another dimension.

Cauliflower Ceiling in Murubbeh Cave. Just one of this cave’s beautiful and delicate features, some of which have already been vandalized. It is one of several Saudi caves that ought to be protected, but aren't.

Women Behind the Scenes

The fragile beauty of Murubbeh Cave reinforced our worries about the future of Saudi Arabia's Dahna Desert Caves. The two decorated caves we had discovered, Sultan and Whistling TeaPot had tiny entrances requiring vertical gear and agility. Murubbeh, instead, had an inviting, walk-in entrance and a large room with natural lighting. How many visitors would it take until the "wrong person" came along with a hammer in one hand and a gunny sack in the other?

Keeping quiet about our discoveries might have benefitted the blowhole caves, but we felt that Murubbeh needed protection, so we put together a slide show and began our search for a government entity that might be willing to start a Cave Conservation project for Saudi Arabia.

I was busy teaching English every day, so Susy started making phone calls and was soon giving presentations to various women's groups. She was assured that women – though they wear the veil and are forbidden to drive – nevertheless wield considerable influence in Arabia, but behind the scenes. Within days, we had an appointment with Hesham Elabd of the Riyadh Development Authority who saw our slides and immediately declared, "I would like to see this cave. When can we go?"

Celsius 45.1

At this time of the year, temperatures were over 45°C (112°F) and you could fry out in the desert if you ever had an accident. However, we easily found two more carloads of volunteers for a camping/caving trip and a week later, there we were, following Hesham's GPS, well, not exactly back to Murubbeh Cave, but very close. Close, however, isn't good enough when there's nothing in sight anywhere to use as a landmark. Don’t forget, before May of 2000, the signals received by the GPS were notoriously and deliberately inaccurate. So, as the sun began to set, the three vehicles in our expedition were frantically driving around in circles trying to find, but not fall into, a hole 15 meters wide. The orientational skills of Dave Canning who wasn't along this time were fully vindicated.

Finally, the sun slipped below the horizon. We had hoped to spend the evening studying and surveying the cave, but it now looked like we'd be camping just anywhere. So near and yet so far, when suddenly we saw a distant set of headlights blinking in the darkness. One of the cars had found it.

So, a combination of satellite technology and good luck allowed us to camp next to Murubbeh's entrance, which, in turn, put us in the right spot at the right time to observe the bats of Bat Cave streaming into the sky. Those clever little creatures were using an unimpressive hole on a side of the collapse that had appeared to lead nowhere. Now we found that the unpretentious opening led to a whole new section of the cave we had never seen before.

Showing off the cave to new visitors brought to light so many details we ourselves hadn't spotted earlier, that suddenly it was 10:00 PM and we hadn't surveyed an inch. Susy and I decided we would at least start the job and made our way to the far end of The Camel Aisle. However, after only two stations, we had to give it up. "I'm freezing," claimed Susy, which prompted me to consult my handy Campmor keychain thermometer. 16°C (65°F) is what it measured.

"What?" cried the people outside when I told them why we'd abandoned the survey. "It's nowhere near that cold in there. Besides..."

"Yes, I know," I replied, "Saudi caves are always a nice warm 26°C (78°F) all year 'round, but this one is cold. Maybe that's because it's twice as deep as the other caves around here."

That night, Susy and I set up our tent on the sandy floor of the Clubhouse, the big room where the local boys used to play cards and such. The very fact that we needed to use our sleeping bags convinced me that my little thermometer had been correct.

The Elusive Camel Spider

Suddenly, in the middle of the night, my eyes popped open. Something was wrong, but I didn't know what. I had heard a few passing bats and even the wings of an owl without fully awakening, but now there was something else. And then I saw it, a faint beam of reflected light barely visible through the door mesh. It was a car's headlights, I decided, but the night was dead quiet, so they had to belong to one of our own. After a few moments, the lights went out and I drifted back to sleep.

The next morning, over a hearty breakfast, we heard the story of The Great Camel Spider Walkabout.

Three members of our party, whom I will discreetly call X, Y and Z, had found it too warm to sleep and for some strange reason, hadn't wanted to spend the night in the nice, cool cave. At midnight, these three decided to go off for a little walk. By this time there was no light coming from our campsite, so they made it a point to keep in mind which way was back. However, in the course of their wanderings, they came upon a camel spider, a big, hairy creature you rarely see during the daytime. Fascinated, the trio ran this way and that, wherever the wee beastie led them, until finally it disappeared down a hole. Then, of course, came the moment of reckoning: "I say, does anyone recall which way is back?" No one had a clue.

X suggested the "great circle" technique: the other two should stay put while he would walk in a wide circle, communicating with occasional flashes of light. "I'm bound to come near the camp sooner or later," said X.

Y, however, the more he thought about it, was convinced that a certain distant glow corresponded to the correct direction of the camp. "We'll save lots of time if you just walk towards the glow," he told X.

So, X set off for the glow, but after an hour and no sight of camp, headed back towards his occasionally blinking companions. "So much for that theory. Now let's try my idea."

The circular approach turned up the camp's location fairly quickly, but when the midnight hikers finally collapsed on their cots, it was 4:00 AM, just a few minutes after someone had finally noticed their absence and had flashed his headlights, the reflection of which had awoken my Inner Watchman, down inside the cave.

"Majnoon" in June

Susy's contacts eventually led her to two outstanding women who arranged for us to be interviewed on a children's TV show as well as a popular program on environmental issues. The children were so enthusiastic and had so many questions on caves, conservation and bats, that four shows were filmed instead of just one. A month later, "Children's Choice" was pleading the cause of Saudi Cave Conservation on nationwide TV practically every day and we had high hopes that all the hullabaloo would catch the eye of some VIP who would like to see the Desert Caves preserved for future generations.

As a matter of fact, word did reach a staff member of the Ministry of Petroleum and Mineral Resources who pointed out that they indeed were the ones responsible for such things as caves in the desert. So why not set up a trip so he could have a look at them?

I phoned up Dave Canning. "Hello Dave. Now that it is mid-June and thermometers that only go to 120°F are exploding everywhere, only a genuine madman would want to drive out to the caves, right? Which is why I'm calling you."

Knowing it would be my last chance to show Murubbeh Cave to the man from the Ministry, Dave agreed to a trip and we worked out a timetable that would avoid exposure of our parked vehicles to the full brunt of the noonday sun. "We can drive out late in the day, explore by night – maybe even squeeze in that survey – and head back early the next morning," I suggested.

"I caught that casual aside about surveying," replied Dave, but I must admit I'd like to bring a digital thermometer into the Camel Aisle just to prove the temperature is not 65°F." Next, Dave the Mining Engineer went into an explanation of the Laws of physics governing underground rock temperatures which demonstrated that a few hundred meters this way or that way doesn't mean a thing, in fact an extremely deep cave would actually be warmer than one nearer the surface. I had to admit that my counter argument ("But it feels like 65°.") didn't carry much weight against the laws of Newton and Canning.

A day or two before the trip, I got a call from the Ministry. Apparently someone had pointed out to them that it would be totally majnoon (crazy) to drive out into the trackless desert in 120° temperatures. So the trip was off. However, when I called up Dave, we discovered that each of us had secretly been looking forward to one last desert sortie and since when did a wee bit of heat ever stop real cavers?

A Totally Cool Cave

So, on June 22, 1995, we reached Murubbeh's entrance early in the evening. A pleasant breeze was blowing and, although it wasn't cool, neither was it anything like the oppressive, stifling atmosphere of Riyadh in the summer. Without asphalt and concrete to retain the heat and buildings to block the breeze, the capital must have been like this in olden times.

We proceeded to the far end of the Camel Aisle and began the survey. After a while, Dave said, "OK, I give up. I've been monitoring the temperature for half an hour and there's no doubt: it's 62°F (16°C) in here." It was a relief to know that my keychain thermometer's reputation had emerged unscathed.

All we needed, then, was an explanation of why this passage, 35 meters deep, is much colder than nearby cavities at both greater and lesser depths. The best theory I've heard was given by geologist/caver Chris Lloyd after seeing a video tape of the cave. He pointed out that the large entrance plus the closed-off lower passage form an ideal cold air trap which would be replenished every winter by the occasional near-freezing temperatures. Chris also pointed out that many formations in Murubbeh are very similar to those of Lechuguilla, a cave in the USA famed for its beauty, suggesting that sulfuric acid may have played an important role in its formation.

In the Hands of the Vandals

Speaking of formations, our survey brought to light a suspiciously bare spot in the ceiling just next to the aragonite feathers. "Someone was at this with a hammer," exclaimed Dave. "It looks like there was a big gypsum formation up here." Sure enough, a look at the ground below revealed broken pieces of what were once grooved gypsum needles over a centimeter thick. Whatever they removed had been very different from the other formations in the cave, perhaps its crowning glory.

Next morning, just before we left, I went into the Clubhouse for a few last minute pictures and measurements. In the course of my wanderings, I came across two heaps of trash and garbage. Rotting sheep bones and crushed soft-drink cans demonstrated how badly the local people are in need of environmental education. However, in their hands lies one of the most beautiful and fragile natural wonders of Saudi Arabia. Perhaps it is inevitable that the rest of the formations will go the way of the smashed gypsum needles, but I continue to hope that steps will be taken to educate the local people and enlist their aid in protecting and preserving Dahl Murubbeh, their unique and beautiful "crystal palace."

The Skull of Najran Anne

One of the nicest by-products of caving in the desert is camping under a night sky filled from horizon to horizon with more stars than you can ever see anywhere else. Once again, Dave Canning and I were heating up the traditional can of Dinty Moore's in front of the spacious entrance to Murubbeh Cave, also known as B7 or Dahl Shawiah. Our plan was to spend the evening solving a fair number of the world's problems and the next morning to take up the far more mundane task of completing our survey of the cave. Little did we suspect that the cave had already been thoroughly surveyed years earlier, but that knowledge and much more would only become available to us later on, when the influence of the Internet would dramatically change the story of speleology in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

That night I pitched my tent on the soft sand floor of the large (50 by 50 meter) entrance room of the cave, while Dave braved the chilly winter winds above. During the night I was awakened two or three times by a large white owl flying over me to reach an occasionally peeping baby. Suddenly I heard a voice. It was clearly audible, low-pitched and vibrant, coming from right outside the tent and it spoke what sounded like two words, not in English: “NAJRAN ... ANNE”

I opened my eyes, very surprised. It was daylight, about 6:30 AM and I immediately looked outside the tent, but saw not a soul. From up on the surface, I could just barely catch the sounds of Dave working on breakfast. Neither of us could explain the strange voice I had heard, but more than one Saudi friend has suggested that a genuine jinn or spirit may have been trying to tell me something. After all, jinns are said to inhabit caves, and look what we stumbled upon a few hours later.

Our survey took us through some big chunks of breakdown, past a few piles of bat guano and into a large room some 60 meters long. Everywhere we looked in this room we found bones, all of them covered with a thick layer of dust that suggested they might be very old.

The biggest bones looked like they had come from camels, but there were lots of medium-size ones, countless tiny bones and a surprising number of pointed black gazelle horns about 10 inches long as well as a single porcupine quill, about a foot long. Was that all that remained of the creature?

"It looks to me like this was the lunchroom of one or more predators," said Dave. "Maybe some sort of hyena used to bring its booty in here, but there's been enough water flow to wipe out all the footprints." What the hypothetical bone collector did leave us was an enormous amount of droppings, measuring around 2 x 3.5 centimeters (1 x 1.4 inches). These, like the bones, appear to be very well preserved, probably because this cave, unlike most in the area, is very dry and a cool 62°F .

Some months later, thanks to e-mail, I learned that a team of speleologists from the Austrian Academy of Sciences had found this room and mapped the cave in 1986 and had learned through carbon dating that these animal bones were approximately 1000 years old.

Intrigued by this natural museum, we forgot about the Joy of Surveying for a while and began poking around in the breakdown. There seemed to be yet another level below us. A few moments later, I heard, "John, come over here." I joined Dave at a spot on what seemed to be the real floor of the cave, just a couple meters from the remarkably smooth back wall that enclosed the whole place. Dave just pointed.

There in the sand, nestled between two rocks, covered with the dust of ages, was a perfectly preserved human skull, the jaw bone lying right next to it.  There was no sign of a skeleton nearby and we speculated that "the predator" may have dug up a shallow grave somewhere outside the cave and made off with the skull. Was this the final resting place of the head of Najran Anne? Had I actually heard a voice urging me to look for it? If so, this frustrated phantom may never rest in peace because it looked like she had been bisected centuries ago. I'm pretty sure no human power will ever put Annie together again.

A few meters from the skull, at chest height, we found a sort of shelf in the big back wall. It was about three meters wide, close to a meter high and maybe six meters deep with what looked like a continuing passage in the back. On this shelf lay a multitude of mixed bones of every sort and countless coprolites, the scientific name for petrified poops. "If this isn't the creature's den, I'll eat one of these bonbons," I thought.

At this point we realized we'd have to avoid moving anything near the skull or in the den or otherwise incur the wrath of whichever paleontologists or archaeologists we could convince to come out and have a look at what we'd found. As we walked away, I glanced back at the skull. I may be wrong, but it looked to me like Najran Anne was smiling upon us.

The Underground Zoo

My next visit to the Chamber of Bones in Murubbeh Cave took place in 1998. Now I was living in Jeddah and “commuting” to Riyadh for caving in the Ma’aqala area. This time Dave Canning and I brought along a vet and an MD, Doone and Tim Watson, as well as dentist-photographer Lars Bjurström.

Relocating the skull proved somewhat tricky due to the multiple levels in this part of the cave and the countless nooks and crannies created by a huge amount of breakdown. However, all we had to do was pull out our newly drawn map and we quickly found Najran Anne's lair. Once we had photographed the skull in situ, Tim examined it and found it was in perfect condition with no sign of having been gnawed by an animal. "The size of the skull suggests that it belonged to a woman," he said. He also pointed out that the zygomas on both sides of the skull were perfectly intact, although they are extremely fragile. Lars noted that the worn condition of the teeth suggested that this woman had lived to a ripe old age. All in all, it didn't seem likely that hyenas had brought the skull into the cave without damaging it in any way.

Nothing else we found that day proved to be human, but Doone recognized the heads and parts of ungulates like donkeys and gazelles, various carnivores like sand cats and foxes as well as a number of ruminants, including camels, of course. The scat in the predator's den contained lots of fur and in some cases, insect parts. She speculates that hyenas may have lived in the den over long periods of time. As we learned later, experts in Austria were able to positively identify hyenas as the predators that left their tooth marks on many bones.

Another dimension was added to the story when several animal skins were found. These had all been prepared by human hands and one large, beautifully preserved piece of leather found by Lars was the size of a small blanket, very neatly folded into a compact package. This, plus the pristine condition of the skull, suggested that human beings, as well as hyenas, may have inhabited or used this cave at some point.

The 2,000-Year-Old Fox

In time, more animal remains as well as another human skull were found in the Chamber of Bones, but the most unforgettable discovery was the Fox. In 1999 I was hunting for unexplored passages in the Bone Room and found two big ones which had escaped the notice of the Austrian surveyors. The possibility of crawling into a space where no human being had ever gone before is, of course, one of the big attractions of cave exploring and I was thrilled to find that one of these rooms held lots more bones, including the complete head of a gazelle. This was more than a skull, as all the hair and flesh were perfectly intact and “naturally mummified” thanks to the cave’s cool temperature and low humidity.

Swedish explorers Lennart Richt and Lars Bjurström later returned to this room, checked it out thoroughly and discovered on the floor the perfectly preserved body of a canine, eventually identified as an Arabian Red Fox (Vulpes vulpes arabica) by the British Museum. This was a truly beautiful creature whose every whisker was in perfect condition. Later we sent a sample taken from the Fox’s bone to the Swiss lab ETH (which had dated The Iceman) and discovered to our amazement, that the mummy was 1,890 years old. The Gazelle Room apparently belongs to a much earlier period in the cave’s history. Although we brought all this to the attention of animal experts in the Kingdom, no further investigation of this room – or any part of Murubbeh Cave – has ever been undertaken, even though it might offer insights into the nature of fauna in Arabia 2000 years ago.

Eventually it was decided to remove the Fox from Murubbeh Cave because of the threat of vandalism. Geologist Mahmoud Al-Shanti was given charge of the mummy and carried it out of the cave to our campground. Since, at that time, the delicate animal was thought to be a thousand years old (but actually turned out to be older), he decided to take it into his tent at night for safekeeping. However, in the middle of the night, “weird noises” woke Mahmoud out of a heavy sleep. He switched on his flashlight and saw that the strange sounds were coming from the Fox. “Suddenly I remembered all those movies about mummies coming back to life,” said Mahmoud, “and then I saw the ancient fox begin to shudder and to move!” After his heart skipped a few beats, Mahmoud discovered that a large black beetle had somehow got into his tent, took a liking to the mummy and was apparently trying to carry his prize home.

The 2000-Year-Old Fox. This naturally mummified Arabian Red Fox (Vulpes vulpes arabica) was found deep inside the Bone Room of Murubbeh Cave, 200 kilometers north of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

CHAPTER TEN

SURPRISES AND MORE SURPRISES

Our 1983 discovery of stalactites, stalagmites and other picturesque formations in Dahl Sultan inspired both professional speleologists, dedicated cavers and just plain spelunkers to start hunting for more caves in the Ma’aqala karst.

The Austrian Survey

In 1986, the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals (KFUPM) launched a systematic, meter by meter search for caves in the area. Ralf Benischke, Gerald Fuchs and Volker Weissensteiner found 58 caves, mapped them and produced over 500 pages of scientific documents on their findings. One of their principal goals was highly practical: to discover the role that limestone caves play in replenishing Saudi Arabia’s aquifers. Their findings were illuminating: they calculated that 45% of the area’s yearly rainfall reaches an aquifer via the caves. This information would have proven invaluable in planning the development of towns, industry and roads in Saudi Arabia’s karst areas and in safeguarding the nation’s precious fresh water supply. Karst, of course, is a kind of limestone which is full of holes, like Swiss cheese, where extreme care must be taken – and special laws enacted – to prevent water pollution.  Amazingly, the Austrian reports were not disseminated in the Kingdom at all, but were locked up in a safe and forgotten.

Among the many caves studied by the Saudi-Austrian team were Murubbeh (which they named B-7) and UPM Cave. The former is described above and the latter features a large room measuring 45 by 80 meters, which probably contained an underground lake in the past. This cave also houses a small, but still active gour or rimstone dam and a nest of “cave pearls.”

Diving in the Desert

One of the most extraordinary caves on the Arabian Peninsula is Ain Hit where a long, steep passage offers direct access to an aquifer, where you can literally go “diving in the desert.” Ain Hit is located near Kharj, a town just south of Riyadh. The cave became enshrined in the history books when King Abdul Aziz ibn Saud invited several geologists to have a picnic there in 1938. The geologists discovered that the cave bores right through the layer of anhydrite that caps Saudi Arabia’s oil deposits and this supposedly spurred them on to new discoveries.

At the time of the King’s Picnic, the cave was apparently flooded at the level of the entrance hole. Today, after years of pumping out this 10,000-year-old, but still good to drink, fossil water for various kinds of agricultural projects, one must hike down to over 100 meters below the surface to find the water. The passage is filled with giant blocks of breakdown and has an average slope of 33 degrees, which, according to explorer Chris Killey, is the steepest angle that a rubble pile can reach before it turns into a landslide.

In 1994, Swedish explorer Erik Bjurström (Lars’s brother) began exploring Ain Hit using scuba gear. Here is his description of the first dive.

“I was excited. We had no idea what lay before us. I thought about the current I had seen at the waterholes in Al Kharj and wondered if we would encounter a similar current here and be swept away. I instructed the lifeline holder to keep the rope tight at all times so we could have signal contact with him. With my heavy diving and photography equipment, it was tricky to get the few steps down to the water, but soon we were on our way. We went over a ledge and down in a big underwater room with crystal-clear water. With our torches we could illuminate the entire room. The bottom was covered with a very fine silt of dissolved anhydrite, like flour. When stirred up, it made the water like milk. We had to be very careful. In the silt I could see the glitter of beautiful gypsum crystals. We laid out the light sticks to mark the entrance and went on. The cave forked in two directions. Straight ahead it narrowed into a black tunnel, while below it fell away in a narrowing canyon. We could see a black hole where it went out of sight. We decided to explore the forward route first. My partner led with the lifeline while I followed with a hand on the rope. The shapes of the walls were surreal, seamed with shelves of different strata in the cliff.  They were covered with white silt as if it had been snowing. When our exhalation bubbles struck the roof, flakes of loose rock came falling down like snowfall. They did not affect the visibility. But the silt was a different matter. We had to move very carefully, gliding through the water with almost no movements. Neutral buoyancy was imperative. The tunnel narrowed more and more. Finally, after swimming about 150 meters, we struck the roof and came to a dead end.

“We turned back. The line-holder was doing his job well and we had no problem in following the rope as we retreated. We decided to see if the canyon below led further. We swam down in a zig-zag course avoiding the silt-covered shelves. We saw several side tunnels leading in other directions but followed the main shaft. It became narrower and narrower. At last we ended up at an opening only big enough to let one person through. I looked at my depth gauge: 17 meters, then glanced back the way we had come. I could see the rope had snagged the rock in several places, meaning that we no longer had contact with the line-holder. Also we had kicked up silt that now came rolling down towards us like fog...

“I began to feel uneasy; if we lost visibility now, our situation would be dangerous. My partner had considerably less diving experience and seemed unaware of the danger. The situation rapidly went from bad to worse. Before I could signal to him to turn back, he started to crawl through the opening making violent kicks with his fins. In an instant all visibility had gone. We were left groping in a milky soup. There was no way of judging direction. Only the rope leading upwards, white in the torch beam, offered a chance of returning safely.

“The silt begins to rise.

“Desperately signaling to my partner to turn back, I began a slow ascent, following the rope hand over hand. I saw the gleam of my partner's torch, and knew that he was following. Fear started to slow down my thinking. I knew I had plenty of air left but I started to breathe heavily. I felt I was not getting enough air. I had to lie down and control myself before I did something irrational like leaving the rope for an uncontrolled ascent. I went on and came to a rock were the rope was jammed. I had to put the light aside. In total blindness I loosened the rope with my fingers, entirely by feel.

“We went on. After several similar stops, the rope was finally free and I was back in touch with the line-holder and my feeling of security came back. Soon we found the light sticks marking the tunnel entrance. Our land support team was worried since they had lost contact with us. We were shaken by this incident and I was glad to see the sun again after an exhausting climb back up to the main entrance.”

Steamy Crawlways

Another notable discovery in the Ma’aqala karst was Gecko Cave, named after a very photogenic and incredibly patient gecko which “posed” for us on a stalactite for about one hour and would actually move up or down, as we required, whenever we tapped him or her on the nose or tail. This cave featured a nice sandy floor: very convenient since 99 percent of the passages can only be visited while crawling on hands and knees. A special feature of Gecko Cave was the Steam Room at its far end, where the humidity rose to 100 percent, condensing on the pieces of flagging tape we hung from the ceiling for our survey and dripping off of them. A few centuries from now these may have transformed themselves into stalactites.

Equally steamy is Mossy Cave, named for the bright green moss growing all around its entrance: a definite attention getter in the desert. This cave is full of gorgeous stalactites and bizarre rock formations, inevitably viewed through a river of sweat running down the visitor’s brow.

Friendly Cave is one of Lars Bjurström’s many discoveries. Bjurström decided that the only way to discover beautiful caves in the Ma’aqala area was to systematically go down every single hole and have a good look. “Friendly” in fact, has a rather unfriendly 11.5 meter deep entrance hole, infamous for spilling tons of sand in the eyes of anyone rappelling into it or prusiking, ( using mechanical ascenders that allow you to “walk up the rope” at your own speed) back out. Nevertheless, in comparison with other caves in the area, this one was friendly enough because a short walk, not a crawl, mind you, of 40 meters brings the visitor to a room filled with rows of picturesque stalactites and stalagmites.

The Most Beautiful Cave of All

Now when it comes to beautiful decorations in the Saudi Underground, the winner is probably Surprise Cave, found by Lars Bjurström and Lennart Richt in 1999. Here is Lars’ description of how the cave was discovered.

“Early Thursday morning I went to the cave area. It was a very disappointing day. I think I went down 12-15 holes, most of them resulting in nothing. And nowadays I don't give up easily. In the afternoon I was dead tired, bruised and with aching knees. I found one rather big one but ‘hostile.’ By that I mean lots of tight passages, sharp and difficult floor, gray, dusty, dull and with no decorations whatsoever. You can see it is dead. At that time I was ready to give up caving altogether. A sheep herder I met at a hole said: (in Arabic, but I got the meaning) ‘Don't go down there. There is nothing to see and it is dangerous. You are crazy!’ And he shook his head. I almost agreed with him, but I went down. When I came back up, after rather a long time, he was still waiting for me and I could clearly see he was surprised I was still alive. I also saw my first snake, a small one that quickly disappeared.

“On the way to my camp in the sand dunes I found one interesting hole close to Friendly Cave but I decided to check it the next day when I planned to meet with Lennart Richt. He seems very interested and as crazy as me.

“I had a nice, peaceful evening by myself in the sand dunes testing my new car tent which is fixed to my new roof rack and which I can roll out to make almost a Bedouin tent. It worked fine. The sand was very firm after heavy rain and it was really fun to drive up the highest hills with no difficulty. Beautiful evening.

“The next day I met Lennart at Friendly Cave. We had some difficulties to find a cave he had told me about and I stopped at a small hole 90 centimeters in diameter, not much bigger around than Dahl Sultan, to have a quick peak. I could chimney-climb down approximately fourteen meters and to my happy surprise, to say the least, a nice, beautiful, cave presented itself! It was clean, so big that I could walk upright, had a nice, sandy, floor and with lots of really beautiful decorations. So I named it Dahl Surprise. I walked as long as I dared but soon went back to get Lennart. We brought all the marking line we had and started to explore it. And it went on and on until we had no more line and did not dare to go further. We were also very tired. But it is a major cave, that's for sure. And friendly! No dead sheep, no really tight passages, except at the entrance, and very beautiful. Also, the temperature is relatively cool. It was lots of ‘My God!,’ ‘Sh--!’and ‘Wow!’ Not to mention ‘It continues further!’ or ‘You have to see this, Lennart!’ We stayed for three hours and some very delightful hours they were. All my troubles from before vanished with the wind.”

In time, a second entrance to Surprise Cave was found and 652 meters of passages were mapped, with plenty of others still to be investigated.

At the Mercy of Vandals

One of Surprise Cave’s surprises is that many of its stalactites are dripping and still active. This is in contrast to the typical formations in Saudi caves which apparently formed and stopped growing a million years ago. Surprise also has old stalactites which were coated with a thick layer of translucent calcite. These have pointy “ducktails” at the bottom, slanted at a 45° angle. On top of that, there are segmented clusters of pure white gypsum crystals of extreme fragility and beauty.

Unfortunately, the combined inventions of the GPS and email have made it easy for great numbers of people to discover the exact locations of cave entrances, even extremely small ones like the little hole leading into Surprise. Eventually, the coordinates fall into the hand of an occasional “bad apple” who can destroy natural marvels formed over millennia in an instant. Surprise Cave is one of nine outstanding Saudi caves whose entrance we felt should be fenced or gated. We petitioned various government agencies to do this in 2001. A committee was formed to look into the matter and apparently they are still looking. Meanwhile, not a single cave has ever been protected and many have been vandalized.

Surprise Cave. Susy Pint exits the easy-to-miss entrance to 652 meters of explored passages, containing some of the most beautiful formations in Saudi Arabia. Many parts of the cave still await exploration.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE GREAT PIT OF ABALHOL, FATHER OF FEAR

Some time ago, a road builder for Saudi Aramco, named Qurian Al-Hajri, was driving through a flat, featureless, hard-pan plain somewhere west of Saudi Arabia’s Ghawar oil field, the largest of its kind in the world. Suddenly, an enormous hole appeared before him, almost out of nowhere and by the time he put on his brakes, he was only meters from the edge of a great pit, so deep that he could not see its bottom. Realizing the serious danger this wide cavern mouth represented for anyone crossing the desert on four wheels, Al-Hajri immediately arranged for a rampart of dirt to be erected around the hole, which was so impressive, he never forgot it.

Years later, the story of Qurian Al-Hajri’s encounter with the formidable pit reached our ears, as many people in Saudi Arabia knew that we were interested in exploring caves, the deeper the better. Having discovered his office phone number, we decided to give him a call.

“We heard about the huge pit you found in the desert.  Do you have the GPS coordinates?”

“I am a Bedu. I don’t need a GPS. Aramco gave me one, years ago, and I put it in a drawer where it still lies. But I’d be happy to meet you and take you to the hole.”

We immediately contacted our caving friends and began planning a visit to Qurian’s abyss.

Hot Pipes and Soupy Fog

So it was that one very cold day in December we found ourselves driving from Al Kharj (just south of Riyadh) toward a GOSP (Gas Oil Separation Plant) not far from the lonely outpost of Al-Haradh. Susy and I had spent the night shivering in our little tent only to be woken up at sunrise by an interminable procession of heavy vehicles lumbering along the network of rig roads that crisscross the Ghawar oil field. But when we poked our heads out to see what was making all the commotion, we were amazed to find ourselves surrounded by a wall of white. A pea-soup fog was the last thing we expected to encounter in a desert.

Precisely at 10 AM, our colleagues, Mike Gibson and Arlene Foss pulled up next to us and a few minutes later, a white Explorer appeared.

“Kayf al haal? You are John? I am Qurian. Nice to meet you. Yalla, yalla. (Let’s go)” said the wiry man inside. Qurian led us through a maze of graded Aramco roads, stopping occasionally to show us what the oilmen are doing in the area. “This pipe with all the valves on it is called a Christmas Tree. Oil was found here long ago, but only recently did we open the valves to let it out. Now it’s flowing through this pipeline. Can you hear it?”

The pipe was humming, and hot to the touch. In Saudi Arabia the problem is not pumping the oil out, but keeping it in.

Beyond the oil field lay the empty desert whose most salient feature was the lack of features. There wasn’t even much sand to be seen, just a hard, white, flat surface that stretched off in every direction. Again I asked Qurian why he didn’t use a GPS.

“Now I am very sensitive to the smallest details of my surroundings. I have to keep myself razor sharp. But if I used the GPS, I would lose my edge.”

Curious about this man’s outlook, we asked Qurian how much of him was Bedu and how much Aramcon.

“I am doing all I can to keep up the way of life I was taught as a child. It was a hard life and it made me strong. But today, people have it easy and as a result, they are becoming weak. So, I don’t live in Aramco housing – I live in a black, goatskin tent that was hand woven by my mother, in the same lonely spot where my grandfather dug a well long ago. You want to know how strong people were in the old days? I’ll tell you the story of how I was born.

“When my mother sensed that the time had come to give birth, she slipped out of the tent and walked seven kilometers out into the desert, to a place where no one could see her or hear her. You see, she was shy and didn’t want to disturb anyone. Maybe she was a little embarrassed as well – it was the first time she was going to give birth, you know.

“Well, after a while, I came out into her hands. That’s when she realized she had forgotten to bring along a knife to cut the cord with. So she had to bite it in half with her teeth. Then she wrapped me in her head scarf, slung me over her shoulder and walked the seven kilometers back to the campsite.

“There she saw my father standing beside the tent. ‘I have a man for you,’ she said, placing me in his hands. My father was astounded. ‘What? Didn’t I see you a couple of minutes ago inside the tent? How is this possible?’

“Now my father is dead and it’s my responsibility to care for my mother.  And let me tell you, she still takes off a shoe and whacks me when she has a mind to, but when that happens, I thank her for her admonition and I kiss her on the top of her head, exactly like a well-educated child should do.”

ARAMCO Road Builder Qurian Al Hajri. "They gave me a GPS, but I put it in a drawer. I need to keep my edge."

With stories like these to listen to, time passed quickly. Suddenly, about twenty kilometers into the desert, the dull white of the landscape was broken by a circle of deep green. It was a round wheat field irrigated by a slowly rotating water pipe. This was obviously the landmark Qurian had been looking for.

“The big hole is out in that direction,” said Qurian through the open car window, pointing west. And off we went, our cars three tiny specks on a vast white sheet, bright and glaring in the afternoon sun. For most of 50 kilometers I could distinguish no features that might be helping Qurian to orient himself. How did he do it?

A half hour later, we saw a low, dirt rampart breaking the monotony of the flat plain. Standing on top of the rampart, we looked down into the mouth of a huge hole, a great, black scar contrasted against the shimmering white of the desert. No bottom could be seen. Mike and I had figured the hole would be thirty meters deep at the most. Now we were glad we had several hundred-meter ropes along. While we circumnavigated the irregularly shaped chasm, looking for a good rigging point, Qurian pulled out what looked like a briefcase and turned on a satellite phone which he used to contact his headquarters. “Even though we’re fasting for Ramadan and our office hours are up, I’m always getting calls. Aramco never stops.”

Then, out of nowhere, a pickup truck appeared and out stepped several bearded gentlemen wearing dark “winter” thobes. They were from Al-Hunay which would seem to be the closest settlement to this hole – maybe 30 kilometers away. They seemed delighted that we had come “all the way from Jeddah” just to visit this unusual spot. “We call this dahl (cave) Abalhol,” they told us, "because it's BIG!”

"What does Abalhol mean?" we asked.

From their and Qurian's explanation, we gathered that Abalhol was the name of a "very large and very ancient Egyptian." Only later did we learn that this old Egyptian giant is actually the Great Sphinx of Giza and “abalhol” is short for Abu Al Hol which means Father of Fear.

After a while, our visitors left, including Qurian, who urged us to come visit his tent at Ain Dar, where he had "one hundred camels which Susy will enjoy milking."

The Gaping Maw of Abalhol. Mike Gibson and John Pint (in the sunbeam) on their way to the bottom of the cave.

Hanging in Space

We then went to take a good look at the pit. The mouth was twenty by thirty meters and a string lowered to the bottom indicated it was around 70 meters below us. This suggested that Abalhol might be the fourth deepest cave in Saudi Arabia.

We connected two ropes to one of our vehicles and then threaded the ropes through the bars of our “racks,” friction devices attached to our harnesses, permitting us to slide down the ropes slowly.

About ten meters below the surface, Abalhol opens up into a huge, fully illuminated single room, which gives you the feeling that you are hanging in space, maybe the way you would feel if you were suspended from a helicopter over an enormous canyon. As we dropped into the pit, we found ourselves among hundreds of rock doves soaring across the vast, almost perfectly round, room. We landed on the steep hillside at the bottom and scrambled down to where we could gaze at the huge dome above us without fear of getting hit by debris from above. It was a spectacular sight.

About half the cave can be easily reached by walking around the perimeter. The rest is covered by giant blocks of breakdown which look very unstable. We moved along, looking for passages, but for the most part only succeeded in surprising the many doves that were blissfully roosting on the floor. These birds would inevitably pop up right in our faces, scaring us as much as we scared them. Other features at the pit bottom included truck tires, sand-filled soda bottles and the corpses of numerous dehydrated doves.

Having found no significant passages or formations and having thoroughly worn out our welcome with the doves, we prepared our return to the surface. For this we use mechanical ascenders which slide up the rope easily but hold tight when pulled downward. As I prepared for my climb, I saw Mike stuffing our various bags of photo gear and such into a giant duffle bag.

“Mike, that looks like the Abalhol of all gear bags. Shouldn’t we send up one bag at a time?”

“It’ll be a lot easier to do it all in one haul,” were Mike’s last words as I started up the rope, and unforgettable words they proved to be.

By the time both of us got out of that hole, darkness was fast approaching.

“Quick, let’s get the gear bag up while we have light,” I said. Mike leaned over the edge of the great pit and tugged on the rope. “Argh! I can’t even budge it. Maybe we can pull it up with the car.”

“Wait a minute – our video camera is in that bag! Let me try a cave rescue pulley system we used to use in Mexico.” Well, it took an hour to set up this clever arrangement which uses only three pulleys to give you an eight-to-one lifting advantage. All four of us were then kept busy either pulling on the rope or repeatedly returning various ascenders to their original positions as the weight below slowly rose.

“OK, John,” said Mike, “it’s working, but we have to pull ten meters of rope to lift the bag a couple inches. This is going to take all night!”

To make a long story short, it took us another two hours to haul the heavy bag up and over the lip but when we did it, we declared ourselves qualified and ready to pull the fattest camel in the Kingdom out of the deepest pit, as long as nobody was worried about how long it might take.

Then we walked back to our tents, just as a full moon rose into the sky, lighting up the desert all around us and casting spooky shadows deep into the throat of Dahl Abalhol, which at that moment looked like it truly deserved the name Father of Fear.

CHAPTER TWELVE

THE HOWLING WINDS OF THE FAR NORTH

Just before the 20th century ground to an end, email came to Saudi Arabia. The service was rudimentary and could only be accessed via loudly screaming but exceedingly slow modems.  Those modems, however, were good enough for sending low-resolution photos and I decided to start a website about Saudi Arabia’s desert caves, even though the Internet itself was still not allowed in the Kingdom. My principal motive was to create a central repository for data on speleological studies carried out in this country over the years, because I realized that most of this work was being done by foreigners who would come and go, taking their maps and findings with them. Each foreigner was, in effect, starting all over from scratch instead of building on the discoveries of those who came before him.

Saudicaves.com is born

The pictures and stories I sent to my computer-savvy friend Tom Ross in Superior, Wisconsin and he did all the rest. That’s how www.saudicaves.com was born on March 3, 1999.

Our 1983 discovery of Dahl Sultan had proven the geology books wrong. The deserts of Saudi Arabia were rich in beautiful caves well worth visiting and studying. Just before the start of the new millennium access to the Internet was approved in the Kingdom, Saudicaves.com proved to be a big eye-opener, not only to cave explorers around the world, but especially to Saudis themselves.

We had already experienced the reaction of Bedouins to photographs we had taken of gorgeous formations inside the caves of Ma’aqala. “Jameel,” (beautiful) they would say. “In what country do you find these marvelous things?”

We would point down the small hole at their feet. “Hinna, hinna,” we would say: right here, under the ground.” And what interesting looks we would get in reply!”

One day in the year “2000”, as we used to call it, we got an email from Dr. Maher Idris, vice-President of the Saudi Geological Survey. “I saw your web page,” he said, “and I was amazed. We are the ones who should be investigating caves in our country, but what you have found is entirely new to us. I’d like to learn more.”

A few days later, Dr. Idris was in our home watching a slide show about caves we had been studying over a period of 17 years. When he discovered I was about to head back to Mexico after a three-year teaching stint in Jeddah, he shook his head.

“No, no, you can’t leave Saudi Arabia. We want you to come work for us and to teach our geologists all about caves.”

I couldn’t believe my ears. Somebody actually wanted to pay me to explore caves? It was a caver’s dream come true and before the year was up I was back in Jeddah, training enthusiastic Saudis in cave exploration, safety, conservation and surveying. Life was good.

Searching for Habikah: Dhubbs and Wolves

Not long after arriving at Saudi Geological Survey, I received an email from another fan of the Saudicaves.com website. “There are several caves near a small place called Habakah in northern Saudi Arabia,” wrote Mr. Faisal Al Zamil of Al Khobar. “You should really check this place out.”

Just finding Habakah on the map turned out to be quite a feat. It looked like two houses next to a spring, located some 50 kilometers south of the border with Iraq, without even a track leading to the place. But the time was ripe for seeking new caves. In fact, I had spent many weeks providing basic speleo training (in and out of caves) to some fifteen Saudi geologists and they were ready to test their new skills “where no caver had gone before.”

“What’s the nearest airport?” asked Mahmoud Al-Shanti, project leader of the newly founded Cave Unit. This question might seem surprising to typical cavers used to driving for days to visit a likely looking hole, but Saudi geologists, I discovered, were accustomed to flying to the airport nearest their work site, where they would be met by drivers and fully loaded vehicles.  Of course, I didn’t object to flying instead of driving, as long as somebody else paid for the tickets.

The nearest airport to Habakah is at the tiny town of Rafha, only 6 kilometers south of the border. Here we met our drivers and headed west along the Trans Arabian Pipeline road until, to our surprise, we spotted a sign reading “Habakah Thataway” in Arabic.

“Aha!” There’s a track after all,” I shouted with glee, only to discover after ten minutes that it wasn’t just one track, but dozens and they weren’t all going the same direction. However, we had a GPS fix on Habakah, so it didn’t really matter.

The area we were traveling through was about as desolate as it gets: flat, powdery hard pan where not even a cactus could grow. The only living creatures we saw for hours were dhubbs or spiny-tailed lizards and these we spotted everywhere, madly dashing for their dhubb-holes at our approach. Occasionally we would come upon a flock of sheep, the shepherd always a wire-thin Bangladeshi with skin as black as basalt. Unlike shepherds in other parts of Saudi Arabia, these men had five or six dogs to help them watch over their flocks. “Why do you have all these dogs?” we asked one of them. “Wolves!” he answered in the one-word sentence style so common in this part of the world. “And where do these wolves live?” we asked. The reply came instantly: “Kuhuf, caves.”

Eventually we came upon the last thing we expected to see in that stony desert: grass, wide fields of bright green grass. Next, we came to small lake. Buzzing above the lake in great clouds, we found something else we had hardly expected: mosquitoes, the biggest we had ever seen. Beyond the lake, a few houses appeared and we knew we were in Habakah.

We stopped to chat with the only human being we could see, a young man standing in front of a tin shack with the word “STORE” scrawled on it, in English, believe it or not. First, we learned that this place is called Ha-BI-kah, even though it is written Habakah, but vowels don’t count for much among Arabic speakers. Next, the young man asked us why we had come to Habikah by such a strange route. “Why didn’t you take the graded road? It runs straight from here to the highway.” Instead of asking why the highway sign was standing several kilometers east of this fine new road, we brought up the subject of caves.

The young man’s eyes lit up. “You like to go into caves? I’ve been waiting years for someone like you to come along.” The young man’s name was Sa’ad and he was the son of the local Emir. He began to tell us about two large caves he and his brothers had ventured into for some distance but had been afraid to explore all the way to the end.

Tayib-Al-Issim Cave

The first cave we visited with Sa’ad and his little brother had a rather small walk-in entrance six meters wide and two meters high. It smelled of wolf, which made our situation almost ludicrous; a gang of men following two boys into the den of the beast. To be honest, we all thought this cave would end a few steps inside. After it forked in three directions and the entrance faded from sight, Mahmoud broke out the flagging tape. “These are nice kids, but can they find their way out?”

Well, we soon came to some curious formations including a horizontal bridge stretched across the passage and connected to the ceiling by two round columns. Next there was a “giant wart” that seemed to be glued to the wall. The cave looked better with every step.

“Sa’ad, what’s the name of this cave?” I asked. He looked surprised at the question, then smiled and said, “Tayib Al Issim” which means something like, “Oh, what a nice name!” It’s a phrase which has long been used by local people to satisfy strangers who demand names for places without a name or places that are risquély named. You’ll find more than a few Tayib Al Issims on many a map of Arabia.

Forty meters from the entrance we walked into a room whose walls were covered with curious, sausage-shaped formations. Each sausage was tipped with a sort of spiked crown – Could these be what the cave is really named after? The next room was also remarkable. Bones galore littered the floor, the remains of animals both big and small. There were also plenty of ancient wolf and hyena droppings. We were in the wolf’s den, but fortunately, no wolves were to be seen.

Now the cave opened up into a room some 25 by 35 meters. Here we found stalagmites that had been broken open at the top and appeared to have been “mined” for the soft white powder inside them by persons unknown and for purposes we couldn't imagine. Until this day, I believed all stalagmites had to be solid inside. It has been suggested that maybe these formations are made of gypsum and the powder inside them may be gypsum reverted to anhydrite. A study of the speleogenesis of this cave would probably be very interesting.

At the very end of the cave, we found the bottom of a gurba or waterbag. How long ago had it been since some brave soul had crept deep into this cave to collect precious water?

Black Scorpion Cave

Kahf Al Aqrab Al Aswad got its name when we first tried to camp next to the entrance. Somebody picked up a rock and found a big black scorpion under it. Somebody else picked up another rock and found that scorpion’s twin brother. When a third person found yet another scorpion under yet another rock, we decided to look for a different campsite.

This cave has a big, impressive entrance room 60 by 45 by 10 meters high, well lit by rays of sunlight streaming down the long downslope from the surface. Wandering about the room, you might not even notice a pile of breakdown at one end, but these rocks are hiding a small opening that leads to the rest of the cave. The first time we squeezed through it, we got smeared with fresh proof that wolves still make their home in this cave.

A fifty-meter-long walking passage leads to a big room called the Wolves’ Assembly Hall, with a great heap of breakdown blocks running down the middle. Between the breakdown and the long, straight, west wall, lies the biggest collection of bones we’ve found in Saudi Arabia. On the east side of this room, there’s an alcove whose walls and ceiling are covered with swirling gypsum flowers as well as tiny needles. This area is also home to foxes, some of whom may have been the visitors whose eyes we could see every night, peering from the darkness surrounding our campsite. But all of us agreed we’d prefer foxes over scorpions any day. The Wolves’ Assembly Hall is eighty meters long and seventeen meters high.

Now the ceiling drops and after a short distance, the passage splits. On the left, there’s the Macaroni Room in which an amazing variety of gypsum formations are concentrated on every surface. There are miniature flat-sided swords, fine needles, wildly spiraling filaments, curly flowers, straight, brush-like flowers, cotton-candy balls, belly-button fuzz… well, you couldn’t come up with enough names to describe them all, but this gives an idea how easily you could become mesmerized in this passage.

Driver-turned-caver Sa'ad al Slimi with one of hundreds of gypsum formations found inside Black Scorpion Cave.

My photographer’s assistants were so busy looking and modeling that we didn’t realize how many hours had passed until we heard a strange noise coming from just outside the Macaroni Room. We tiptoed out and discovered Abdulrahman, one of the geologists, stretched out on a bed of hard, dried, wolf and hyena droppings, snoring away peacefully. These guys are able to catnap just about anywhere.

The cave continues southward, featuring ever narrower passages, eventually leading to the Majlis al Khafafeesh or Assembly of the Bats, filled with hills of very old-looking guano. In some places water has eroded the guano, leaving a sort of canyon wall which shows strata of different colors and consistencies. Many hundreds of bats, probably Asellia tridens, swirl around the room.

Black Scorpion Cave. This is the largest of numerous caverns found near Saudi Arabia's border with Iraq. Rumor has it that the two countries are joined by at least one underground passage, though the authorities did not allow us to investigate this.

The Blowing Caves of Munbateh

We soon discovered that the Rafha airport is more often closed than open. We couldn’t even get into the airport to find out the flight schedules. Turned away by armed guards at the gate, we headed west along Tapline toward Ar’Ar, which had been the hub for road traffic between Saudi Arabia and Iraq before the Gulf War. As we drove along, the sky grew darker and darker and the wind began to howl. When waves of sand began to wash across the highway, I knew we were in for a shamal, or sandstorm. I had experienced some memorable ones in which visibility was reduced to a few inches from the end of my nose, but in that kind of sandstorm – the kind that can strip the paint off a car – you wouldn’t want to open your eyes anyhow.

In this case, we could just barely see the road and crept along through the swirling sand for about an hour, after which the sun came out and the winds slowed down to what we would later call Ar’Ar Standard Windspeed,” meaning just strong enough to wreak havoc and make camping miserable.

Walking into any airport in the world with bags and bags of cable ladders, racks and ascenders, not to mention battery rechargers, slave units, anemometers and other electronic gear, inevitably draws attention, especially of the soldiers who must decide whether they are going to let you on the airplane. We found that official letters proclaiming us to be servants of the government carried no weight at all with the military, but when we opened a folder of 8 X 10 photos, it was another story. First, they wanted to know what country those caves were in. “This country!” we said, but they didn’t believe it until we showed them pictures of ourselves inside the caves. Each picture resulted in much discussion until the soldiers’ commanding officer appeared. He was just as interested as all the others and in the course of several more visits to the ’Ar’Ar airport, we made fast friends with this officer and several others who introduced us to the most intriguing cave zone in the whole country: Munbateh.

There couldn’t be more than a handful of Saudis alive who would know where Munbateh is. To the south of it lies the Nafud desert, to the east, hard pan strewn with boulders too big to drive over and therefore almost impossible to navigate. I don’t know what lies to the west, but you’d have to cross 132 kilometers of it to find the first paved road. That leaves an approach from the north. Guided by GPS, you find your way across 50 kilometers of barren wastes until you come to a little depression five meters in diameter and three meters deep. In the wall on one side there’s a low shelter cave. It doesn’t look like much, but it’s strangely cool inside and there’s a breeze.

The blowing hole of Munbateh is at the left end of the shelter cave. It’s only 65 centimeters wide and one day I measured the wind speed at 18.6 k/h (9.2 knots). However, on some occasions, we saw it blow harder and at other times (like in the middle of the night), it sucks instead of blowing. Before we acquired an anemometer, we used the Bedouin approach to measuring the wind speed of blowholes. This has proven useful when trying to get decent information about a rumored cave.

“There is a blowing hole in such-and-such a place.”

“OK, will it lift a Kleenex?” Then it’s a class one hole. Possibly interesting.

“Will it lift a ghoutra (headscarf)?” Hmm, class two, definitely interesting. (In Mexico, substitute sombrero for ghoutra.)

“If you throw a full box of Kleenex inside, does it fly back out?” Ah, that’s a class three blowhole, the very best. This kind will also fully inflate a thobe, the long white garment worn by men in Arabia.

The Munbateh blowhole was a class three and its cool breezes were appreciated even by the local animal population. One evening we found a baby hedgehog in the shelter cave, enjoying the natural air conditioning. But where was all this wind coming from? Belayed by Mahmoud, I wriggled down the sloping tube below the hole to a vertical drop only three meters from the entrance. The walls were smooth and covered with milky-white flowstone.

Geologist Mahmoud Al-Shanti demonstrates the powerful air flow of the Munbateh Blowhole near Ar'ar. Similar phenomena in the area suggest that a very large cavern lurks beneath the surface in the far north of Saudi Arabia.

We rigged a rope and rappelled in through shimmering flowstone and stalactites. It was a glorious entrance to a rather disappointing room at the bottom. This chamber was rectangular in shape, about eight by fourteen meters, with no decorations and piled high with great heaps of very fragile breakdown covered with a thick layer of white powder, a handful of which could easily be squeezed into a ball. It just happened to be that time of day when the wind stops blowing, so we had no air current to follow. However, as we made a complete circuit of the room, we realized that every low, narrow “passage” we discovered looked ready to collapse, as did the ceiling of the entire room. We both agreed that this room was not a good place to linger and we got out as fast as we could.

Next, we decided to have a close look at another blowing cave we had come upon by pure chance. As we drove off, we noticed that most of our tents had been blown down. This happened all too frequently at Munbateh and eventually, we bought Eureka and North Face tents to replace our shredded Colemans.

The entrance to Star Cave is also found on the side of a shallow depression and is also too low to stand up in, but it’s a lot bigger than the Munbateh shelter cave.

We crawled inside and Mahmoud sniffed. “Wolf!” he said as we broke out our survey equipment, which consisted of a very precise compass (the most famous brand is Suunto), a clinometer to measure up and down angles and a new-fangled, very expensive gizmo called a Disto, made by the Leica company. This is a laser device for measuring distances that works marvelously well in Saudi Arabia’s usually dry caves where there were no suspended droplets in the air to deflect the laser beam.

By the way, one of the lesser known advantages of using a Disto is that no one has to crawl into those spooky dark corners in order to measure the passage width. This decreases the likelihood of your running into a wolf and I think the Leica people could allude to that in their ads.

Star Cave has a number of dusty old formations including columns about twenty centimeters wide. Just how old they are, we discovered when Bern University researchers tried to date them using the uranium-thorium method. The Swiss were hoping to discover just how far north the Monsoon used to reach into the Arabian Peninsula, by looking at the isotopes of oxygen from tiny bubbles of water eternally trapped inside stalagmites. Heavy rains, it seems, produce water with different isotopes than from light rain, so every stalagmite (but not stalactite) is a data base for weather studies. However, to the great surprise of the Swiss and everyone who has tried to estimate when Saudi Arabia’s inland caves were formed, the stalagmites of Star Cave as well as those of the Ma’aqala karst turned out to be over 400,000 years old and impossible to date by the U-Th method.

Star Cave is 43 meters long and 13 meters wide. At its far end, we found an opening from which cold air was blowing so vigorously (actually it was about 62°F (16°C) that we were soon shivering while trying to complete the survey. Outside, it was around 100°F (37°C) in the shade. I hadn’t thought there were any blowholes in Arabia stronger than the Kleenex-Box ejectors, but here was one we would have to call a class four!

Beyond the opening at the end of Star Cave, which we could name the Star Gate, lies a gradually widening, vertical fissure with smooth walls of calcite. Five meters away, the fissure opens upon a drop of unknown depth. Once again, we determined that bolts were needed to follow the airflow and this time they’d have to hold fast in flowstone.

Something is breathing under the desert south of ’Ar’Ar and we wonder who will be the lucky ones to discover what it is.

A River of Bones. Over thousands of years, hyenas, wolves and foxes have carried bones into Saudi Arabia's caves, where low humidity and a steady temperature have preserved them.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

THE CAVES OF KISHB

The project to hunt for caves in the vast, volcanic wastes of western Saudi Arabia, got its start with a little push from “the grand old man of US caving,” Bill Halliday. No sooner had I arrived at the Saudi Geological Survey in Jeddah, than I was handed a computer printout by my new boss, Mohammed. “Someone has sent you an Email, John,” he told me. Well, I didn’t even have an Email address yet, so I figured this must really be important, and so it was:

“I notice there are lava fields not far from Jeddah,” wrote Halliday. “Are there any lava tubes to be found?”

Well, I repeated that question to quite a few French, US and Saudi geologists during the next few months, but none of them could give me an answer. “The man you need to talk to,” they all replied, “is Dr. John Roobol. He spent years in those miserable lava fields. Right now he’s on leave, but he’ll be back.”

Nearly a year went by before John Roobol finished sailing around the world and by then I had forgotten all about searching for lava caves, completely distracted by limestone caves filled with fascinating calcite and gypsum formations, great caches of mysterious bones and several fiercely blowing leads. But then, one fine day, the doorway to my office was filled with the frame of a big, big man. “So you’re interested in lava tubes,” boomed the voice of John Roobol and there and then began a new chapter in Middle East speleology.

Yes, said Roobol, at last answering the question of Dr. Halliday: there were lava tubes in Saudi Arabia. Many of them he had spotted during helicopter flights over vast stretches of lava and he had actually entered one of them, where he found beautiful, long, spindly lava stalactites hanging from the ceiling. However, to his knowledge, that was the extent of lava-cave exploration in Saudi Arabia, with no maps or surveys ever having been carried out.

I learned that there are about 89,000 square kilometers (34,363 square miles) of lava fields on the Arabian Shield, which covers most of western Saudi Arabia. Reaching the majority of these areas by helicopter is difficult, due to the great distances involved, refueling problems and, of course, astronomical costs. If, however, you have a vehicle with good tires and several spares, you can attempt to navigate the Bedouin tracks that criss-cross the lava fields, locally known as harrats. “The shortest distance between two points, when you’re driving across a harrat, is not a straight line,” said John Roobol, because the sharp-edged chunks of basalt are death to tires. You have to stay on the tracks, but the tracks go every which way.

Obviously, a guide is invaluable for harrat navigating and I was delighted when Roobol offered to lead our first volcano-speleological expedition to Jebel Hil, a scoria cone near which he had seen at least a half dozen lava-tube entrances some years earlier.

Jebel Hil is located in Harrat Kishb, a lava field located only some 250 kilometers from Jeddah. I thought my caver-trainees would be delighted about this, but they told me “Those lava fields are thick with mosquitoes and if you light a lantern at your campsite, you’ll see big scorpions running towards it in minutes…and every pool of water you find out there has huge black snakes in it which are famous for jumping right out of the water and attacking anyone foolish enough to come near.”

It sounded delightful, but we had heard even worse stories about what is supposed to lurk inside limestone caves and had lived to tell the tale. So, in November of 2001 our expedition of ten men and one woman, my wife Susy, of course, drove off towards Harrat Kishb. Our hopes for success on this mission were greatly bolstered by a bit of pure luck. By sheer coincidence, John Roobol had been handed a set of photographs, taken somewhere in Kishb by a hunter.  Several imposing lava-tube entrances were shown, proving that large walk-in caves were waiting for us, but, unfortunately, we had no clue as to exactly where the pictures had been taken.

Because we had gotten off to a typically late start, darkness had already fallen as we approached Wahbah Crater, a monstrous, two-kilometer-wide hole in the ground created by a series of explosions caused by spring water reaching a deep area of thermal activity. This is a favorite hiking and camping spot for foreigners living in western Saudi Arabia and easy to reach by road. However, our caravan would have driven straight over the crater edge if our fellow caver, Mahmoud Al-Shanti hadn’t wisely stopped just beyond a “barrier” of three side-by-side oil drums. In the lights of our three Land Cruisers and one truck, we walked forward a few steps and discovered we were right on the edge of a 200-meter drop to the bottom of the crater. This, it was decided, was a fine place to camp. “The strong breeze will keep away the mosquitoes,” said Mahmoud. Apparently there were no sleepwalkers in the group and no-one minded camping four meters from the brink of a deep chasm.

Stuck

For hours we worked our way through great black blankets of volcanic rubble, broken by occasional smooth, flat areas dotted with acacia trees. In one of them we found “the only thick sand I’ve ever seen around here,” according to John Roobol and, of course, we managed to get our ancient pickup truck hopelessly stuck in it. After doing our best to burn out the engine, we finally resorted to the infallible way to get out of the sand: we let the air in our tires down to 15 lbs, drove right out, and then spent a very long time pumping the air back in, using my 12 volt air pump.

At last we found ourselves on top of a somewhat flat place alongside Jebel Hil and lo and behold while searching for a good camping spot, we spotted a dark patch on a low wall. This proved to be a vertical cave entrance about 20 meters high. Leaning over the edge, spacious tunnels could be seen going off in opposite directions. Our first lava tube.

We set up camp nearby, ate and decided to go have a look at the series of holes proceeding from Jebel Hil. A ten-minute drive brought us to a lookout point right beside the volcano. We had a magnificent view of the flat plain below us but, alas, couldn’t see the line of collapses from this position.“You can see everything from the top of volcano,” remarked John Roobol, who (as is his way) immediately began climbing. Well, it was about 4:45 and it looked like we could just make it to the top and back before sunset, so we all followed him.

Roobling up the Volcano

Ah, but this “Hil” is not a “hill” up which one can merrily prance while filling the air with the sound of music. No, I swear the sides of this volcano are as close to 90 degrees as I would ever want to get and only 20 meters or so on the way up you could see almost every member of the group hanging onto some tiny knob of rock, the only thing solid in a sea of loose scoria (which is like lightweight gravel), almost everyone, that is, because Abdulrahman, the biggest guy among us (excluding JR, of course) was dashing up that exasperating mountain like a rabbit. “He’s a Bedu; that explains it,” I said to myself, but then who did I see right behind Abdulrahman, but Saeed, who is not a Bedu and who usually looks terrified every time he has to do a rappel.

“Gulp, I guess if they can do it, so can I,” I muttered and began inching my way up that wretched slope, which grew ever steeper as the few handholds were replaced by fine scree. By then I was halfway up and could see the silhouettes of my two trainees on top of the cone. I had to keep going.

It seemed as if an eternity passed before I made it. After catching my breath, I began to take pictures of the magnificent interior of the crater, in which you could see a wide, flat “ledge” which had once been the surface of a lake of lava, and the collapsed hole through which lava had flowed into. On the plain far below I could just discern one of those collapses in what must be a mighty impressive lava tube.

And then I heard a female voice. I couldn’t believe it! Susy’s head popped over the edge. Later she said, “When I saw that you had made it, I knew that I could too.” Now tell me, is this a compliment?

John Roobol and Ghassan came over the edge next and he was the last. As we walked along the crater’s narrow rim, John enthusiastically described Jebel Hil’s geology and history. Meanwhile, sunset was approaching and we were wondering just how we were going to get back down. “Well, certainly not the way we came up,” said John. “It’s much too steep. We’ll go down another way.”

We continued walking a lot farther and then checked the slope. It was even steeper than where we had climbed up and 100% scree. Besides, it looked like there was a sheer drop about halfway down.

“John, how did you go down last time?”

“Well, now, the last time I was here, as you may recall, was by helicopter.”

“You mean you’ve never climbed down before?”

“Nor up.”

Burnt Bottoms

This explains how six apparently rational beings sat down on a nearly vertical slope and tried to slide down on their posteriors, hoping they wouldn’t make the small mistake that could start them tumbling down the volcano’s side like snowballs.

Well, most of us ended up shredding the seat of our pants, all except JR, who used his rucksack as a sled and came out of it with his backside unscathed.

Somehow we all survived and may even have achieved fame as the first brave souls to have climbed and butt-tobogganed down Jebel Hil. In addition, we had all learned that John Roobol is even crazier than a caver.

The Bed That Ate Shoes

On Tuesday morning we split into two groups. Four valiant souls went to hunt for the lava tube holes below Jebel Hil. They trudged some 12 kilometers over a very rough lava bed, visiting each entrance, noting depth, diameter and amount of collapse, etc. They found ten vents, six of which were collapse openings above a cave floor lying from 22 to 42 meters below. The lava tube appeared to be about 20 meters high and at least three kilometers long. Commented Mahmoud: “There was pahoehoe lava above the lava tube, but what we had to walk over was prickly Aa lava most of the time with irregular, loose chunks ready to break your ankle mixed with thin pieces ready to collapse under your weight. John Roobol kept reminding us to be careful with every step because ‘We could all die out here.’ ” They returned, not dead, but dead tired, around 5 PM, having lost considerable shoe leather. But, they had documented a long, east-west oriented lava tube with secondary tubes leading north and south from several of the vents. To this writing, no one has returned to actually step inside any part of Jebel Hil Cave.

I was in group two, whose mission was to map the three lava caves seen by John Roobol’s hunter friend, which we had managed to locate the day before with the help of some Bedouins. I “guided” our driver “Eagle-eye Sa’ad” to the site using GPS coordinates, a method of navigation Sa’ad did not approve of at all. On the way back he asked me not to use the GPS and he got us home in half the time, by an entirely different route.

Dr. John Roobol strolls near the entrance to Ghostly Cave in the Kishb Lava Field. The drop is seven meters (23 feet) but ancient peoples created a high rock heap at the bottom to improve access to the cave.

First Lava Tube Survey

Upon reaching the entrance to the first cave, I think I sent my three Saudi trainees into a state of shock by announcing that they would carry out the first survey of a Saudi lava tube. Susy and I would merely assist.

We then spent a while practicing how to use the compass, clinometer and Disto digital measuring device as well as how to put data into a survey book. This lava tube is about four meters high, 157 meters long and easy walking all the way. About half-way in, we began to see small basalt stalactites which had once been drops of molten lava. According to John Roobol, the cave was 1000 degrees Fahrenheit, walls glowing red, when this happened. Seventy-five meters from the entrance we found a raised side chamber with what appear to be very old hyena, wolf and who-knows-what droppings, surrounded by bones.

Twelve survey stations later we came to the end of the cave and the home of a handful of bats. The floor was smooth, dried mud of undetermined depth, sectioned in a nice-looking pattern. Near here were also a number of “soda-straw lava-mites,” thin and delicate-looking, but, of course, hard as rock.

Exiting this cave, I asked the surveyors what they wanted to name it. “Kahf Mut’eb” they told me. This translates as Very-Difficult Cave. Now, if this is how my trainees categorize surveying a flat, smooth easy-walking single passage, what would they think of the kind where you have to take readings while lying on your belly in a tight crawlway half full of a gooey mixture of guano, mud and bat urine?

Worn out from their “ordeal” and aching for lunch, the survey crew preferred to stand by and let me have all the pleasure of exploring the 7-meter-deep hole just a short walk away.

Ghostly Cave

There was a big pile of breakdown below, on one side of the hole, so I only had to climb the ladder five meters to reach these rocks. I could see passages going off in opposite directions. I walked over to the one heading west. The entrance to it was long and low. I bent over and peeked inside. In the half-light beyond, I could see a large chamber filled with figures. It was as if I had surprised a gathering of skinny goblins and they had immediately turned to stone.

Slowly – and I do mean very slowly – I stepped into the room. “These statues look like stalagmites,” I thought to myself, “but there are no stalactites above them, and, besides, I’m in a lava tube, not a limestone cave.”

On closer examination I found that these strange figures were made of bird droppings. There must have been fifty of them in there, the tallest standing one and half meters (5 ft). Now, one rock dove had flown out of that room when I entered, but what had happened to all the others?

I also wondered how old those “guanomites,” as we began to call them, were, as I made my way through them, deeper into the cave. The floor consisted of fine, powdery dirt covered with a thin layer of bird guano. It crunched like snow. At one point, I broke through the crust and my foot sank down 20 centimeters. This was a new sort of cave experience for me and I regret I was in a hurry and couldn’t examine the place better.

I followed this passage to its end where I found stuffy air and a handful of very small bats. A later survey would show I was 135 meters from the entrance. On the way back, I checked out a short passage parallel to the main one. On the floor I found a flat, vaguely L-shaped stick which I thought was a bit curious. I stuck it into a hole in the wall and followed this passage to its end, which was blocked with breakdown through which I could see daylight. However, I couldn’t get through, so I made my way back to the collapse entrance the long way.

The eastern passage of this cave also looked interesting, but I was running out of time. I took a quick peek, though, and saw only a few guanomites inside a big room some 40 meters wide. A large part of the wall and roof were covered with a crispy crust of a pure white mineral which I imagined was gypsum. At the end of this room the passage kept going. Good reason for a return trip, I figured and headed back to the cable ladder.

A few months later found us back in Harrat Kishb. This time we decided to pitch our tents on a flat patch of black ash just a short walk from Ghostly Cave.

As we stood at the edge of the entrance collapse, I was impressed how easily our team of Saudis were now handling knots, ladders, belaying, cable ladders and surveying. Indeed, with the three geologists handling the mapping, Susy and I could concentrate on photography the whole time.

We spent some time shooting the entrance with the tall guanomites lurking just inside like silent statues, and the remains of a very old stone wall poking out of the guano-covered floor. Then the survey team reappeared, all three of them coughing, rubbing their eyes and wondering how a khawagi (foreigner) had ever talked them into entering a place like that.

The cause of their misery was, of course, the thick layer of white “dust” on the passage floor. But, as good geologists, they had taken a sample of it, which showed it consists mainly of calcium, potassium and phosphate. JR called it “bone dust” and it is so thick inside the cave that a crust has formed on the top which your foot breaks through, sinking into very light powder.

We then took a look at the large room and passage on the east side of the entrance hole. This one led about 100 meters back to a bat chamber where a glimmer of daylight could be seen through the obviously thin ceiling, which sported several brown bat-urine stains.

In this section of the cave, Mahmoud discovered a flat, nearly L-shaped stick much like the one I had stuck into the wall in the small parallel passage, which stick he had also retrieved. Both of them looked like boomerangs and Roobol later remarked that throwing-sticks like these were used in this area by Neolithic people six to eight thousand years ago, a claim he later backed up by showing us pictures of rock art – discovered near the town of Hail – which depict flat-headed people holding L-shaped sticks much like the ones in Ghostly cave.

We spent that evening sitting on our carpet, near a blazing fire under a starry sky, playing “Oh Guano!” by the light of a gas lamp and to the hubbly-bubbly sound of a water pipe. I’m sure it was the first time in the history of Harrat Kishb that such an activity had been undertaken by three Saudis, an Afghan, a Gringo and a Mexican, female, to boot.

The Twilight Zone of Ghostly Cave. This lava tube received its name from this forest of “guanomites," some of them nearly two meters tall, deposited by rock doves.

Knotty Curse

The next day we spent some time taking photos in Mut’eb Cave. Deep inside the cave we needed a hiding place for a Coleman lamp and I asked Mahmoud to lift up a big, flat rock lying on the dirt floor. He picked up this rock and suddenly I heard a gasp and “Oh no!”

“What’s wrong, Mahmoud?”I cried, “Are you OK?” He put down the rock carefully and pointed at what had been under it.

“Do you know what that is?”

I saw a very old-looking piece of rope with a knot in it.

“Looks like a very old piece of rope with a knot in it!”

“John… This is –how do you call it—a curse.”

“A curse?”

“Yes, the knot represents a spell and it was hidden in a place like this so the victim couldn’t come and untie it.”

Well, here was a whole new use for caves I knew nothing at all about. Anyhow, after a short reflection, Mahmoud uttered a short prayer and carefully untied the knot. I hope that gave some relief to someone somewhere, but if the rope was as old as the boomerangs we’d found, Mahmoud may have undone one of the longest-lasting curses in history.

Throwing Sticks Found in Ghostly Cave. The curved upper surface of these sticks provides aerodynamic lift. They are thought to be Neolithic but have never been carbon-dated.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

GHAR AL HIBASHI LAVA TUBE AND THE DUST OF AGES

Before 2001, not a single speleological study of a lava tube had ever been carried out in Saudi Arabia. Only three years later, mineralogist Paolo Forti declared Hibashi Cave, located 243 kilometers east of Mecca, one of the ten most important lava caves in the world – “mineralogically speaking, of course.” About the same time, extraterrestrial-cave researcher Penelope Boston declared that Hibashi Cave had been an invaluable help for producing robotic motion simulations for navigation inside Martian lava tubes. How had so much happened so fast?

I first heard about Hibashi Cave at the end of 2002 in the course of my work as a caving consultant to the Saudi Geological Survey. One day geologist Mahmoud Al-Shanti dropped a tabloid newspaper, written entirely in Arabic, on my desk. “I think you’re going to like this,” he said. Mahmoud translated the lurid headlines:

“Man Survives Deadly Cave Ordeal for Twenty Days – Lives on Cave Grass”

The details of the article were even more attention-getting. The man had wandered into Ghar Al Hibashi, a cave located deep inside a huge lava field, and gotten himself hopelessly lost. During three weeks he had stumbled around in the dark where he had battled ferocious wolves and hyenas, breathed poisonous fumes and endured the bites of disease-laden bugs. During his ordeal, he had eaten “cave grass” and drunk “cave water” until he surfaced through a hole located 17 kilometers from the cave entrance.

Such a cave appeared worthy of investigation, even if it turned out only one tenth as long as the newspaper claimed. During the first week of January, 2003, we set out on our quest. All we knew about the cave’s location was that it lay somewhere between the towns of Ranyah and Turubah that meant a mere 130-kilometer stretch of tire-eating lava to investigate. “I think I’ll sit this one out,” Susy had commented, “until you actually find the cave… if it’s really a cave at all.”

We drove out of Jeddah, took the Christian Bypass around Mecca, obligatory because I was in the party, and climbed the escarpment to an altitude of 1700 meters. At last we entered the 11,000-square-kilometer lava field (4,247 square miles) known as Harrat Nawasif/Buqum. All we could see was rubble in every direction. We drove along a wide dirt track and stopped to question the few people we came across. Many hours later we were still nowhere near the cave and the sun was about to set. Since you can’t find a black hole in black lava in the dark, we pulled off the road to an isolated spot and began to make camp near the mangled remains of a tanker.

A Roar in the Dark

As usual, I picked a spot far from the camp to set up my tent, knowing how late the others usually stay up. I found a patch of sand between some lava chunks and thorn bushes and had just finished putting on the rain fly (Yes, it rains on this escarpment) when I heard a very strange sound in the total darkness, somewhere far behind me. It was a long, slow, throaty growl and it made the small hairs on the back of my neck stand straight up. Then I heard it again, this time a lot closer.

I couldn’t believe my ears as it sounded exactly like a lion, but there haven’t been any lions in western Arabia for thousands of years. The rumbling growl came again, even closer. Could it be a wolf? There are definitely plenty of wolves in these parts. I edged away from the tent and carefully made my way back to the cars. Without a doubt, there was something weird out there. I told Mahmoud I thought I had heard a lion and he gave me a very peculiar look. Then he asked everyone to shut up and he heard it too. His eyes bulged and he walked over to the truck and picked up a heavy metal pipe. The whole gang of us now tiptoed behind Mahmoud as he very carefully made his way toward my tent. Suddenly, we saw a movement in the beams of our collective flashlights. Mahmoud stopped, turned to me and in a low voice, said, “John, there is your lion,” pointing towards a camel, whose head could be seen just above a large bush behind the tent.

Lost in the Lava

The next day found us wandering all around the Harrat, trying unsuccessfully to communicate among our three vehicles using some cheap walkie-talkies we’d bought. We might have spent years crisscrossing that lava if we hadn’t topped a small rise from which we could see, in the distance, several large white tents, neatly arranged all in a row. Bedu. As usual, a couple of these astoundingly generous people immediately volunteered to lead us to the cave, which they said was nearby. After a kilometer or so over typically savage lava-field tracks, we were standing on the edge of a hole nearly 20 meters across… and freezing.  Yes, a lively wind had risen and it was a relief to jump from rock to rock down into the shelter of a room so large we couldn’t make out its other end.

Because it had a flat floor, plenty of room and a pleasant temperature, Mahmoud declared that here is where we were going to camp. There were a few looks of surprise at this and a few murmurs about the minor problem of transporting our gear (you can’t imagine how much stuff we take on these trips) all the way down from the surface. But soon we were busy forming a human conveyor belt. There was just one slight problem. As so often happens, somebody had decided this cave was a fine place to throw his dead sheep, and there were three bloated carcasses perfuming the air of our new home. Fortunately, there were sandy spots near the sheep, so I decided to abandon the chain gang and bury the bodies. This turned out to be more of a job than I had figured, but in the end it was well worth it as our new home smelled as lovely… well, as lovely as you could ever expect a cave to smell.

Which brings me to the subject of the cave floor on which we spread our carpets and tarps. This lava tube, like all the others we’ve seen in this country has a deep layer of powdery sediment covering the original floor. Now, a dirt floor would not be bad to camp on, but this first room of the cave had obviously been used as an animal corral in the past, as witnessed by the remains of an old stone wall near the end of the twilight zone of the cave. Amazingly, it took only a few hours for us to forget that we were camping on top of billions of little sheep and goat balls, and soon the drivers began to prepare a meal.

As usual, chicken kabsa was the only item on the menu, but this time it was lightly spiced with the dust which rose every time anyone took a step on the sheep-dung floor. After a few cups of tea, it was time to go have a look around the cave. We put on our helmets and picked up a Coleman lamp because the great size of the passage facing us plus the flat floor suggested this was going to be an easy-walking cave. We also took along a couple of stout sticks because we had spotted the large imprint of an unknown, five-toed animal’s paw on the ground.

The passage we were in had an arched ceiling and smooth walls 16 meters apart. It felt like we were walking in a man-made tunnel. The floor was composed of very fine dust which had been blown or washed into the cave during ages. Here and there we saw shallow depressions. Later we learned these were sleeping spots made by hyenas and/or wolves which had previously – we hoped previously – lived in the cave.

Comparing the ceiling arch to the shape of lava tubes where you can see the original floor, I figured that this Saudi lava tube had been filled with several meters of fine powder, deposited at some point during its million-year history. What archeological treasures lie buried in the dust was anyone’s guess because no archeological studies have ever been carried out in a Saudi cave, even though this part of the world is considered “the Cradle of Humanity.” On close inspection, the side walls revealed runny lava “dribbles” and small lava stalactites. Here and there were found lumpy lava stalagmites, up to 30 centimeters high. But the most interesting formation of all was a 13-meter-long lava channel on the inclined floor of a side passage. It looked as if a tongue of lava had run up the slope and then drained, leaving a V-shaped groove along its length.

A few steps further, the floor suddenly turned to ash. Bones and even rocks lying on this light-grey surface were charred on the bottom but not on top. The burnt area covered a large part of the cave and appeared to be a layer of guano that had caught fire and smoldered for a long time. Some parts of the ceiling in this area were covered with a shiny, sticky, rather hard black coating caused by this fire, here and there dotted with tan-colored stalactites of an equally sticky substance. We had seen several small wood fires on the floor of this cave, perhaps used for lighting purposes and it may have been one of these that set the guano on fire, but how long ago?

An interesting feature of this cave was a very large, well-shaped dome with the usual high heap of large chunks of breakdown beneath it. We placed a hygrometer and mini-max thermometer in this area and got 48 degrees humidity and a pleasant temperature range of 22-24 degrees Celsius (71-75°F). The low humidity means Hibashi Cave is ideal for preserving anything that has found its way inside of it.

Campsite at Hibashi Cave. Problems of excessive heat, cold and wind on the surface convinced us we ought to camp inside the cool, quiet cave.

The Murdered Maiden

The next day, the three geologists mapped a large part of the cave while I went around taking photos. They got the worst end of this arrangement because three people stir up a lot more dust than one and all of them returned to Jeddah with bad coughs and burning throats. But by being off on my own, I missed the most exciting find of the whole trip. Deep inside the cave, Abdulrahman found a large rock upon which someone had placed two parts of a human skull. Because the cave had had graffiti-writing visitors in recent times (thanks to that wildly exaggerated newspaper article) we decided to take these pieces with us.

Our survey of the cave showed Hibashi was 689.54 meters long (the tabloid was only 16.31 kilometers off) with extensive burnt guano zones at its east and west ends. The vertical difference was 26 meters and everywhere we found caches of bones on the dusty floor, apparently carried into the cave by hyenas or wolves, which had left coprolites everywhere. Besides bones, we also came across gazelle horns, hedgehog parts and porcupine quills.

At last, we finished our work and broke camp. Carrying our tons of gear up the long slope to the surface was not exactly fun, but the cave had given us shelter and warmth, a fact we were reminded of the moment we were blasted by the cold wind whistling across the stark stretches of Harrat Buqum. Upon our arrival home, we showed the skull to volcanologist John Roobol. “Probably some poor girl who was raped and killed,” he commented. Then we sent pictures of it to various knowledgeable people by email. “It is a human skull,” they assured us, “and the teeth indicate it was a young woman 12 to 18 years old…and didn’t you notice that the brainpan has been sliced off?” So it seems Roobol was right and this skull tells us a story of foul play. Carbon dating later told us that the unfortunate owner of the skull had died 425±30 years ago. We found neither poisonous fumes nor grass nor water in Hibashi Cave, but we did find enough other things to start a few legends of our own.

The Forti Connection

Not long after mapping Hibashi Cave, we were visited by Paolo Forti whom I had asked to come to Arabia to evaluate certain limestone caves for their tourism potential. Knowing that Professor Forti is co-author of Cave Minerals of the World, we naturally loaded him down with samples of formations, sediments, etc. from all the caves we had recently visited.

On his return to Italy, Paolo submitted our samples for analysis by stereoscopic microscope, powder diffractometer, Gandolfi camera and electron scanning microscope.

Several months later came the results. To Paolo’s surprise, the samples contained not only the expected minerals, such as calcite and gypsum, but a great variety of other minerals rarely found in caves, including glauberite and palygorskite. Most surprising of all were the 14 minerals found in samples from Hibashi Cave.

The list of Hibashi minerals includes nearly unpronounceable aphthitalite, a rare, natural soluble sulfate discovered in 1835 at Mt. Vesuvius and whitlockite, a rare phosphate mineral which has been found in Martian meteorites and in human kidney stones and which takes the form of polished red pearls in some caves.

Even more curious is arcanite. This mineral was first identified in 1845 in a pine railroad tie in the Santa Ana tin mine of Orange County, California. The Medieval Latin alchemical name for Arcanite is Arcanum duplicatum, which means “double secret,” perhaps suggesting that the mineral can only be found in hidden places. This unusual name is no doubt responsible for fictional “uses” of arcanite elaborated in fantasy novels, where arcanite is described as the best possible material for making magic swords, chain mail, etc. Readers of such stories might be surprised to find that the most likely origin of arcanite is bat urine.

Previously, arcanite had only been identified in five caves around the world, all of them in Africa. Paolo’s team, however, found it in four different samples taken from Hibashi Cave. It was found not only in dry bat guano, but also in the black plastic-like coating apparently deposited on the ceiling of the cave during the guano fire. It is also found in the tan-colored, organic “stalactites” up to four centimeters long, which appear to have grown in places where bats made it a habit to urinate.

Apparently the guano fire melted these “stickytites” as we called them and the baking process produced even rarer minerals such as pyrocoproite and pyrophosphate.

While Paolo Forti was identifying these strange minerals, along came another researcher interested in Hibashi. “I understand you have found a bed of loess inside a cave; how deep is it and how old is it?” asked Peter Vincent of Lancaster University, who just happened to be involved in a project studying Saudi Arabia’s silts. We showed him a sample of the powder on the cave floor and he found it consisted of quartz, feldspar and kaolin with a mean particle size of about 10 microns. Vincent and his team found this very interesting and we set up a joint expedition to learn more about the cave’s powdery floor.

One day at the end of August, we returned to Hibashi Cave and made our way down the entrance slope, Once again the cave gave us relief from the weather on the surface, which, for a change was sizzling hot instead of ice cold. We measured the depth of the loess by driving an iron rod through it down to the original floor and got a maximum depth of 1.5 meters. That was easy, but next came the hard part. We wanted to get a sample of the stuff at the very bottom of the loess layer, which we were going to put into a light-tight container for age-dating by Optically Stimulated Luminescence (OSL) which basically tells you how many years your sample has been lying in the dark.

To get down to the original floor, of course, we had to dig a hole. If you’ve ever tried digging a deep hole in dry sand and discovered how frequently everything collapses, you can appreciate the problem, but believe me a five-foot thick layer of dust is much worse! Even with the help of a pressurized water sprayer, it was a miserable experience, with everyone involved enveloped in clouds of choking dust, but we got our samples and eventually learned that the oldest loess had last seen the light of day 5.8±0.5 thousand years ago.

When photos of this adventure reached scientist Penny Boston, it immediately gave her second thoughts about the Arizona lava tube they had been using as a model for the underground environment microrobots might find on Mars. Since the surface of the Red Planet is covered in fine dust, she reasoned that microbots in a Martian lava tube would probably be plunged into something much like the thick layer of loess on the floor of a previously unknown lava tube in Saudi Arabia called Ghar Al Hibashi.

Dust of Ages. Hibashi Cave has 690 meters of passages, all of them covered by a layer of fine dust (loess) at least one meter thick, deposited around 5000 years ago.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

THE LOST CITY OF SHUWAYMIS

In Saudi Arabia, you often end up with a great caving story long before you ever step inside the cave. Just getting there can be an unforgettable adventure. My best story of What Happened on the Way to the Cave may be the tale of the Lost City of Shuwaymis.

It was the first day of Ramadan, the month of fasting. My wife Susy and I were traveling with John Semple and Peter Harrigan, two friends who had previously been shown the entrances of two caves not far from Shuwaymis, a town located about 200 kilometers NE of Medina.

We drove north from our home in Jeddah, along a typical Saudi highway with four lanes and no potholes. When we reached the small town of Al Hayit, we rolled off the asphalt onto a wide track covered with powdery dust. “This track goes straight to Shuwaymis. We can’t miss it,” said our companions. “We should get there just in time for Iftar.”

Now, Iftar, is the meal that breaks the Ramadan fast (which is very strict and allows no food, drink or even swallowing saliva all day long) and it begins exactly at sunset, which is announced by a cannon shot in many cities.

Well, we heard no cannons and enjoyed no Iftar meal because, as the sun slowly dipped below the horizon, our wide track had utterly vanished and we found ourselves in a lovely but lonely plain dotted with acacia trees and surrounded by low mountains.

“It seems like we missed it after all,” announced our friends, who then mentioned that neither of them had bothered to take the GPS coordinates for Shuwaymis because it had been so easy to find, the first time they'd gone there.

So, Peter figured out the coordinates from the topo map, put them into the GPS and we set out to find Shuwaymis in the dark, although I would have preferred to camp right there in that beautiful spot and do our hunting in the daylight.

Unfortunately, bad luck continued to plague us because when we reached the spot which coincided with the location of Shuwaymis on the map, there were no bright lights anywhere to be seen, only utter darkness shrouding what looked like the remains of a ghost town. But we could see a dim glow in the far distance and we assumed that was Shuwaymis.

Off we drove through billowing clouds of choking dust until we finally came upon a few buildings and several human beings. We asked if this was Shuwaymis.

“Shuwaymis?” It’s twenty kilometers from here, thataway. Just follow the wide track – you can’t miss it.”

Ah, but we could miss it and we did, once again finding ourselves on an ever narrowing track, winding through sharp-edged basalt rocks and growing fainter by the moment. “Let me try to recalculate the coordinates from the map again,” suggested Peter.

An hour later we were back at the ghost town.

“What else can go wrong on this trip?” shouted John and Peter. Now, I believe this question was meant to be rhetorical, but the answer came literally with a bang as one of our tires exploded.

Next we discovered that the ruts underneath us were so deep that there was no way to set up the jack without wriggling into the space between the bottom of the car and the sharp rocks and choking dust. It was the sort of place even a caver would hesitate to crawl into and, once I had squeezed underneath, I was hardly overjoyed to discover that our official Toyota jack required the strength of Hercules to crank. Well, we took turns grunting, sweating and cursing until we were at last able to raise the car and change that poor, destroyed tire. It was approaching midnight when we finally limped to the least stony spot we could find in the neighborhood and tried to get some sleep.

As for the sumptuous Iftar meal we had dreamed of, we were forced to make do with a miserable bag of potato chips. “Things can’t get any worse,” we said before going to bed. “Tomorrow we’ll be fine.”

In fact, we rose with new enthusiasm and started the new day with a truly luxurious breakfast which even included pancakes, whose batter Susy had prepared in advance at home.

Now that it was light, we could see a town not far away and we assumed it must be Shuwaymis, but, once we got there, we weren’t greatly surprised to find that it wasn’t. “Well, where is it?” we asked the two Bangladeshi mechanics who were busy patching the huge rip in our tire.

“Shuwaymis? It’s about twenty kilometers from here. Just follow those power lines, you can’t…” Well, we didn’t bother waiting to hear the rest of the sentence and, of course, the power lines soon went off in one direction while the track went in another.

But at this point, our luck finally changed. We had flagged down an old man with a long white beard, who had told us we were still twenty kilometers from Shuwaymis (No big surprise at this point) and who was giving us directions, when Peter and John happened to mention they were friends of the Headmaster of Shuwaymis.

The old man did a double take, his eyes lit up and he reached out to shake our hands, as if we were meeting for the first time. “Hayakallah!” he said, which is a warm greeting that Bedouin use amongst themselves. We had obviously moved up to a much higher category in his estimation and the greeting ceremony was being repeated in a proper Bedu manner.

“I will take you to Shuwaymis!” shouted the man as he jumped into his truck, even though he had been headed in the opposite direction.

At last, we broke the 20-km barrier and arrived within sight of the Shuwaymis water tower, where the old man bid us Ma’salaamah (good-bye). On arrival at the Headmaster’s house, we were greeted by his son Khalid who told us his father was out in the hills and was worried that we hadn’t shown up the night before. “I will take you there,” exclaimed Khalid, and off we went.

At last we came to a wind-sculpted sandstone jebel (hill) where we finally met Headmaster Mamdouh Al-Rashid, who, from that moment on, took care of us as if we were his own children. Of course we told him all about the frustrating attempts to locate Shuwaymis.

“Ah, but Shuwaymis is in the wrong place on all the maps,” explained the Headmaster. “You see, we moved the town to a new location a number of years ago. The place your GPS kept leading you to is the old, abandoned site of our town.” At last, the mystery of the inescapable ghost town had been resolved.

And at last we got to enjoy a Ramadan Iftar, which Headmaster Mamdouh, realizing how tired we were, arranged to take place right in front of the high sandstone outcrop where we would camp for several nights. Mamdouh explained that those cliffs were famous for rock art but it was only until the next morning that we could take a good look at it.

We were astounded at what we saw: ostriches, domesticated cows, hunters with bows, even a lion. We learned that the hundreds of petroglyphs in these hills had been drawn in Neolithic times and they painted a picture of a lush, African-like environment utterly unlike the harsh desert conditions of today.

After we had taken lots of pictures in the good, early-morning light, Mamdouh said “Today I’m going to take you out to a dahl,” The five of us piled into the Mamdouh’s car along with his young son, because it was taken for granted our poor-quality tires would never survive the trip!

We drove for hours, circling around a mountain, over 1600 meters high, until we were well inside of Harrat Khaybar, where Saudi Arabia's most picturesque volcanoes are located.

Soon we arrived at the entrance to Dahl Rumahah, which you would never find if you weren’t looking for it. But what you do see on the surface is a long, low, curving wall built of rocks.

“This wall channels runoff rainwater into the dahl,” explained our guide. “Once upon a time this cave was kept secret and its entrance hidden because it was a valuable source of water, a reservoir actually.”

Mamdouh was amazed we planned to go inside with our dinky little headlamps and flashlights. “Now, this is the kind of light you need for a cave,” he announced, holding up a gas lantern, unconcerned about what would be the result if the lamp ever received a good knock.

As soon as we went inside, through a narrow, one-meter-high entrance hole, we assured the Headmaster that his dahl is indeed a lava tube (a point that had been disputed). The ceiling had the classic arch and a few small levees here and there and, of course, the cave was in basalt. The tube meandered in several directions and had a couple of side passages.

This cave, known as Dahl Rumahah, was generally about two meters high and varied in width from 1.5 to seven meters at the most. In places, the ceiling and walls were draped with impressive flowstone due to calcium and carbonate-rich water leaking through cracks in the ceiling.

Rumahah has areas filled with countless thousands of bones and coprolites. Among these we found a porcupine quill and a small wooden hand tool. Once again, no attempt has been made to dig into the sediment floor, whose depth we didn’t even try to determine. We also found termite tunnels on one part of the ceiling. These may go back thousands of years to when there was a different climate and vegetation on the surface.

Another curiosity of the cave is the high humidity at the far end, which results in a “Milky Way” coating the ceiling. It looks like sparkling, silver or white paint from a distance, but is actually formed by tiny droplets of water, suspended over what we think is a coating of cave slime. This is the first lava tube we have found in Saudi Arabia where you can see water dripping from both basalt and calcite stalactites and one of the few places in Arabia where you can actually enjoy a belly crawl in the mud.

The next day we headed for home. Well, not quite. “We can’t leave here without saying goodbye to the Emir (the local representative of the Saud family) said Mahmoud and off we went for several hours of coffee, tea and incense in a huge tent big enough to hold a couple hundred people. When we had finally said goodbye to the Emir, we went not home, but straight to Mamduah’s place for yet more tea drinking and such.

Finally, as sunset approached, we drove off the highway onto a sandy plain, looking for a camp site.

“This is a bad place,” said Obaidullah, one of the drivers. “Many many snakes here.” Much discussion then ensued with considerable shouting and gesticulating. Then everyone returned to his car and I thought we would drive to some spot they had agreed upon. Instead, each car took off in a different direction at high speed. Obaidullah raced to the foot of a distant, red sandstone escarpment as if getting there first would establish his preferred spot as our campsite. In fact, the soft, ruby-red rock, eroded by eons of wind, rain and hot sun, was beautifully sculpted and no one could resist getting out of the cars and going for a walk in such an enchanting place. And there’s where we camped.

“So, Obaidullah,” I said, “you chose this spot. That means there won’t be any snakes here, right?”

“Only a few,” he replied with typical Bedu reserve.

The Natural Bridge of Dahl Rumahah. On our first visit to this cave, we were guided by the headmaster of Shuwaymis, Mamdouh Al-Rashid (armed for our protection) and his son Ahmed.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

ACROSS THE GREAT NAFUD

April, 2007. I am in Jeddah, once again working for the Saudi Geological Survey and eager to be back in a desert cave after a two-and-a-half-year absence. My first field trip will be to a limestone area in the far north of Saudi Arabia. “I missed you on my last trip to Al Greya,” says Mahmoud. “I can’t find anyone else here willing to go with me into tight passages that no sane person would crawl into.”

Well, I took that as a compliment and now here we are, heading north from steamy Jeddah in two Land Cruisers piled high with camping and caving gear. “We’ve found a new route to the far north,” says Mahmoud, “which you will love. We are going to drive straight across the Nafud Desert.”

Anyone who has seen the film Lawrence of Arabia ten times, as I have, will remember that the Nafud is the scorching hot, pitiless desert where Lawrence and his Bedouin friends nearly died trying to sneak up on the Turks in Aqaba from a totally unexpected direction. Remembering Aqaba, I pull out my map of Arabia and notice that Al Greya, where the caves are, is as far north as Petra, in Jordan, where I remember shivering in an unheated hotel room. Maybe I should have brought much warmer clothes, but now it’s too late.

Four hours north of Jeddah, we are hit by our first sandstorm. The world turns yellow. Only the air conditioning saves us from choking on the fine dust swirling around our car. Visibility is reduced with each kilometer we drive until we are forced to a crawl. Can’t see more than two meters ahead and suddenly it begins to rain. Water plus fine sand and dirt equals mud. One side of the car is dripping with it when we finally emerge from the sandstorm.

The New Nafud

After driving in a straight line through the town of Hail, we take a brand-new paved road heading straight into the Nafud. Unfortunately, it is now pitch dark and all I can see is inky blackness on both sides of the highway. Finally, we stop to camp, but with only soft sand surrounding us, we are forced to spend the night next to a microwave tower. Instead of enjoying the sounds of the desert which we can’t see, what we get is the roar of a generator under the tower. Thus, I am forced to use earplugs in the Nafud Desert!

Next day, we awake to find out that we are in the middle of a great sea of sand. I should only have an eye for the beautiful dunes, but the truth is I am fascinated by the highway we are on. Only one side of it is finished, so we can see the techniques being used to build the other two lanes. In some places we can see up to twenty bulldozers literally resculpting the dunescape, filling huge valleys with sand and leveling some high places. Mahmoud points out that most of the construction is being done with materials found locally. No, I don’t mean sand. These guys are actually digging down beneath the sand and extracting the dirt and gravel they need for their work. “And when they want water,” says Mahmoud, “they just sink a well.”

Of course they are building a road similar to the one crossing the Rub’ Al Khali. They create a sort of “artificial dune” with just the right amount of curvature and then they put a road on top of it. On this curved surface, the sand just blows off instead of accumulating, so you don’t get the “buried highways” which plagued the first road builders in this country.

Monday, April 9, 2007. We arrive in Sakaka at 10:30 AM and meet Awad Al Falleh, Majed Al Auda and Hytham Al Auda. Each of their trucks has the logo “FriendsofDesert.Com” on the sides, with color posters of Mahmoud (lifted from my website) admiring stalactites in a cave. We joke about “royalties” as the team from Sakaka shows us how they have adapted their vehicles for the desert. On one side they have two spigots: one gives you soap and the other water (from a built-in, 60-liter tank). They are not really an organization, explains Mahmoud, but three friends who spend a great deal of their time in the desert and are fully committed to preserving its beauty. They hope to learn as much as possible about cave exploration and conservation during this trip.

We load up with food and are soon off road, roaring through hills covered with sand and dotted with black rocks. Half an hour later we come to the first limestone outcrops. We are no longer in the volcanic Arabian Shield but have entered the western end of limestone beds which stretch all the way to Ma’aqala, where Saudi Arabian speleology was born in the 1980s when we first crawled into Dahl Sultan. An hour later we come upon a pickup in a very lonely spot. A man next to it waves his arms wildly and comes running. “You must not leave here without helping me!” he shouts, trembling and crying. He tells us his car broke down yesterday and his brother set out walking for help at eight this morning. We give him our Thuraya satellite phone to call his relatives and he learns that his brother is okay and help is on the way.

Caravaning like this, you must constantly keep an eye on the car ahead of you. We only slip up once and suddenly have no clue where to go. We follow our noses and end up finding the best-looking prickly rock (karst) I’ve ever seen in Arabia. It’s dolomitic limestone, very hard. I take the waypoint and soon we reconnect with the others. A little later, we stop for a rest and find we’re surrounded by pieces of bizarrely shaped, highly polished, curiously colored chert. As an incurable chert collector, I’m impressed and can’t resist taking some along.

A little later we come to green meadows guarded by ferocious sheep dogs. Mahmoud says some kind of gypsies (Salub, or People of the Cross) live here. Could they be remnants of the Christian communities that lived in these parts, long, long ago?

Now we are in Bowaitat, which means “The Houses.” All around us are the remains of homes built of flat slabs of limestone. Some are round with domed roofs, built igloo style. Awad tells us this area was lived in 5,000 years ago, but the houses were rebuilt periodically. They apparently didn’t use any sort of mortar or packing to keep out the wind. A picturesque tower we saw here five years ago now sports bright red graffiti. A lot more friends of the desert are needed in order to protect treasures like these. Just at sunset, we arrive at Abid Cave and set up camp. For the next three nights, this is our home.

In The Bowels of Abid

Next day, Mahmoud and I enter Abid Cave with the three Friends of the Desert. We rig a handline to assist in climbing down the entrance hole which is just a few meters deep. Inside, we find a series of rooms gradually taking us deeper and deeper. To my surprise, we come upon the only cave pearls we’ve ever seen in Arabia, apart from those celebrated and still-growing pearls in UPM Cave. The Abid pearls look very old and seem to be the only calcite formations in this cave.

Eventually we come to a hole about a meter in diameter that puts you into a stoop-walking/crawling passage which immediately makes a U-turn. The walls are now smooth and polished and a strong, cold wind is blowing in our faces. It’s obvious that this passage has received huge quantities of water traveling at high speed. Debris stuck to the ceiling shows that the tube fills completely with water and we speculate how long ago there was so much water in this place. “This debris could be from thousands of years ago,” we say and then discover, to our chagrin, half of a very modern-looking shoe stuck near the top of the tunnel. Later we find two plastic Pepsi bottles and figure they must get some pretty powerful storms in these parts. “I sure hope it isn’t raining out there right now,” I tell Mahmoud, remembering the dark clouds we had seen on the horizon this morning.

At the end of this passage we come to a T where we find water dripping from the ceiling.  Hmm, maybe it is raining up there! The two passages we have come to at this point eventually become too tight for crawling, but wind whistles through them. We decide to head back and that is when Awad whips out a big trash bag, which we help him fill with bottles and cans as we make our way out. I think we cavers could learn a lesson or two from these Sakaka guys. Before leaving the cave, Mahmoud hides candles in one of the rooms (where there is less wind) and we do about twenty takes to get one good picture.

After we go to bed, a strong wind, typical of the “far north,” arises and tests our patience. This especially goes for Mahmoud, who gets “slapped in the face” all night long.  But in all fairness to Eureka, I must mention that he hadn’t put in any stakes.

Stalagmites by the Dozen

The next day Mahmoud is busy studying geology and I go off with a couple Friends of the Desert to try to find a cave. After a while, we come upon a big collapse which looks anything but promising. Nevertheless, I go through the motions, moving along the wall of rubble, looking for a hole – and finding one. It’s only about 75 centimeters in diameter and has no airflow, but I see darkness beyond and I crawl into it. One glance inside and I shout to my companions, “Stalagmites! Big ones!” They have no helmets, but can’t resist joining me to have a quick look around. The cave has huge blocks of breakdown lying on what is essentially a flowstone floor. There are stalagmites all over the place and stalactites, many of which are either broken off or crumbling from weathering. At first I attribute the breakage to vandalism, but later Mahmoud points out that this cave has been subject to various forces, from collapses to flooding. Everything we see is covered with a layer of brown dust.

We go back to tell Mahmoud and the others about our find and soon we are surveying what we now call Dahl Majed. A closer look at the ceiling reveals an area filled with cauliflower and helictites. At one end of the cave, we find a great wall of flowstone stretching from ceiling to floor, with an opening at the bottom. We crawl in and find a second room. It has upper passages with strong airflow, but the ceiling here looks very fragile and ready to collapse. The cave goes, but we are not willing to risk our necks to see where or how far it goes. While we are inside the cave, one of our drivers, Abdulwahed, has collected arrowheads and a cutting tool made of chipped chert, reminding us again that this area was inhabited long ago.

Dahl Majed by Candlelight. The cave is located in Al Greya, just north of the Nafud Desert and is chock full of ancient stalagmites.

We head back to camp, just as a strong wind begins to rise, blowing sand and dust everywhere. Awad and company, however, are ready for any contingency and unroll a collapsible “instant wall” which indeed gives us welcome protection from the cold wind.

Just after sunset, we see three goats walking by in the distance. “They are lost,” says Hytham and he jumps into his truck. “I will catch them and we’ll keep them here until the owner comes along,” he says and off he roars into the darkness. Well, we see neither hide nor hair of him for an hour, just an occasional flash of light in the far distance. “Don’t worry, he has GPS,” say my companions. Finally, even they get a bit worried and drive two cars to the top of nearby hills and flash emergency lights.  At last, Hytham appears. Amazingly, he tells us that he caught the goats and somehow found their owner. After giving the animals to him, he then found his way back to our camp. As we are surrounded by hundreds of very similar low hills and it’s pitch dark, I assume it was the GPS that led him back to us. “GPS? No, the battery is dead,” he says without blinking an eye. What remarkable people.

Next morning, as we break camp, Abdulwahed finds a seven-centimeter-long centipede hiding under his pillow. “That’s nothing,” says Mahmoud, “on a previous trip, Sa’ad, lifted his pillow to discover not one but two scorpions under it, fighting each other to the death.”

A lone white egret watches us from a nearby hill as we collect all our trash and burn it. Friends of the Desert have come to the same conclusion as we about this. Carrying garbage to the nearest gas station, American-style, doesn’t work out here, as it just ends up right back in the desert anyhow.

Our Sakaka friends are disappointed that we don’t have time to accept their invitation to a meal on the way back, so they radio ahead and we find Hytham’s brother waiting for us in Sakaka with gifts of extra-virgin olive oil, honey and deliciously sweet dates, all products of Al Jowf, which is the name of this region in the northwest corner of Saudi Arabia.

We drive into the Nafud and camp out again, this time far from any towers. At 6:00 AM we are awoken by the RAKATAKATAKA BEEP-BEEP-BEEP of bulldozers and trucks just a few hundred meters from us. It’s the new song of the Nafud, welcoming us back to civilization.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

THE LONGEST CAVE: MYSTERIES OF UMM JIRSAN

After crawling around limestone caves in north-western Saudi Arabia (Did I forget to mention our meeting up with sand vipers on several occasions?), it was time for a change and we decided to pay a visit to what I consider the most fascinating lava field in the whole country: Harrat Khaybar, home of Saudi Arabia’s incredibly beautiful Black and White Volcanoes. I must confess we were partly motivated by hopes of finding a lava tube longer than Al Fahda Cave in Jordan which, at that time, held the record for being the longest surveyed lava cave on the Arabian Peninsula (923.5 meters).

The Monster Hole

May 15, 2007. This is Field Trip 62 for the SGS Cave Unit, which now consists of only three members: Mahmoud Al-Shanti, Mohammed Moheisen and me. Politics and infighting have reduced government-sponsored cave exploration to the minimum.

We are heading for a spot only 128 kilometers north of Medina, so we expect to be at the cave before dark. We were given these coordinates by geologist Jamal Shawali who visited the cave by helicopter. “I see the route includes 50 kilometers of bone-jarring, tire-slashing lava rubble,” I comment to Mahmoud. “Yeah,” he says, without hesitation. “It’s a piece of cake. I checked it out on Google Earth.”

As we drive, we program co-ordinates into our GPS’s. After seven hours, we leave the highway and find ourselves in a vast field of lava chunks criss-crossed by tracks running every which way. Our waypoints prove invaluable, though, and moments before sunset, we pull up next to a huge black hole much, much bigger than anything we had expected. It’s a monster of a collapse 89 meters long with passages heading off in opposite directions. We slap one another on the back: “Now, this is a real cave!”

We had hoped to camp inside the cave, but it’s a 13 meter drop to the bottom of the collapse, reachable via a narrow trail that hugs one wall. Besides, our three drivers take one look at the big hole, shake their heads and declare that they are camping on the surface no matter what, even though the wind is howling like crazy. Putting up a tent under these circumstances is a real challenge. During the night the temperature drops to a comfortable 18°C ( 64°F).

Doorway to Umm Jirsan Cave System. A spiny-tailed lizard (dhubb) keeps watch over Saudi Arabia's longest surveyed cave (1481.2 meters). Jirsan is just one of some 40 lava tubes spotted by helicopter in Harrat Khaybar. There are 39 more still awaiting exploration.

The 12 Mohammeds

Next day we breakfast at the edge of our enormous hole. Off in the distance, 20 kilometers to the northeast, we can see the White Volcano, Jebel Bayda, gleaming in the morning sunlight. We are surprised to see swallows darting in and out of the cave. We’re used to rock doves living in Saudi caves but this is the first time we see swallows. Do they use echolocation to find their way around in the dark as do those on the island of Mauritius? We decide to enter the east passage, surveying our way in.

The sheer size of this lava tube is staggering. In one place it’s actually forty meters wide. We’ve never found such a big passage in any of the other lava caves and I decide we must have a picture of this spot. I hand Mohammed a small flash unit and ask him to walk across the entire width of the passage in a straight line, pointing the unit at himself and pressing the manual flash button every few paces. I then open the lens of my camera, which is far away on a tripod, to catch the succession of flashes. In many of the world’s lava tubes, this would be a tricky business for the model, because the original floor of a tube is usually covered with sharp-edged chunks of lava, but this cave is full of dirt which has been building up over its entire life, quite possibly several million years. At this point in the cave I have no idea how many meters deep this artificial floor may be.

Mohammed does a splendid job of going in a straight line despite the darkness, but I have no idea what was really involved in this until, back in the office days later, I show him the picture I took, which shows 12 Mohammeds lined up from one side of the passage to the other. “What an amazing shot!” I proudly say. But Mohammed winces.

“Now that was something I’d rather forget!” he says.

“Why?” I ask.

“Because I had to shoot off that flash right into my eyes twelve times.”

“But why didn’t you just close your eyes each time?”

“Oooooh,” says Mohammed, “I never thought of that.”

Umm Jirsan would be impressive for its size alone, but inside we find all sorts of interesting things.

In many parts of the cave, for example, the floor is broken up into evenly-spaced “domes” of hard mud, about 20 centimeters in diameter and 6 centimeters in height. It’s like walking on tightly packed giant ball bearings. We find wolf and hyena coprolites all over and plenty of bones. The walls are sometimes decorated with dazzling white gypsum or brownish calcite formations, including stalactites. In one place there is a huge block which seems magically suspended from the ceiling. Our survey covers around 50 meters between each station. Sometimes it’s farther than the practical range of our Disto laser measurer. After 948.6 meters, we reach a second entrance and the end of the passage. We have beaten the Jordanian record and now have the longest surveyed lava tube on the Arabian Peninsula!

Up on the surface, it’s beastly hot and the wind is still howling. Mohammed spots our camp in the distance and we walk back over the chunky lava. It was definitely easier to cover the same distance underground even though the cave has several curves in it.

Twelve Mohammeds in the Workshop of Jirsan Cave. A time exposure dramatizes the unusual width (40 meters) of this lava-tube passage, which is thought to be several million years old.

Growling Wolves

After lunch, I go back into the cave to take pictures. When I come out, it’s just getting dark. “Where are Mahmoud and Mohammed?” I ask the drivers, but they say they don’t know. By 8:00, we are all getting worried. Suddenly a light pops up over the edge of the big hole and Mahmoud’s head appears. Both he and Mohammed are panting and look agitated. “Wolves!” they shout.

They scramble up to the surface and as tea is poured, they tell us their story. “We decided to survey the other (western) passage,” says Mahmoud. “After 341 meters, it got really dusty and stuffy and smelly. Rocky (the puppy Mahmoud adopted on our last cave trip) refused to go any further and seemed paralyzed with fear. There were all kinds of bones in this place and then we looked into an opening at the very end of the cave. It was full of wolf droppings, mostly fresh. And that’s when I heard a kind of rumbling sound. I asked Mohammed if that was his stomach rumbling and he said, ‘It’s not me.’ Then we heard something moving around farther inside and suddenly there was this loud growl and a kind of roar and we high-tailed it out of there with me carrying Rocky in my arms. That den at the back is full of wolves!”

Before going to bed, Mahmoud tells me he has a feeling that this cave was used by a lot of people in the past. We decide to spend some time the next day looking for signs of human habitation.

Friday. No wind today. At 4:45 AM I hear our driver Hamadi giving the pre-prayer wake-up call. This must have been exactly the right time to rise back when desert travel was limited to the cool morning hours, but I wonder how modern city folk (who like to stay up until the wee hours of the night) could possibly get their eyes open twenty minutes before sunrise.

After breakfast we all go down into the pit. For the first time, I notice that certain spots on the basalt “stairway” we are using are highly polished. “Mahmoud is right,” I say to myself: an awful lot of people have walked down this path.”

I look for rock art on the pit walls, but I can’t tell whether the animals I see are products of my imagination or vestiges of some primitive artist’s masterpiece.

We go into the East passage. I pound an iron rod into the caves dirt floor, which turns out to be 1.17 meters deep. This sediment has been deposited sometime during the cave’s three-million-year history. We speculate on what might lie buried beneath the floor’s surface. No excavations have ever been done in any of Saudi Arabia’s lava tubes, most of which have floors as thick as this one.

The Workshop

We go around a big bend and approach survey station 5, which is 188 meters inside the cave. It is almost totally dark except for a faint glow from the entrance. The hard, smooth mounds cover the floor of the passage, which is eighteen meters wide. Mahmoud sits down on a flat-topped rock about 25 centimeters high and says, “John, come look at these.” He shows me two “sticks” of basalt which were lying at the base of the rock he’s sitting on. At first, these look like nothing else but fragments of rock to me, but I shine my light on the ground and find another and another and another, all about the same length and thickness. After we’ve found eight of these, I’m sure they can’t be “just rocks.” On close examination, we see each one has a convex and a concave side and in every case, one end of the “stick” is pointed. When held in your fist, your fingers fall into the concave groove. We look around a little more and find half-moon shaped pieces that fit nicely into your hand and have a very thin edge. These seem to be scraping tools while the others might be for gouging. Hundreds of chips of basalt are scattered all over the ground, covered by a thin layer of mud. Only a few steps away we find two more flat-topped rocks convenient for sitting upon and each is surrounded by objects of the same shapes we have been looking at. “This is just like the obsidian workshops I saw in Mexico,” I tell Mahmoud. “All the pieces we are looking at are the rejects. The good stuff was carried out of the cave.”

The Wolf Passage. The large entrance to this section of Umm Jirsan Cave is home to swifts, while at the other end of the passage, we found wolves and 4,000-year-old skulls.

We walk back to the entrance and find that the drivers have lowered their tea-making equipment straight down into the entrance by rope. After tea, we three cavers – plus Rocky the cave dog – head into the Wolf Passage which I haven’t seen yet. The entrance to this side of the cave is spectacularly big. On top of the breakdown just inside the entrance we find a baby crow with a broken wing. Mahmoud immediately adopts the crow, as he did Rocky. This west passage has a flat floor with no mysterious mounds. It also has lava levees which the other passage doesn’t. At a certain point, we come upon lots of bones which look very old and a pile of feathers which look very recent. “Those feathers weren’t here yesterday,” says Mahmoud. It’s interesting that the predator brought the bird this far into the cave, where there’s no light at all. We go a little further and find a huge Ibex horn. At this point, Rocky the dog lies down on the floor and refuses to walk. A second later, Mahmoud spots two red eyes watching us from deeper inside the cave. We decide it’s time to leave. Mahmoud has his arms full carrying Rocky in one and the crow in the other. It, whatever it is, does not follow us.

Near dusk, the swallows return, swooping through the air like bats. Are they catching insects? We haven’t noticed any flying insects around here at all.

Night falls. Along the edge of the pit we see flickers of fast-moving shapes. At first we assume it’s the swallows but we find they are large bats, well, larger than Asellia tridens, which we usually see. The bats fly fast, round and round along the walls in a wave-like pattern, “cresting” barely one meter above the lip.

Next morning, we pack up to the shouting and banter of the drivers. Naturally the wind is howling like crazy, making it just as hard to take down my tent as it was to put it up. Everyone has cooperated to collect our trash for burning, but when I go off to answer nature’s call, a long walk is required, I see that the black lava is now dotted with white spots as far as the eye can see: a sea of Kleenexes.

After our return to Jeddah, we email pictures of the basalt fragments we found to everyone we can think of. Replies come in:

“Stone age tools? They’re fakes.”

“Stone age tools? They’re geofacts not artifacts.”

“Stone age tools? Yes, that’s what they are and they’re at least 600,000 years old.”

Return to Umm Jirsan

Two weeks later we’re on our way back to finish mapping the entire system, which includes three sections of lava tube and three collapses. This time the only cavers are Mahmoud and I with our driver-cooks Sa’ad, Obaidallah and Hamadi all of whom have acquired considerable speleological skills over the years.

During the drive, we plot the location of our cave on the geological map of Harrat Khaybar and discover that we can actually see the string of collapses we have been exploring. Our cave is in one of 40 Whaleback Flows, which are slightly elevated areas above lava tubes, always punctuated with a number of big holes where the ceiling has fallen in. What’s exciting is that our survey of the cave confirms that there can be intact lava tubes between one hole and another. Since some of the Whaleback Flows are up to 17 kilometers long, it looks like there may be enough long lava tubes in Harrat Khaybar to satisfy an army of cave explorers.

Starvation

After a long drive from Jeddah, we reach Umm Jirsan at sunset. Even though it’s hot, we build a fire and sit around it drinking the traditional coffee and tea. Somehow, the conversation comes around to how tough life used to be “in the bad old days.” Sa’ad then launches into another of his stories, telling us how his uncle was once obliged to roast and eat his camel-skin shoes for lack of any other food. I then tell them about Charlie Chaplin boiling and eating his shoes in The Gold Rush.

“Actually, that is nothing,” says Sa’ad, with a straight face. “Many years ago, two of my cousins and I were starving. As one of these cousins was rather chubby, we decided we had no other choice but to eat him. So we sent him off to gather firewood, but he had no idea what we were planning to do with it. As our cousin was returning, we suddenly heard the braying of a donkey. ‘Allah has spared you!’ we shouted and we ran off to catch the donkey, which we then killed and roasted. While we were eating, our chubby cousin asked us why we had said, ‘Allah has spared you’ when we heard the donkey bray. “O cousin,’ we told him, ‘if it weren’t for that donkey, at this very moment we would be eating you!”

It’s hot and stuffy inside the tent, even with the door completely open. Only at 4 AM do I need to slip under a light blanket. At 5, the drivers are up and shouting at one another. Their teasing goes on from sunrise to sunset and beyond.

Before nine we are in the East Passage of the cave, examining the area where we found the basalt pieces shaped like hand axes and blades. We sketch the area, assign letters to different sectors and take photos. We look around for some item that shows clear signs of having been worked, but only find more of the same: pieces of basalt that fit nicely in the hand and are pointed at one end. Assuming that the archeologists we have consulted are right and none of these fragments have been chipped or worked in any way, the fact remains that only in this part of the cave do we find a concentration of tool-shaped fragments. It could be that ancient people scoured the cave for basalt fragments useful for gouging and scraping, sorted them out the spot we call The Workshop and then left the cave with the best pieces. Investigation of more lava tubes in Harrat Khaybar might clarify this business. Strings of collapses shown on the geological map indicate there should be caves ten times longer than Jirsan.

We decide we’ve had enough of amateur archeology and pull out the tape recorder. We walk through the cave and Mahmoud gives a geological description of everything we see, which will later accompany our map of Umm Jirsan in a report. This technique allows us to focus our attention entirely on the features of the cave and I spot some things I completely missed when we were surveying, for example, lava levees on both sides of the far end of the passage and flat wasps’ nests made of mud all over the walls at the other entrance. We also notice hundreds of fox tracks and the curvy lines left by a couple of snakes.

Fortunately, we run into only a few wasps and no snakes, so we survey our way for 56 meters across a collapse dominated by a Buzzing Tree. I assume it is bees doing the buzzing and keep my distance, but Mahmoud discovers they are flies.

This brings us to the third covered section of this lava tube: a cave only 28 meters long with a man-made stone wall in pretty good condition stretching completely across it. Blast furnace temperatures welcome us when we get out of the cave, but we decide to walk back to camp over the surface in order to have a look at the places where water leaks down into the lava tube. We are delighted that our survey has extended the length of the cave system to 1481.2 meters. As soon as we arrive at our camp, of course, we go straight back into the cave and its pleasant environment of 21°C (70°F) and 55% humidity and our drivers waiting for us with cool drinks and what else? Chicken kabsa.

A 4,000-Year-Old Skull

After lunch we all go over to the Wolf Passage. Mahmoud and the drivers go all the way to the far end of the cave and bring back a human skull, fragments of two even older looking skulls, a thick bone which would seem to be from some large animal and a springy curved stick made of very hard wood. I take pictures of the spectacular Wolf Passage entrance and find a small swift’s nest on the floor. Woven into it are many strands of green plastic that look like they’ve been unraveled from a feed sack or tarp. So, in a cave deep inside a remote lava field, swifts are now building synthetic nests!

Later we sent the skulls and bones off to a lab. Surprisingly, the more intact skull is a mere 150 years old while the oldest skull cap is age dated at around 4040 years old. The animal bone turns out to be around 2285 years old and is from some kind of bovine (not from a camel). The mystery is why bones from such different periods are all lying together on the surface…and what might we find buried one meter deeper?

The skull found in Umm Jirsan

At 7:00 PM we exit the collapse and collapse. There’s a slight breeze and it feels quite pleasant as we sit around the fire under the slightly fuller moon. Since we’ve been on the move all day long, we’re all hungry and Hamadi decides to make his famous barbecue chicken. It’s so good that we all decide Hamadi should open a restaurant. “OK,” says Hamadi, “I will open a restaurant with Abu Adel…and Sa’ad will be the dishwasher.” That leads us to the subject of how each person has some special talent. “All except Sa’ad” says Hamadi, joking. These two guys have been pulling each other’s leg for all the years I’ve known them.

I intervene: “No, no. Sa’ad has a special talent too,” I state, obviously with Mahmoud’s help as translator.

“What could that be?” they ask.

“Why he’s the world’s greatest story teller,” I say, reminding them of how he pulled the wool over my eyes exactly one month earlier when we found a wide mud flat in the far north and he convinced me he used to play football there with the Beni Hallal, a legendary tribe that hasn’t been seen for a thousand years.

We leave Umm Jirsan Cave System convinced that Saudi Arabia’s Harrat Khaybar is, indeed, the most promising site for cave exploration in the Middle East and perhaps one of the most important in the world.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

SAUDI ARABIA: A CAVING FRONTIER

For centuries people used to make pilgrimages to Jeddah (which, they say, means “grandmother”) to visit “the tomb of Eve.” The famed explorer Sir Richard Burton went to take a look at it and concluded, from the distance between the head and foot stones (200 paces), that the mother of mankind must truly have been a giant among women.

There are, of course, also stories about the resting place of Adam, but personally, if I were going to hunt for his bones, I think I’d start looking in the lava caves of Saudi Arabia, most of which are located not terribly far from Jeddah.

Although I wouldn’t bet on discovering Adam’s tomb, I am quite sure that in these caves archaeologists will find the bones of some of our earliest relatives, those brave souls who left Africa some 75,000 years ago, crossed the Red Sea at the Bab Al-Mandab and made their way north up the Arabian Peninsula. These travelers would have discovered, as we did, that lava tubes are marvelous shelters from the burning heat of summer and the icy winds of winter and they could not have failed to notice that many of them are natural catchments for rainwater. Succeeding generations discovered the same truths, as evidenced by the stone walls we found inside even the most remote lava caves.

If we found 4,000-year-old skulls lying on the surface of a sediment floor at least a meter deep, what will archaeologists find when they dig deeper? Apart from that, the great spice routes and pilgrimage trails wind their way through several lava fields and we have historical proof that some of the most ancient peoples of Arabia lived at the edge of lava fields. The town of Khaybar, for example, is located at the western end of the lava field of the same name and has been around for a very long time, since the history books tell us it was captured by Babylonia in the year 552 BC. What better place to hide scrolls and valuable objects than the dark recesses of a lava cave?

I estimate that there are at least 400 kilometers of cave passages in the older flows of Harrat Khaybar alone. Only two kilometers of these have been studied by speleologists and not one inch of a Saudi lava tube has ever been looked at by an archaeologist.

Thanks to Google Earth, the gigantic kites (stone animal traps) of Harrat Khaybar are being studied with great interest by scientists all over the world who have never set foot on the Arabian Peninsula.

Saudi Arabia has around 89,000 square kilometers of lava fields awaiting exploration. As for the Kingdom’s vast limestone deposits, the 207 caves we have registered so far are just a drop in the bucket.

What we did learn is that desert caves, with their low humidity and cool temperatures, are perfect for preserving bones, bodies and objects from the past. As for the minerals, microbes, flora and fauna which have developed inside these isolated habitats during their long history, we’ve seen just enough to suggest that wonderful things are lying dormant below the surface, just waiting to be discovered.

John and Susy Pint relaxing at their camp site after a long day of caving beneath the desert.

John Pint fell in love with caves as a Peace Corps volunteer in Jamaica. He later taught English all around the world and somehow managed to find caves everywhere that he went. After major discoveries in Arabia, he was hired by the Saudi Geological Survey to explore and document the country's caves. He wrote Desert Caves of Saudi Arabia in 2003 and today makes his home in Mexico where, with his wife Susana, he wrote Outdoors in Western Mexico. Stories of his adventures in both countries can be found at www.saudicaves.com.

For more fine original works of fiction or non-fiction in either digital or print format you are invited to visit the Selwa Digital web site at www.SelwaDigital.com

Following are excerpts from two of our e-books that are available at your favorite retailer.

EXCERPT

OUT IN THE BLUE: LETTERS FROM ARABIA 1937-1940

Thomas C. Barger

The camp at Ma’aqala

Chapter Eleven

January 13, 1939, Dhahran

Day before yesterday, we heard that a ship coming from San Francisco with much of our building materials aboard was lost at sea. Everything will have to be re-ordered and the construction timetable is once again delayed by six months. There have been plenty of incidents like this and they all contribute to the bedlam around this place. For instance, the number of cars has tripled since last summer, but last October when the tools and spare parts needed to maintain this fleet were to arrive, they couldn't be found and had to be reordered. Until they arrive the garage is working day and night trying to keep the cars in the field.

Someone in San Francisco got the bright idea that since the four-wheel drive Marmon Harrington cars were so good in sand dunes, all of our cars should be Marmon Harringtons even the new sedans for the geological parties. The hitch is that no one is working in sand country this year. The Marmon Harringtons ride very, very hard, and in the rough dikakah country of the north they are always breaking springs. Now there are no more spare springs in stock and the machine shop is making extra spring leaves that will have to do until more arrive.

The number of men has increased several times since the food order for the year was shipped; so we're short on lots of items, such as fruit juices, the very staff of life for geologists in the desert. We never go hungry, as there is always lots to eat, but just now the variety is a bit stunted.

I was in Bahrain last week buying mess outfits for the geological parties. Just before the boat left I was called at the pier and asked to buy a complete outfit for 20 more men, the second seismograph party which was ready to go out except for the lack of forks, spoons, pots and plates. Strangely enough, I managed to get nearly everything I needed. Alice Bush, who went shopping with me, said it was much different than when she and Mike first arrived here five years ago. They had to use wooden forks for four months, until they could get some metal ones from the States.

January 23, 1939, Dhahran

I went back to Bahrain last week to buy cord for the tentmakers, medicine and palm mats for us. The doctor there is young and, hence, very scientific. He says that analgesic balm and Vick's Vapo-Rub are no good, and only offer mere temporary relief. I admit this, but it keeps our patients happy and makes them think they are better; so I bought two dozen of each. Without them I'd hardly be able to practice my quackery in the desert. Think how fine analgesic balm is – a pleasant, but penetrating odor, it stings in cuts and when rubbed vigorously it makes the skin burn. It is obviously a very powerful remedy that is bound to do a man worlds of good. The doctor made up some very evil-tasting cough syrup on the theory that it would discourage excessive demand, but his psychology may be wrong. Such a vile concoction must almost be necessarily beneficial to any man, Arab or American.

Tonight, BBC News said that the Insurgents are within 15 miles of Barcelona. By the time you read this letter the civil war may be over.

The last shipment is nearly all in the storerooms now, so I will be going into the desert in a few days. Drills, chisels, canteens, towels, sheets, coffee pots, drawing-instruments, generators and what have you. First, I must get "Dutch" Schultz off, day after tomorrow I hope, and then I take out for the great blue.

Dutch's partner hasn't arrived yet; he's due in today or tomorrow. He'll have a warm reception; he'll land in the afternoon and be popped out into the desert the next morning. Neither of them speaks any Arabic and their cook can say a very good "Good Morning!” and that's it for his English. I don't envy them. However, we'll be close by, and they can learn with some discomfort, but no danger. Dutch's partner may be used to it, as he is supposed to have had a couple of weeks’ experience in Afghanistan.

Boats are most unsatisfactory carriers. They carry a lot, but when the cargo has been shuffled and dealt there always seems to be something missing. In one of our orders we got tools for 25 cars, but the crate containing the toolboxes was missing. I guess we should be happy to have the tools without the boxes, rather than the other way around.

The commissary ran out of butter for a few days until they could get some over from Bahrain. There always seems to be an item or two to furnish the fellows with wisecracks at the expense of the chap in charge of the mess hall.

The other day Khamis and I were dragging the chain from Hinnat to Uwaina and stopped at this well for lunch. As we ate lunch this fellow strolled up. He was with a caravan coming from Shagra, far in the interior, and going to Jubail for rice, tea, sugar, coffee and the like. Khamis pumped all of the relevant information possible out of him while he was eyeing our back bumper. Finally he asked, "What are you doing with that tail?"

Khamis replied, "Why, we're strangers here. We drag that along so we can find our way back and not get lost following some other track."

The Bedu asked, "Is that right?" "Beyond doubt." answered Khamis.

Then the Bedu said, "You ought to have a guide here in the desert; you might get lost and die."

"Oh, no we'll be all right; we're not going far and we can find our way back."  Khamis said with a lofty air, as if we were superior to the ordinary desert Bedu and had no need for such a useless person as a guide.

In a purely professional way, Max’s principal attribute was his tremendous intellectual honesty, combined with his willingness to stick his neck out by making interpretations and predictions based on whatever geological data was available at the moment. One of his favorite words was “embarrassed” and he was always talking about being “embarrassed”, though I doubt that he was ever fundamentally embarrassed in the professional sense. As new data became available, he was perfectly willing to throw out the old hypotheses and develop new ones. He was not all embarrassed to call a given structure an anticline on the basis of new information, even though he had said that it was a syncline the year before. He never could understand people who obstinately clung to old theories in the face of new facts.

In addition, he possessed a great amount of humility, some of which was possibly designed to encourage his young staff, but most of it because he genuinely sought help and ideas wherever he could find them. He would discuss his ideas with us young geologists as if he were seeking our advice. Part of this was Max just thinking out loud, but nevertheless it gave us a great sense of importance and confidence.

He certainly gave us our head, and most of us responded by working our heads off to justify the confidence. As I remember, the instructions he gave to Ernie Berg and me at the beginning of 1939, when I first became a party chief, were as follows.

“You go out to Ma'aqala.”

I asked, "Where's Ma'aqala?"

Max replied "Oh, it’s out there, 100 or 150 miles west of Jubail. We'll get a guide to find it for you. When I went through there two years ago, I didn't have time to look around. Something's happening there, and you find out what it is."

These were the totality of my instructions for five months of work.

February 7, 1939, Seismograph #2, 110 miles north of Dhahran

My new partner, Ernie Berg, and I left Dhahran last Wednesday morning with the lorry piled high, two pickup trucks and the sedan. We were delayed in Jubail for three hours drinking coffee with various personages and waiting for the soldiers to say good bye. In the pouring rain we made Dutch Schultz and Ken Parsons' camp just in time for dinner.

Next day we went on to Ma'aqala, a place about 200 miles west of Dhahran. We arrived just before sunset, but were lucky to find a fairly good campground, i.e. a flat, sandy place out of the rainwash, on the south side of a hill near firewood. That is something of an order, as sand is scarce in this region. The country is low rolling rock hills, with most of the sand lying in gully beds that become torrents with the least rain. Our site is a good place on the north side of a low wadi that empties into a mud flat about a quarter of a mile to the west. It is now covered with green grass and many sidr, thorny, acacia trees, which make a green grove that is especially striking in Arabia.

Ernie and I are running a two-barometer traverse back from Ma'aqala to tie in with one of Bill Seale's survey stations. We read our barometers together, then I drive ahead for half an hour and stop and read mine. Ernie reads his and comes up and we repeat the performance. In this way the chap behind is able to record any change in the barometric pressure while the chap ahead is traveling, and we can get relatively accurate elevations.

With Ernie Berg, the man who would discover the largest oil field in the world

Ernie seems to be a very good egg; I think we shall get along very well together. We had our radio set up and going the first night we were at Ma'aqala, though we started to unload and make camp only half an hour before sundown. The next day he was under the weather while I puttered about camp. Yesterday I had a terrific cold – the first in quite a while. But today we are both almost in the pink and ready to go.

I just shot a hubarrah near the road since the last stop. Old Mohammad, the guide, sure gets rattled whenever he sees any game. He's of the Qahtan tribe of western Nejd, southwest of Riyadh. I think he is quite new to a car. Every time I put my window up or down he does likewise. Just now I opened my door and put my feet out on the running board as a more comfortable writing position, and he promptly followed suit.

Our new radio is fine. It has a built-in loudspeaker. The receiver is as good as any I've heard in Arabia. We've heard the news all of the past three nights, including discussions of Hitler's speech, F.D.R.'s secret talk to the Senate military affairs committee, and the announcement of the occupation of all Catalonia by the Insurgents.

Right now Mohammad and I are waiting for Ernie to show up with his barometer. Mohammad is somewhat mystified by me stopping within plain sight of the seismo camp, instead of going on in as any normal person would do.

February 13, 1939, Ma’aqala

The weather is making conversation. Night before last the thermometer went down to 26 degrees. About four in the morning, I gave up the struggle and arose from my bed of ice, lit the stove, warmed up and put on my sweater and socks before going back to bed. Ernie held out longer, but he was up before daybreak doing the same. In the morning all of the goatskins of water were frozen solid, as were the cars. Ernie keeps repeating a sentence from a letter his brother wrote him. "I know you are suffering from the terrific heat, but it will be a good experience for you."

About this time you will be looking forward to spring. By the time this reaches you the winds of March will be tossing your black locks about.

I was sorry to hear of Pope Pius' death; not only because of the troubled state of Europe, but because he was a good man and a great pope. The radio announcer started out, "For those few of our listeners who have not been near a radio or a newspaper for the last 12 hours we regret to announce ...”

At present we have two big problems: water for the soldiers, and the King's brother, Mohammad bin Abdul Rahman, who is camped about 20 miles northwest of us. The water comes from dahls, sinkholes in the limestone that vary from a foot to 10 feet in diameter. Unfortunately they are not full of water as reported. The one with the most water is very dirty; it is more thin mud than water. The biggest one requires crawling through 100 yards of winding tunnel and dragging the water out in gurbas. Our eight gurbas won't last more than a couple of weeks hauling water for 11 men.

There are lots of Bedu in the country, mostly from tribes outside of this district, who either do not know or will not tell us which dahls have the water. There must be hundreds of these sinkholes scattered around. At first we were leary about driving into one unawares, but now we've found out where and how to look for them. Khamis is sending us some more information about water-filled dahls through Jerry. Our new guide is good, but he's handicapped by having only a general idea of this region from talking with Bedu, and from his own trips through here with camel caravans going into the interior.

Mohammad bin Abdul Rahman lives out in the desert all winter and goes into Riyadh for the summer. He has the reputation of being very hot headed and according to the cook, "the King does not say no to him." We have steered clear of his camp, though the soldiers took a hawk up to him as a present.

Tonight a carload of his men visited our soldiers and put the bum on me for gasoline. I told them that we only have enough for our work and that I have no orders from the company to give anyone gasoline, then I gave them five gallons. It is something they would love to turn into a habit, as they have lots of cars and most of their gas is brought in by camel.

The country is fairly alive with game to the south and east of here where the royal brother has not been hunting. We've seen hubarrah, kirwan, qattat (about twice the size of a qata), and hajjel, a kind of rock grouse slightly smaller than a prairie chicken. A gazelle came within 400 yards of us when we were measuring a baseline on the gravel plain south of camp, but I had left the rifle home for the first time since we've been out here.

Bismarck, North Dakota, February 14, 1939

See by the paper here that it was 29 degrees below zero last night. The other day one of the Public Welfare Statisticians made a very pointed remark indicating how nice it would be to be in Arabia. Later a more pointed question, "“How would you like to be in Arabia this morning?”

I replied, ”I would like to be in Arabia every morning, Mr. Hempl.” You see I’m more or less the freak of the 15th floor. When all other conversation dies people can reflect on my fate – Did he leave her in the lurch waiting at the altar or didn’t he? All good, clean fun though.

February 26, 1939, Ma’aqala

The mail goes in tomorrow morning and despite all my good intentions I am writing this at the last minute. We took half a day off to write letters to send with the car to Casoc. By the time we had finished our calculations and instrument adjustments, the half-day and most of the evening was gone.

The work has been going more slowly than we had expected, though we are now finished with the worst of it. We've been surveying in a base network for our map. We go around and build rijms, rock cairns, for our stations and make them the points for the base map. We place them on the most prominent points so, that wherever we go in the area, we can see at least two of them and, thus, locate ourselves with precision. In shooting over the rock surfaces, the heat waves are very troublesome, even on cold days. About nine o'clock the horizon begins to shimmy and by lunchtime, all but the closest landmarks are indistinguishable. We take our long shots in the early morning and late afternoon and do the shorter ones at midday.

I have heard nothing of the housing situation of late. The few houses that were ready have been occupied by officials connected with the producing department, sent over from the States. The effect of the Abu Hadriya well is problematical. Shortly they should know if it is going to be an oil well. If it is, they may suspend construction of accommodations for families at Dhahran, to begin construction for further drilling and production at Abu Hadriya. The two can hardly be carried on simultaneously because of the shortage of labor.

If Abu Hadriya is a dry hole, it will have a tremendous adverse effect on the concession as a whole. It would infinitely decrease the chances of finding oil in some other places which we think are good prospects, and the company will take it slowly for awhile, until we can find something else. It's all up in the air, as usual.

A couple of weeks ago when we first arrived, the soldiers bought a couple of sheep from some Bedu who wanted Maria Theresa dollars instead of Saudi Arab riyals. Both coins are worth the same, but the Marie Theresa dollars are bigger than an U.S. silver dollar. The riyal is only the size of our 50-cent piece. First struck in the 1780's by the Austrian Empress, Maria Theresa, they are still coined and exported for use all over the East, here they are called "French money."

One morning last week the Emir wanted to have one of the drivers take him out in a pickup to buy a sheep from a Bedu. So I told him that I had some "French money" and asked if he wanted some. I managed to make out "six or seven" from his reply and gave him seven of the dollars. He didn't give me any riyals in return, but I did not press the point at the time. That night at coffee the soldiers had two new sheep, one of which was pointed out as mine. I admired it duly.

I've had no time for study, but I am learning a lot of Arabic from these new men, as they do not speak the "sahib Arabic" of Khamis and Hussein, but lay it all out in feminine and plural adjectives, feminine verbs and participles galore, until I am half swamped. Khamis and Hussein have been around us so long that they know that we only know a handful of the irregular plurals, and the masculine only of the adjectives and verbs. I just found out last fall that all words ending in “a” are feminine, that the feminine verb sounds like the second person singular and all irregular plurals take the feminine. I had thought that when the soldiers said "El-jemal takuluh" they were saying  "The camels, you eat it", instead of "The camels eat it". It turns out that they were trying to speak simple Arabic for me, ala Max Steineke, whose verbs are all in the second person.

Mohammad bin Khursan, our new guide, is not as good as Khamis, but he is a competent guide and has a great sense of humor. He and all the rest of the soldiers get a big kick out of Ernie's Arabic and take a very active interest in teaching him. Today he wanted to know the English reply when someone held a gun on you and threatened to shoot. He was fascinated when I showed him "Hands up!"

Usually the Arabs sort of bargain. They say, "By my face, my rifle, and my camel"; i.e., I would like to be let off with my life, my rifle, and my camel. Whereupon the one behind the gun decides on how much to allow him.

Mohammad said that in the 1935 war with the Yemen, he saw something very strange. It seems he came on four Yemenites who potted at him. One shot nicked him in the left shoulder, so he killed three of them with his "Mother of Five", repeating rifle, whereupon the fourth held his rifle before him with the muzzle in the ground. In Mohammad's words, "I let him go, because I thought he wanted to surrender. I had not seen that before."

We have fine days and cold nights, several below freezing, but we eat and sleep regularly. As soon as we get this preliminary survey finished, we will take off a day and use it for nothing but sleeping.

Bismarck, North Dakota, March 20, 1939

A major event in my life – a letter from you dated Feb 26th. The news sounded discouraging seems they have us coming and going. No oil, no houses needed, oil and all houses needed for labor, but I shan’t worry nor do you, just love me always and that will be enough. I’m trying hard to grow up and I think I will soon. Funny how you become conscious of adulthood so suddenly. Truly it has just been the last month or so that I’ve realized that it seems like I’m walking into a new world, everything has a different aspect altogether. If only I had you here to talk and talk.

Please write some silly letter or send me something crazy or baby me – just anything it’s so hard to grow up alone. I love you so I can’t think straight.

March 8, 1939, Ma’aqala

Today, I got what should be a dandy movie. It was a bitter day with a cold north wind, but we found a good place for lunch in one of the low grassy places. Mohammad made a fire for his coffee in the shelter of some big green thorn bushes. After we eat, we come and drink coffee with him and talk for a quarter hour or so. Ernie and I have a new lunch time game. One recites a verse or whatever he knows of a poem and the other names it and the author. No holds barred I got him with "Tannenbaum" in German, which I then translated for Mohammad. The second verse goes:

"Oh, maiden, how false is thy pledge

You swore to be true to me in my good fortune

But now that I am poor you leave me."

"Yes, it is the same with us." Mohammad said.

Then as I was in the midst of learning the first four lines of an interminable poem, a rider on a camel came by. To Mohammad's shouts he hobbled his camel well away from the car and came up. He was an old man, wrinkled and ragged and dirty. Mohammad set out his dates and poured him some coffee. He came from the north, very far, and was going over there not far from our lunch site. I took a movie of him and Mohammad eating and drinking as they sat on the green grass with the smoldering fire between them.

Presently, a flock of 200 sheep came into the meadow with two youngsters driving them. One lad was about nine, the other five or six years old. Mohammad asked if they had any milk and the old man replied by telling the oldest boy to bring milk. Off he went to return leading a goat which Mohammad milked on the spot while I took movies of the milking, Mohammad drinking his milk and the two kids and their grandfather wolfing down the box of cookies we gave them. We were invited to have lunch at their "house", and stay for dinner too, but we declined with thanks.

We are very popular. Day before yesterday a Bedu came dashing up on a camel, dismounted and came over with the usual salutations. Usually, they do not say much to us but gossip with Mohammad. After the greetings I told him we did not understand Arabic very well and to go see the soldier over there. But, no, he insisted I was a "correct man" and then put the bum on me for tobacco. Ernie gave him a cigarette that he sat down and smoked in nothing flat. Ernie said that now he knows why the Bedu say they "drink tobacco". As we prepared to go he asked Ernie for another one. I advised Ernie against it; if the news should get around, he wouldn't be able to work at the plane table for the crowd.

As the plane table network of rock cairns or rijms was being developed, I was appalled at Ernie’s carelessness. He was not all perturbed by the cigarette ashes he dropped all over the plane table paper. It was the messiest plane table job I had ever seen. I kept my mouth shut until we were ready to put it to the test and find out in a jiffy where we were by connecting three or four lines that were supposed to cross at the point we were working. I was sure they wouldn’t connect and was ready to read him the riot act. To my astonishment, the intersection of the lines used to determine our position was flawless. A sharp pencil point was about the measure of total deviation from a hundred percent perfection.

Yesterday, I was much flattered. Ernie had the plane table set up on top of a hill, and I was working about a kilometer away pounding on rocks. I could see three Bedu approaching in haste; they were too fast for me, as they arrived before I could finish and get away. After the preliminary salaams they stood around silent until I finished writing my notes; I could see that they were waiting to say something. At last, I finished and said for the second time, "How are you?"

"Very good," they replied, "O'Shaikh, come to coffee with us." It took me back, as I had expected they wanted something such as tobacco or a ride someplace. After profuse thanks, I explained to them that I was very busy. It must have struck them as silly; as I was obviously doing nothing but pounding rocks with a hammer and, at intervals, holding up a pointed stick for another American to look at. They wandered off near Ernie to gossip with Abu Nasir.

When I came up, Ernie and I looked over the results and decided it would be a good thing to go look at the rocks in a dahl we knew to be close by. This particular dahl has a dirty name in Arabic, the Arabs do not have our inhibitions in naming places, and was shown on the map as "Tayib Ism", i.e. “a good name.” A little Arab joke that is particularly funny if the surveyor doesn't know very much Arabic and writes down "Tayib Ism". The British War Office maps have several "Tayib Ism" places on them.

I walked over to where the four of them were sitting in the sand and asked them if they knew where the dahl was, naming it by its correct name. A smile flickered all around, a tribute to them, rather than to my Arabic, as I have a difficult time getting lots of Bedu to understand my accent.

"No," said Abu Nasir," they are not of this dirt. They are from Aflaj," a province south of Riyadh, "and the Wadi." - Wadi Dawasir far to the south on the southwestern corner of the Rub’ al-Khali. So I asked about a couple of towns they knew and then said, "You are from the country of the Wudhaihi." They looked at one another and muttered "ajeeb", wonderful, and were all smiles. The wudhaihi is the Arabian oryx which none of us, including Khamis and the soldiers, have ever seen. In response to their questions, as I swaggered off, I heard Abu Nasir say, "Ah yes, he knows many things. He has not been there but he knows about it."

The other day Mohammad bin Khursan was showing Ernie how he'd approach if he were a robber. He put his ghutra over his face and crouched behind a rock with his rifle. Ernie told him, in his brand-new Arabic, "You're no soldier. You're a wolf in a sheep's skin."

Mohammad thought that was very funny and now he's been three days learning "wolf in sheep's clothing" in English so he can tell Dick Bramkamp that "Sahib Berg is a wolf in sheep's clothing." He has a terrible time with "wolf", the "1" and the "f" together, and also more difficulty with "sheep's clothing"; "p's cl" makes four consonants together. It is theoretically impossible to have more than two consonants together (not separated by a vowel) in Arabic. Besides there are no nasal sounds comparable to the "ng" in "clothing."

Mohammad bin Khursan, the Qahtani guide at Ma’aqala

He is very interested in everything and is forever asking questions. He is very anxious to learn to drive, so I have promised to let him try tomorrow at lunchtime. He wanted to know what kind of clothes the people wore in New York, which we had told him was the biggest city in the world. Then he asked what they would do if he went there with his Arab clothes. "Would they kill me?"

He is intrigued at the absence of divorce amongst certain people in America. "If I took a wife could I ever let her go?” he asked.

"No, Mohammad, not until you or she is dead,"

"Even if she was old and wrinkled and no good?"

"Not even then," I said.

He has had three wives, but has only one at present. I asked him what happened to the old ones. He replied that someone else had married them. So I persisted, "What if no one else took them?"

"But someone would," he answered.

"But if no one did, if they were old and wrinkled?"

"Well," said Mohammad, "then their kin would take them in. God is kind."

He is coming with us to America when we return. We assured him that he could get a wife there, but if he tried to divorce her, the government would catch him and kill him. He says that he will get around this difficulty by bringing her back to Arabia. If she is not satisfactory he will divorce her here.

He cannot quite grasp the idea of farms and farmers; that is, the idea of people not living in a town, and yet living in one place all the time. All agriculture here is, of course, carried on only around the towns, where water is plentiful. He wanted to know about camels in America. When informed that there were few or none and people paid money to see them, he wanted to know if we had grass. On hearing that there was plenty of grass, he said the camels would eat it and we could buy one in Bahrain for 100 rupees, about 37 dollars, to take home to show our fathers. So expect me to walk in, hissing and whirring at a camel on a leash behind me.

That winter there had been a lot of rain, so that the dahls were full of water and we had no problem filling the ghurbas. The meadows, those places that had clay soil in them, were green with new plants. If they had bushes on them they were called raudhas, but if they were grass meadows they were called faidhas. The country was dotted with rainwater pools everywhere. One day Ernie had been off on some errand and was driving alone, when he came up and over a rise to find half a dozen Bedouin women bathing in a large pool. To his utter astonishment, they were all stark naked. When they saw Ernie, they put their hands over their faces and ran away like mad.

March 19, 1939, Ma’aqala

We have to send a car in tomorrow. Our soldier's cook has some sort of abscess on his finger, we have been treating it under instructions from Dhahran, but it hasn't responded well. Today his whole hand is swollen and the doctor has ordered us to send him in.

We have what looks at present like a pretty fair oil prospect. Dick Bramkamp corroborated our results and extended the closure in a way we could not have done without him. We are still working on it, as the mapping is by no means complete; if and then any oil is found, we will share in the glory. The actual discovery, of course, is Max's work, as is everything else here except Dhahran. He seems to have the faculty of picking out significant areas at a glance. Often he sends us out saying, "Well, I'd kind of like to have you map such and such an area. There are some dips, and I saw such and such rocks and maybe you'll find something. Then when you get through there you ought to go up here and maybe you ought to go down there. But you'll know what to do."

So we go out to investigate a place that doesn't look like much, scout around to get our bearings, and finally turn up with a map and nice contours. Then he comes out excited and enthusiastic about "your find". I guess that's why people like to work for him. To see Max with his shirt hanging out, worrying about gurbas, radiator cement, drums of water and cans of beans he looks like a bewildered farmer, but he certainly has the grand touch when it comes to geology and geologists.

Jerry has about the toughest area being worked this year, there are few outcrops and they all look alike; so Max has had to be kind of stubborn to keep him at it, because no one here but Jerry could do it at all.

Tomorrow we are getting the third driver, other than Mohammad Ali, we've had since we've been out here. The first was a wild man who couldn't get along with anyone. On the only trip he made to the Seismograph camp, he netted a hole in the gas tank and a very large hole in a new tire.

The next was a dopey looking guy who had been here two days when the fellows caught him stealing food from the kitchen. Before I could send him in, he wrote a note making indecent suggestions to the houseboy, who spit on him and turned the note over to the Emir. The soldiers cut themselves some springy branches and gave the driver a preliminary beating. He left here yesterday on his way to the Jubail jail. Mohammad Ali says, "A crazy one goes and a crazy one comes. Sahib, it would be better if you had a laborer to help me put cement on the rijms. I would rather do all the driving alone than have such  ‘friends’."

Last week a Bedu came to have coffee with the soldiers and told them of some Dawasir camped nearby who had caught a stray, tame hawk. So the next day, the Emir, Mohammad bin Khursan, and one of the drivers went over to see if it were Shelwah. There were about 20 untamed Dawasari who not only refused to show our men the hawk, but also ordered them away and struck the Emir. There was some pointing of guns until our forces retreated before the superior numbers. The Emir sort of lost face, though he could hardly have resisted under the circumstances. He sent a letter to Jubail that will probably bring some of Bin Jiluwi's men down upon those luckless Dawasiris.

The days roll by quickly when there is so much to do, and not much time to think. Off in the morning immediately after breakfast. At noon Mohammad often entertains us with some story, such as today's, of how he, with 50 men, captured a fort in the Yemen Campaign. Sometimes I think he is a bit careless with numbers. Before the actual capture of the fort he, with 15 of the 50 men, ambushed 500 of the enemy and drove them off in confusion.

After lunch we work some more and try to get back before sundown so Ernie can ink the map in sunlight. After supper we go over the notes, draw the contours and put the geology on the map, run the radio, get the time signal, listen to the news, feed the rabbit and go to bed.

We have a new rabbit now. The first thrived on milk from an eyedropper and grew big and strong – as he needed to be to withstand the Steineke kids; Dick took him in the other day and the same afternoon Bin Khursan brought us another. This one is slightly older and refuses a milk diet. He must be eating the grass in the box, as his ability to kick and squirm does not seem to be diminishing.

April 9, 1939, Ma'aqala, 3:30 AM

As you see by the date and time I have been out carousing again and taking in all of the Ma'aqala night life. Yesterday evening I had planned to write you at leisure and have a letter ready to go with the lorry in the morning. But fate stepped in; Von Hornlein, a gravity-meter surveyor who has been here about a week, didn't get into camp before dinner. We were lolling about, halfway through the meal, when Ernie noticed it getting dark and no Von. So we set out with a couple of soldiers; Ernie on the road and I on a hill with Bin Khursan. When we arrived at our stations it was pitch dark and there was no sign of Von. After an hour of waiting we went in the direction we'd last seen him in the afternoon. In less than a mile we met his soldier and driver who he had sent into camp. The driver had stuck the car about five in the afternoon and they couldn't get it out. Furthermore, they weren't sure where Von was.

Mohammad and I drove until we saw headlights. We headed towards them, but, about a half mile away, I stuck the car in a mudhole. They were Ernie's lights. When our lights quit moving he came over and pulled my sedan out of the mud. We set a compass course and started out, only to have Ernie get stuck this time. I pulled him out, then managed to get my car stuck again a half mile away.

Finally, we got on dry ground and after 10 miles, by the grace of God and the light of his stars, found Von's last station. We backtracked and found him well stuck. There was much slopping and digging of mushy sand before we started home. About a mile before camp, Von's Marmon Harrington bogged down again. There was more digging, swearing, and pushing as clouds came down from the north to blot out the starlight we were driving by. Mohammad bin Khursan found one of our survey stations, from which he could see a light put on a high jabal near camp by our Somali driver. We arrived back in camp about an hour ago.

The Damon Runyon Collection arrived today with the mail from the Jabal. I kiss you for it, Kath. Remember when we sat on your porch and read about Zinser Fritz and Emerald Em?

Yesterday, Walt Hoag, Floyd Oliger and one of the Casoc directors, a Mr. Russell, stopped overnight on the way to Riyadh. Ernie and I took great joy in showing Russell our child that we hope to see decorated with oil derricks in a year or two. Ernie is itching to see some of the boys he came over with, so he can say, "Well now, I told Russ, we all called him 'Russ'," and "Well Russ asked me..."

When Russell first arrived in camp we introduced him to everybody. When he met Bin Khursan, they shook hands and then Mohammad tapped him on the chest and said, "Inta (you are) wolf in sheep's clothing," which provoked a gale of laughter from us, but bewildered Russell. He didn't recognize that Mohammad was talking English to him.

Our oil well, my sole contribution to the discovery of oil in Saudi Arabia, was eventually drilled and resulted in a dry hole. By all rights it was a classic geological formation for an oil reservoir, but then that was why the life of an oil wildcatter is so tough. However, in the next season Ernie was to discover the largest oil field in the world.

April 14, 1939, Ma’aqala

Your letter with the picture arrived, 'tis fine I crave more; why I even liked the dress. I'd like it better if I could see it in person, with you inside of it.

This is going to be another short letter because the kerosene is gone out of the stove, the tent is getting chilly and I still have to write a letter to Max.

The last few days have been filled up, as usual. Dick Bramkamp came out and we made a 150 mile trip across the Dahna, the big strip of sand lying west of us, to a place called Hafar El-Atj. It was a fine trip with good weather and sleeping under the stars, but we didn't find any rocks poking through the sand as we had hoped.

We returned yesterday and spent today working on the south of our area, where we found some rocks that shouldn't have been there. It doesn't spoil the structure, but it messes up our nice map and the oil possibilities aren't quite as good. The structure is considerably more complicated than we thought and we'll have to do a lot more work on it.

The gravity-meter crew of 10 Americans and a dozen Arabs are camped just across the way. I've been doing duty as interpreter trying to straighten out the mess they have gotten themselves into by having two Arabs who are from a "better" tribe than the rest. They demand different (better) food and their own cook.

April 27, 1939, Ma'alaqa

While you are gawking at the bridges of San Francisco, I'm exhausted from entertaining royalty in the deep desert.

First off, we had a couple of cars wheel up with a load of soldiers and camp about a mile away on Raudha Ma'aqala. A "raudha" is a low meadow with many thorny acacia trees in which much rainwater gathers. We had coffee with the visitors when they came up to chat with our soldiers. They were the advance guard for the King and were here to keep the Bedu from using up all the water in Ma'aqala.

The next evening a great cavalcade of cars appeared on the plains to the southwest – their lights looked like a moving city. They roared in and set up camp across the raudha. There was much excitement in camp until Bill Lenahan, the company's Jeddah representative, appeared. Instead of the King, it was Shaikh Abdullah Suleiman, the Minister of Finance, with only 100 cars. Bill and three other Americans were in the party on their way to Dhahran to prepare the way for his Majesty's visit. One of the Americans was Anita Burleigh. Travelling with her husband Bill, Lenahan's assistant in Jeddah, she is the first American woman to ever cross the Peninsula.

Lenahan took all of us, including Mohammad bin Khursan, over to meet Shaikh Abdullah. The Shaikh was sitting out in the dark on a big carpet. Ali Ali Reza, a very sharp fellow from a wealthy Hejazi family who has evidently been around a lot, acted as interpreter. The big, bad, bold Mohammad was as meek as a lamb and the only words he got in were that I understood Arabic perfectly – this in a weak small voice. I denied the accusation, but made the mistake of doing so in Arabic. The Shaikh laughed and replied, "You have proved yourself wrong."

I met him in Riyadh last summer; he is a very affable fellow who is the King's right hand man. He is a lot more than just a Minister of Finance — Grand Vizier to the King would be a more appropriate title. There was much banter between him and Lenahan. He asked how long I had been here and then asked Bill why it was that he has been here five years and still can't speak Arabic. Bill replied that he had been so busy learning things from Shaikh Abdullah that he hadn't had time to learn the language. Afterward, we talked to the other Americans in the party and invited them, Najeeb Salih, the Minister of Mines, and Shaikh Abdullah's secretary to breakfast. Bill went off to get Shaikh Abdullah's permission and came back with the news that he would only allow them to come if he might come also.

We stayed up half the night fixing up two tents to hold 15 guests and 12 of us. They were up before the sun and arrived at 6:30 after the Shaikh had seen all of his cars under way. Breakfast was a success, even though his Excellency ate only a little fruit and drank some coffee. He then pulled out a package of Lucky Strikes (after I had warned everyone not to smoke - I knew he smoked in private, but didn't know whether he would or not in front of us), lighted up and proceeded to rib Bill and Najeeb on their appetites.

The next morning another army of cars and great clouds of dust swooped up from the southwest, with the King himself. As he was supposed to stay here for two days, we instructed the soldiers to request an audience with the King in the evening or the next day, and went to work as usual. Within an hour, three soldiers came out to round us up, as the King wished to see us immediately.

There was a lot of scurrying around and putting on of clean shirts. Ahmed, our cook, brought in a bisht, the long, dark Arabian cape, for me to wear. I told him that since we did not all have bishts it was better if none of us wore them. "As you wish." said Ahmed with a look of disapproval.

I asked him, "What do you think?"

He replied "As you wish." again.

So I said, "Not what I wish, what do you think about it?"

"Well, Sahib, it is very bad for many people to go see the King and have no leader." So I wore the bisht.

We drew up about 50 yards away from the King's big reception tent and marched en masse between two lines of 100 soldiers armed with sub-machine guns. Shaikh Yusef Yassin, who speaks English about on a par with my Arabic, met us. We'd brought Hassan Al-Jishi, an English-speaking rodman on the surveying crew, as our interpreter. In the handshaking with the King, Hassan got shuffled around, so I had to speak a few words directly to the king.

He grinned broadly and said, "Mashallah!, It is the will of God.” This is an expression of wonderment and admiration, and I was quite flattered. We all sat along one wall with a row of dour looking mugs, mostly ministers I presume, across from us. The King was very cordial, not at all condescending, but in Ernie's words, "I didn't hear any of the servants piping up with their nickle's worth."

He was very interested in our radio, so I invited him to come and listen to it. He would be glad to – at five o'clock that afternoon, he would like to talk to Shaikh Abdullah, or anyone who could talk Arabic. This took the wind out of me, as five o'clock is the worst time for radio reception and Shaikh Abdullah was at Abu Hadriya; so the thing would have to be worked by rebroadcast from Dhahran. He also wanted us to have a look at his radio, which was easy, as there are a couple of experts on the gravity meter crew. After a couple of rounds of coffee we left and worked the rest of the day getting ready.

I called up Charles Homewood at Dhahran, he got in touch with Abu Hadriya. I tried working Dhahran direct; they could hear us, but we couldn't hear them, so we arranged for Abu Hadriya to listen for us directly while the Jabal would rebroadcast the Shaikh to us. The system worked fine with Claude Jared, the boss driller at Abu Hadriya, telling us we were coming in fine, ad infinitum.

Ernie, head of the housing committee, put four big tents together and spread out all of the available mats. In the center of the closed end, he raised a sort of dais of blankets and pillows. We put the radio on the King's right and another mess of blankets on his left for smaller fry.

At 5:30 the King arrived in the first car. We were disappointed that he didn't follow the usual custom in towns of sending a couple carloads of soldiers armed with machine guns ahead to surround the place, though we did have a soldier in the kitchen all afternoon supervising the coffee preparation. A usual custom, Ahmed tells us.

Your husband, attired in a sabon, a long gray robe buttoned under the chin, which he borrowed from one of the drivers, greeted the King in Arabic and accompanied him to his seat. About half-way there, His Majesty turned around to introduce the Crown Prince Saud and I all but broke my neck getting back to greet him before we all sat down. The Crown Prince sat alone on the King's left, flanked by the sourpusses. We sat on his right side; I sat by the radio with Hassan. After the usual pleasantries, I called up Charles Homewood at the Jabal, who called Claude. We were still "coming in fine."

I handed over the microphone to the King, that is, I wanted to hang on to it to work the button that cuts off the receiver when you are transmitting. It was somewhat awkward when the King won and put the microphone up to his ear. Hassan explained to him how it worked and he started out with, "Abdullah, Abdullah."  There was a vast silence.

We heard Claude, "You're coming in fine, but let me tune up a little better". More "Abdullah’s” and more silence. I tried to have Hassan tell the King to make a little longer speech. The sweat began splashing on the carpet as it ran off the tip of my nose. Finally, Shaikh Abdullah came on and the King replied. There was more silence. Then Charles said, "Claude, please have Shaikh Abdullah say something. Put him on the air."

Claude replied, "You're coming in all right, Charles." There was more imploring by Charles and finally the Shaikh came, on asking the King if he wanted anything.

"No, I have nothing. I just want to see how this works." Followed by more silence and then Charles beseeching Claude with disgust in his voice. Nearing the breaking point, I broke in and had Homewood call it off and asked him to put on the Government representative in Dhahran. The King had a good talk with him. He'd learned to work the button better than lots of Americans, and seemed pleased at the end.

After a round of orange juice and coffee we took him out to see the gravity meter. He clambered into the truck and had a look through the reading microscope, quite a job, as he is as tall as I, but much heavier of frame. He has gained weight since the cars have come and he doesn't ride a camel anymore. As he got down from the truck he asked the Crown Prince if he wanted to look, but Saud laughed and said, "I'm no engineer."

There was more handshaking and they departed. Ahmed says it was a great success. If it hadn't been, the King would have frowned and said little instead of laughing and talking as he did. Hassan Al-Jishi, our Qatifi interpreter, was very skeptical, if not outright antagonistic, about the King before the visit; now he is the King's most ardent supporter. Abdul Aziz's personality is even more powerful than his sword.

The only hitch as far as I was concerned was that I didn't get any pictures. As the host, I could hardly run off to get my camera. However, the other fellows have all promised me prints and if the movies are good I'll have duplicates made. Anyway, I have the distinction of being one of very few Americans to speak with King Abdul Aziz ibn Saud in his own language. There is to be a three-day celebration in Dhahran after the King inaugurates the first shipload of oil out of Ras Tanura, the terminal of the new pipeline.

Our structure looks good yet, though we keep finding more work to do on it until I despair of ever completing it. The gravity meter is getting results that corroborate our predictions very well. A driller will be out here to start a water well within the week, and they may start drilling for oil before the summer is over.

We heard Hitler's speech to the Reichstag tonight; afterwards a couple of British commentators took it apart. It should be a huge success inside Germany. As Von Hornlein says, "I can't think of anything nicer for Hitler than a good cerebral hemorrhage."

May 11, 1939, Ma’aqala

So you liked San Francisco? That makes everything okay; now I can hurry up and get to be a big shot in the California Company so we can live there. Didn't you love the sea and the brown hills across the bay and the clean, washed faces of the houses?  The only thing I didn't like about San Francisco were the newspapers, which are lousy, but a city like that doesn't need newspapers.

No, I have never eaten crabmeat chow mein, but then you've never tasted roast dhab. A dhab being a big yellow lizard – fat and right for roasting this time of year.

I don't know whether you'll ever come to Arabia. I have hopes, but sometimes I am much despairful. Encouraging words I get, but nothing tangible. The whole trouble is that I came here on the understanding that I was single and should I marry, I would not be able to bring my wife along. There are quite a few men who came over with the promise that their wives would be sent when houses are available. I hear gossip of others who have completed their first contract here and are coming back only on the condition that their wives come with them, or soon after. The whole thing is up in the air as there are lot of things that count, such as length of service, position in the company, and so on.

I do not have two years service yet, but I am counted as a senior geologist, which puts me ahead of a lot of men with longer service. On the other hand, it will be argued that as a geologist I will be gone much of the time. Even Max Steineke had trouble with that argument and went over the head of local management to San Francisco directly, which I can hardly do. In truth, I can't see how we can hope to be together before another year, as much as I dislike admitting it to you and myself.

A year from next December my contract will be up. I do not know what I shall do then or what the company will want. However, December is the middle of the field season, and they may want me to stay over until the following spring. In that case, I shall be in a position to bargain that you be brought over next year, say in June. The more I see and hear the surer I am that it will be at least a year.

Bismarck, North Dakota, June 21, 1939

After two long weeks your letter came this morning and I was so very happy to hear from you; the contents took the wind out of my sails for a while, but somehow I’ll live through it. Before the summer is over it shall most likely be the smaller worry in my life. Everything that is happening seems like a nightmare – would that it was.

This is an ultimatum however; you are not going to sign a second contract on the promise that I can come in a little while. I don’t care if you never get another job – three years was my bargain and not one-minute longer.

Darling, I can’t express the things inside, my mind whirls with thinking. I love you so much I am almost green. My mornings are disturbed as is every minute in the day and night. When I interview stricken young men from Linton I weaken at the thought that they may have played with you or gone to school with you. I’m jealous of every minute anyone else spends with you.

By August your vow will be up and you’ll be able to smoke. Remember what an eternity that seemed to you once? Would it make you unhappy to know that I smoke every now and then? Mostly when I get a good case of the jitters. I don’t do so well though because it makes my throat sore. My Old Age Assistance supervisor has advised some ten cent cigarette called Sensations, I’m afraid of just that!

Must close darling, I love you much – hope you’ll write me more letters like the last one, only with better news. Don’t let it worry you, I shall somehow manage to be very, very busy with my riding, swimming and smoking – just like a real dyed in the wool career woman.

May 11, 1939, Ma’aqala – continued

Our trip west was fine except for one mishap – the first day out, our sedan poked the fan through the radiator, which delayed us for four hours while we took it off and soldered it up. Then off down the broad Wadi El-Atj to see a sight strange in Arabia, haycocks, neat little piles of bushes like shocked wheat except they were rather few and far between. Here and there groups of three or four Arabs gathered up the sparse bushes in piles and loaded them on camels to twice the height of the beasts who plodded off to their destinations, in some cases 60 to 80 miles away.

Hauling hay in the Wadi al-Atj

The sand in the backcountry is the reddest I've ever seen, it practically glows in the red dawn. There are high, bold hills with real cliffs on them rising six to eight hundred feet above the plains on their westward faces.

We did not pass through many towns, but one, Marat, was as picturesque as you could wish. The earth about is a reddish clay and just outside the town is a high jabal that we climbed. We took pictures of the town spread out below us with its red-turreted walls, green gardens scattered over the plain, and the great pool in which they gather rainwater by a system of ditches. When we returned through town in the late afternoon there were lots and lots of cows, for Arabia, coming out. Khamis was astounded. They are used for drawing water from the wells in place of donkeys or camels, the usual motive power.

Here and there in the center of Nejd you find low mud walls across the wadis. They are dams to hold the rain. In good years they plant wheat behind the dams after a downpour has been caught and soaked into the earth.

Marat as seen from Jabal Marat

Northwest of Riyadh, we went up a long canyon crossing over the Tuwaiq Mountains. It was very much like the 10 Sheep Canyon going down the westside of the Big Horn Mountains in Wyoming. If you've never seen it, we shall go look at it sometime.

On the east side of the wadi, we passed down a long valley full of ruins of walled towns, forts and old watchtowers on the hilltops. Once this had been a great center of population, but the wells went dry. Recently the water has come back and a few of the wells are being worked again to water the wheat fields. It was harvest time. They were cutting the grain with sickles and bringing it in to the threshing floors where four or five little donkeys walk round and round a post, trampling out the kernels.

Near here is the town of Sudus, which I would have liked to visit, but we didn't have time. It is said on good authority that there are tablets or rocks there which have inscriptions in a language said to look like English – they may be Phoenician.

We steered clear of Riyadh this trip, as the King was still in Dhahran, and to visit it would have meant much ceremony with the little shots. We took in the big cave Bramkamp and I visited last September, and went home having made a couple of surprising geological discoveries on the way, which didn't quite fit former ideas.

I guess the King's visit to Dhahran was a success as far as he was concerned, but a nightmare for Casoc. He left yesterday and is at Abu Hadriya today. Tomorrow we will sit in camp because we have no gasoline. Our lorry is at the seismograph camp, but they won't let it go to Abu Hadriya for gasoline until His Majesty departs. They are afraid it will be commandeered to haul government cars through the sand. The King, himself, is fine. The headaches come from all the hangers on. Judging by the radio reports, which are very cautious, business in Dhahran is just about at a standstill.

The site for the test oil well here has been selected to start as soon as we can drill a water supply. Tomorrow, the head of transportation and three engineers, including Clark Gester, Chief Engineer for the California Company in Arabia on a visit, are coming out to look the place over with an eye to roads, camp buildings, and pipeline to the coast when and if there is any oil.

The weather is hot. Over 100 degrees every day, 112 degrees today, but it cools down to 70 at night. In about three weeks we shall go in for the summer.

May 23, 1939, Ma’aqala

Today we had to make a radio schedule at 7:30, which cut off the best of the day. We've been in camp all day as it was hardly worth going out. A mechanic arrived this afternoon. We are going to take him up to Jerry's camp tomorrow.

Day before yesterday the shamaal began. It's a daily wind out of the north that lasts 30 to 40 days. The nights are calm and cool, but the breeze of the morning grows to a midday gale that whips the tent fly so violently that it cracks like a gunshot. It is nearly as hot as before, but the wind makes it feel cooler than a week ago, when the noon sun poured straight down on the still earth. The shamaal is bad for our work because, in addition to the mirage, the air becomes so filled by a haze of dust that at noon you can hardly see more than a couple of miles. Not quite as bad as North Dakota, but bad enough.

I am at a loss for something to write about, Kath. These last days have been about as monotonous as any I've had in Arabia. The heat makes me feel as if I don't want to do anything but sit at midday. It is actually better to work outside than to swelter in a tent.

Today after a vain attempt to sleep, I read some Hilaire Belloc in an anthology of his that I got in Bagdhad. You must read him if you have not done so already. He does everything so magnificently well: history, fiction, poetry or criticism. Ernie and I have read several times his essay on "The Nordic Man", who is kind to animals in decreasing amounts until his kindness closes when he comes to insects. As for his "A Guide to the Boring", Ed Golaby, who is drilling the water well here, is a natural born example. About the only defect in Ed's technique is that he does not mumble, a fault which may in charity be ascribed to a slight deafness. Then there is "Al-Rafsat" or "The Kick" in which a devoted servant of Allah instructs his small nephews in the art of becoming rich by relying on the ignorance of rich and poor alike.

Ed has a fixation, an unshakable belief that if you talk baby talk loudly to Arabs they will be sure to understand it because, obviously American babies understand baby talk very well. So he has developed a weird vocabulary or rather I should say, syntax, in dealing with Arabs. He'll say, “Sheyl the boardie boys and hutt the boardie over here,” meaning, “Lift the board, boys, and put the board over here.” Though no Arab could possibly understand a word he says, his crew has learned by example as to what he means and what ought to be done.

Ed wasn’t the only one with a specialized vocabulary. Bill Seale’s crew had worked with him long enough to know what was required; they knew what he was saying in English and he pretty well knew what they were saying in Arabic with neither of them being really cognizant of the actual vocabulary.

This phenomenon of Americans and Arabs communicating in a patois that nobody else could comprehend produced all kinds of opportunities for misunderstanding.

My favorite story was that of two laborers waiting to start work. An American arrives and gives them instructions that consist of a few Arabic words and a lot of sign language. The newest employee of the lot starts to get up and go to work when his companion stops him and says, “Hold on a minute, he hasn’t said goddammit yet.”

Later on, when there were a lot of Americans arriving and we couldn’t orient people fast enough to keep them out of trouble, we had several problems with the phrase “godammit”. There was more than one court case in which an Arab hauled an American into court claiming that the American had “godammed” him.

Most of these cases were simply instances of an American working with an Arab, a wrench would slip and the American would say, “Godammit!”

The Arab who had been around long enough to know what the phrase meant, but not the context of American slang, would take it personally and charge the American in court.

Then we would have to explain to the judge that the American wasn’t damning the worker, he was damning the wrench. This made absolutely no sense to the judge; what would be the point of trying to consign a wrench to eternal perdition? I’m sure that these charges were often dismissed only because the judge was willing to accept our explanation in spite of the fact that it defied common sense.

Ed also takes a dim view of the way we socialize with the soldiers and others and said that by God when he runs the camp there aren't going to be any people saying ‘Good Evening’ to him.

No news from the Jabal except that all is still confusion after the King's visit. They sent a lot of trucks to Riyadh with him, none of which have yet returned. The reactions to our request for another truck to haul water for Ed's well bordered on exasperation. We shall go in soon for the summer, it depends on the water well. We have to stay here and nurse Ed until he finishes.

Continuing after supper, the gale of an hour ago has died down to a fitful breeze and the fierce old sun has sunk through the haze. With night the land seems to live again after the torture of the day.

Bismarck, North Dakota, May 17, 1939

Do you realize that you have not written me for nigh onto three weeks? I am more than a little irked; I don’t care if it is the fault of the Germans or the Geology. Please write to me, I am very unhappy when you don’t.

We need rain so badly, the dust storms are increasingly worse and people are so discouraged. There is constant trouble with Farm Security as to whether clients should spend their soil conservation checks for living expenses or not. They have nothing.

Tomorrow we will have been married one year and a half. Had it been one hundred the difference would have been barely perceptible. Here I am working myself into a mood to which I have no right. The bare truth remains that I have become more in love with you than ever and it irritates me more than a little, because it was bad enough before and I try to convince myself that I don’t deserve having it any worse.

Had an idea that I might work overtime tonight, but if I do, I won’t start until I have finished this letter. The dust storm is so bad by now that the downtown buildings are scarcely visible. Every time the wind blows, I get meaner and meaner, in fact I have one of the worst dispositions you have ever conceived of, maybe if I cried it would settle the dust and I would feel better.

May 27, 1939, Ma’aqala

We've just returned from a three-day reconnaissance trip with Jerry and Johnny Thomas. Up at four and now it's 10:15, so be charitable if this is a bit muddled.

Returned to find your book from San Francisco. I am delighted with it. That is, I haven't read it yet, but I have read of Maynard and once heard him speak. Thanks for the St. Anne medal, which I shall wear as soon as I can get a chain for it.

I dream of you continually, Kath. Seems I'm all right as long as there is plenty of work to drive me, but now, except for these last three days, we're sort of marking time waiting for Ed to strike water. Then, the drillers will come out to get started on the oil well, and we go to the Jabal. Up before dawn to work until noon, come in at two for lunch and dawdle in the tent all afternoon trying to sleep. Then after the radio business is finished, sit a few minutes in the cool night before going to bed. These days are the hard ones. I shall see what the situation is when we go in to Dhahran.

May 30, 1939, Camp Ma'aqala

This seems to be the night for letters. Ernie has just written one and I just heard Abdul Latif, the houseboy, reading one to Salih. It was from Salih's father, written I suppose by a friend or a sort of public stenographer. Then, at this end, Salih has to find someone to read it to him.

The weather continues to be warm. Yesterday was the season's record temperature, 125 degrees in the shade, which is hot but not as bad as you might think. We've been broken in by six weeks of 110-degree weather. As I write, at eight in the evening, it is 92 degrees. We are getting up at four a.m. and work to noon. Then we take our cots down in a big dahl and sleep three or four hours in the cool, natural air conditioning of the cave.

The Emir was just in to report on his trip to Jubail. He went in to buy more food for the soldiers and returned just this evening. The soldiers are not very happy, because orders came out to leave them here for a month after we go in. That is, until the new camp is started. They don't like it because they've been in the desert since January. They want to go home; they are soldiers of the "engineers", and the other sahibs don't know and understand them like we do, and besides the permanent camps are supposed to have Hejazi police, who are wholly useless except as a source of trouble. I have been doing everything possible to get them in when we go, had Jerry talk to Max, and last night Max said he was making arrangements to have them replaced.

Two days ago Ed struck water in his well. We are now marking time until the pipe for casing it and the pump arrive, and then we will go in for the summer. The water is excellent; it is truly as sweet as rain.

Yesterday was wasted by reason of an invitation to see the Crown Prince Saud. He was camped a few miles southwest of us. One of his men came up just as we were ready to leave and told us the Emir Saud would like to see us. Off we went. All my long pants are worn out, I have been wearing shorts lately, but I fished out a pair that had the seat gone and borrowed the cook's bisht which covered them up.

The Prince had a camp of about a dozen tents and our audience was much more informal than it was with the King. We sat in front of him on cushions slightly lower than the one he was sitting on. A very friendly man, he laughed a lot and was much interested in our well. We talked about some of the affairs in Europe while the coffee and tea were served. We committed a minor faux pas by not leaving as soon as we should have. The conversation lagged; I couldn't think of anything to say for the life of me as sweat poured off me inside that woolen bisht, so I finally broke out with the "By your leave" of parting. No difficulty like that with the King; he tells you when to go.

I got along fairly well with the Prince, he was very easy to understand except, of course, for the words I didn't know, for instance, the Arabic for "air conditioning". At first he brought in an interpreter whose English I couldn't understand; he knew a little less English than Ernie does Arabic, but after a couple of attempts Saud waved him away and we spoke directly.

Since he didn't volunteer, we didn't ask his business except to find out that he was going to Al-Lisafah, northwest of Ma'aqala. One of our drivers spent his time gossiping with the government drivers and found out that the Prince was going to look at a new well he is having dug at Al-Lisafah, to check on his camels and to settle a murder. In a dispute over water at Al-Lisafah between two tribes, the Ajman and the Subai’i, a Subai’i was killed about a week ago. The Prince will find out who is to blame. If the Subai’i, they will be fined in camels and sheep. If the Ajman, they will be fined likewise, but the relations of the dead man will have the choice of accepting "blood money", to the amount of three to five hundred dollars, or the life of the killer.

If they choose the latter, and the choice depends on many circumstances – the wealth of the family, the relations between the tribes and between the families of the murdered and murderer, the offender will be bound to a stake and shot by the nearest male relative of the deceased, preferably his oldest son. It is the strict application of the rule of "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth."

Several years later in Qatif, a man slipped and fell out of a palm tree, landing on a man below and killing him. The man's widow claimed her blood rights and wanted this man executed for killing her husband. This was a very difficult question for the qadhi, the judge of the Islamic court, as the man was innocent because it had been an accident. After much thought, the qadhi ruled that the widow had the right to kill him the same way her husband was killed. She could climb up a palm tree and fall on this fellow or she could settle for her blood money. She settled for the money.

Glubb Pasha tells of once in Iraq when he held a conference between two unfriendly tribes, both of whom were disarmed beforehand. Midway in the talk a free-for-all broke out before the police could intervene. They finally stopped the row and started pairing off the combatants, a bloody nose against a black eye, etc., until at last there was one man left over. Before Glubb Pasha could say a word, a couple of the policemen seized a fellow from the tribe that was short one man, whacked him on the head, and the pairs came out even. Everyone laughed, was quite satisfied, and the conference resumed.

We were up at Jerry's camp at Al-Lihabah and made a two-day trip west from there to the Dhana and back here. There are about 200 Bedu tents at Al-Lihabah, Ernie says he is going to write home that he'd visited one of the summer watering places of the Bedu, a spa as it were, and that people would have a much different picture of it than the reality.

Camels drawing water at al-Lihabah

There are two wells at Al-Lihabah, set in a low place with low jabals around them. Each has a high mound of camel dung built up around the mouth. The water is at a depth of 150 feet. The tents are scattered about in the wadi. They are mostly black, with an occasional, rare white one marking the abode of a shaikh of some sort. The ground is as bare as a pool table, with the camels, sheep, goats, donkeys and even some magnificent-looking horses grazing on their way to and from the well.

In late afternoon the water drawing begins. Camels cluster at the top of the mound to be watered as a couple of the ungainly beasts walk back and forth, up and down the mound, drawing up the water in skin bags pulled by a grass rope over a crude pulley. All about are groups of camels waiting their turn, being kept together by small boys as tall as the knees of their charges. There are donkeys braying, innumerable dogs barking, sheep and camels bellowing, and a little extra hullabaloo each time a group of camels moves from the mouth of the well and another takes their places. With the vertical sun making the sands as hot as fire, it is a fine place to spend the summer. Most of the Bedu at Al-Lihabah are Mutair, but there are a few Ajman.

Our trip westward was uneventful except that the first day I managed to provide us all with meat: hubarrah for us, a kirwan and a dhab for the Arabs. They saved the best part of the dhab for us, giving us the roasted tail the next morning; it was really very good, sort of stringy but with a flavor something like walnuts.

The wellhead at al-Lihabah

Find out more about Out in the Blue: Letters from Arabia 1937-1940 at SelwaDigital.

EXCERPT

IBN SAUD: KING BY CONQUEST

By Nestor J. Sander

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STEPS UPWARD (1902-1912)

After consulting his father and winning the approval and support of Shaikh Mubarak, Ibn Saud decided to act. Was the venture he was to embark on planned only as a razzia, as most authors suggest, or had he already determined to attempt to restore his family to its high estate? He was almost twenty-five years old. Thrice married, he had two living wives and a son, Turki. Surely it was time to free himself and his family from dependence on a meager stipend from the Turks and the uncertain income from raids.

Would a man of his stock be content to continue only as a leader of forays? If not, concealment of his true purpose was essential, for spies were everywhere. Raiding would serve to dissimulate his intent.

Prologue: In the autumn of 1901 Abdul Aziz left Kuwait with an older half-brother Mohammed, three cousins, four more distant relatives, and about fifty followers from the tribes of eastern Arabia. They were mounted on riding camels, Dhulul, some ridden double. With Ibn Saud’s servant and his bodyguard, both slaves, the troop totaled sixty. the band was soon joined by nomads eager to share in the plunder and derring-do of the nearly bloodless raids, a form of gainful employment age-old in the desert. For a time the forays were successful, garnering many camels near the village of Majma’ two hundred miles southwest of Kuwait. But the looted tribes and Ibn Rashid’s supporters began to fight back and Turkish patrols had to be avoided. So, four months after its departure from Kuwait the band of several hundred shrank as prospects of easy booty vanished. Too, Ramadan was near, the month of daylight fasting when raiding usually ceased. Ibn Saud stopped his forays and retreated southward, ignoring a request from his father to return to Kuwait.

Many accounts say that he was unable to return to Kuwait because he was blocked by Ibn Rashid’s forces, but the desert is like the sea, except that there are watering places, most of which are generally known and can be denied in time of war. The Turks had few troops and could occupy continuously only one or two wells or oases near the coast. Messengers from Ibn Rashid could have insured that the raiders had no access to water in places occupied by his supporters, but it is unlikely that this mighty shaikh would put his soldier-tribesmen on a war-time footing merely to stop a ghazzu.

Decision (?): A messenger from Kuwait found Ibn Saud to warn him that Ibn Rashid had asked the Turks to capture him. He and his band were camped in southern al Hasa at a well called Ain Haradh. According to some published accounts this site was his Rubicon, but was it in fact only then that he decided to retake Riyadh? All agree that it was only then that he asked his followers to undertake the perilous mission, but it was only then that he could be sure that no one would return to Kuwait to betray his purpose, for the fate of anyone who chose not to join him might have been uncertain. Among the sixty he could be sure only of his brother, seven other relatives and his two slaves. The loyalty of the rest was doubtful for they came from other tribes. Hence the oath of fealty to him and his cause that he demanded from them, and his pledge of fidelity to them, a pact made much of by some writers.

The party then moved fifty miles farther south to the Jabrin oasis. Only the Murra frequented it, for its ponds are at the northern edge of the Rub’ al Khali and in summer its far-flung palm groves were hotbeds of malarial fever. There the now oath-bound sixty passed the first days of the month of Ramadan secure from prying eyes, for the Murra, like many of the tribes of southern Nejd and Asir owed no allegiance to the Rashids.

On 23 December 1901, almost three weeks before the new moon would mark the end of Ramadan, the small troop left its covert and set out for Riyadh, two hundred miles to the northwest. It avoided the usual watering places both for security and because in the cool of winter the camels drank only every ninth day, or with good forage, not at all. Leisurely night marches punctuated by long halts to avoid detection by travelers and Bedu shepherds found them on the evening of 12 January 1902 at the limestone cliffs and steep slopes forming the weathered scarp in front of which lay the deep ravine containing the five wells of Abu Jifan. As the last of these marches began the party saw a pale sliver of new moon and knew that no travelers or even dispatch riders would be at the wells, for no one traveled during the three holidays of the Id al Fitr. Nevertheless they scouted the area before couching the camels and spent the next day furbishing their arms and sleeping.

That night, a forty-mile ride brought them in sight of the cluster of villages near Riyadh. The party moved with extreme caution to avoid discovery, but on the morning of the second day, 15 January 1902, all lay concealed in the hills north of the populated area.

At nightfall on that day men and beasts quit their hiding-places and stole into the shelter of the very extensive plantations of date palms that lay on all sides of the town. At an outlying grove, Shamsiyah, thirty men, headed by the Ibn Saud’s stocky, heavily bearded brother, Mohammed, were detailed to guard the couched camels. They were instructed to wait until noon of the following day for news. If none came they should try to escape, for the others of the band would be dead. Desire to share in the attack ran high, but in the narrow streets near the fort a large group would have been conspicuous and the surprise that was the keystone of Ibn Saud’s strategy might have been lost.

The twenty-three accompanying Ibn Saud in his approach to the wall included three cousins and several more distant relatives. The party moved silently through the dark shelter of the deserted groves carrying the long trunk of a palm tree. For an hour the men thus burdened stole through long rows of boles and then through the gardens nearer the gates: a maze of sunken paths, wells, irrigation channels and palm-thatched shelters. The cemetery just outside the north wall offered less difficulty – no stone fences and ditches to slow progress. But the approach had taken more than two hours and the sliver of new moon glowed dully in the west.

In front of the ruinous wall was a dry moat half-filled with dirt and debris. After the family’s departure a decade before, the twenty-five-foot barrier of sun-dried brick had been left to the weather by Ibn Rashid’s governors, and in some places was less than half its original height. The guard towers were not manned and all was silent, except for an occasional bark from a troubled dog and the droning whine from the wooden pulleys of the few draw-wells working during the last night of the Id. The palm trunk as ladder, and Abdul Aziz and eight of his party were over the crumbling obstacle. These paladins included three other cousins, Abdulla ibn Jiluwi and two of his sons, Nasr ibn Saud and the servants Ma’shouk and Sab’an. The other fifteen sat patiently at its foot to await events.The nine stole warily through narrow dark streets and alleys, past the barred doors and the blank dwellings. Shut-in dogs warned loudly of their hushed passage but the clamor raised no alarm. Their walk was short for the massive stone Mismak (citadel) was not far from the north wall. Silhouetted against the backdrop of the cold blaze of myriad stars in a blue-black heaven the round towers of the fort rose high above the dark rectangle of its bulk. The open ground around the stronghold was bounded to the west and south by low, flat-roofed houses. The governor’s residence, known to be close to the seat of power, must be one of the few two-story homes facing it to the west, but which one? A likely prospect, larger than some of the others, had a heavy door below and a latticed opening on the second floor. This house was less than two hundred feet from the massive iron-studded wooden portal of the citadel.

The events that ensued have been recounted many times in print, and Ibn Saud himself told the story often. The published versions vary in detail, even in such basics as the number of participants, and differ even more in their interpretation of intangibles such as the state of mind of the doers. Some suggest that Ibn Saud changed the particulars of his story at will. And why not? He had created a legend.

This version is based on probabilities, given the circumstances, the place, the ambience of the high desert in winter, and Ibn Saud’s propensity, recorded by several observers, to outbursts of violent anger.

Coup: (16 January 1902) The nine discussed their next move cloaked in the dark obscurity of a narrow street bounded by low, windowless houses. They huddled, heads together, the white vapor of their breath streaming in the chill north wind that fluttered the loose ends of their checkered head cloths and wrapped the skirts of their long white thobes tightly against their legs. All were bundled up against the cold and burdened with arms: rifles wrapped in tanned goatskin slung over a shoulder or clutched by the barrel, butt in the dust; swords hitched high, belted daggers partly hidden under quilted vests. One of Ibn Saud’s cousins, Abdullah ibn Jiluwi, short and heavily bearded, leaned on a. stout, iron-tipped spear.

‘The two-story place with the latticed window must be the one,’ ibn Jiluwi said, ‘No other house has a window.’

‘Probably,’ replied Abdul Aziz, ‘but we have to be sure. Let’s get off the street and ask somebody. If we stay here we might be seen and reported. There could be guards in the towers of the fort, too. There’s just enough light for them to spot us if we move around much. Look! This used to be Juwaisir’s place. He sold cows. Maybe he’s still here.’

A repeated peremptory but cautious knock was at last answered by the voice of a querulous woman, ‘Who is it? What do you want at this hour?’

‘It’s ibn Mutriff (one of the guard at the citadel known to ibn Saud) The Amir wants to buy two cows. Let me in to talk it over,’ answered Abdul Aziz

‘It’s late, nearly midnight. No honorable man would knock at the door of a respectable house now. There are no Qahab (sluts) here. Go away!’

‘Amir Ajlan will not take that kindly. You know what he’s like. Juwaisir will suffer for it. Is he there? Is Juwaisir there?’

With a rasp of wood on iron a bar was lifted from its sockets. The heavy door opened a crack and the dim light inside silhouetted a man’s bare head. Ibn Saud wrenched the door wide open. ‘Quick, men, in with you!’ A rush of bodies at full pelt surged through the doorway. Shouldered roughly aside, the man at the door fell to his knees.

The troop jostled in the dark of the small, close room. ‘Build up the fire so we can see!’ Abdul Aziz ordered. Shaken by his fall, Juwaisir, old and stooped, staggered to his feet and heaped brushwood on the hearth, which crackled into a roaring blaze.

Peering dazedly at the weapons of the group crowding his dwelling he quavered, ‘What do you want? We are poor folk, as you see. O Master! I saw you on your mare when you had Ajlan cooped up in the fort. Why did you go away?’

‘Well, we’re back now. You can help us. Where is Ajlan? That’s his house, isn’t it, the big one opposite the door of the fort?’

The old man bowed as he said that his abode was his Master’s. Yes, that was the governor’s residence, but he wasn’t there. He slept in the fort with his men, some eighty of them. But in the morning just after prayer he visited his wife, although sometimes he rode for a time before going to her. Six guards accompanied him everywhere.

‘Can we get to Ajlan’s terrace from yours?’ Ibn Saud asked.

‘Almost, Sir. There is a gap of about four feet, and of course it’s higher. But the wall of Sa’ad’s house touches his. Next door, you know.’

‘Is Sa’ad alone?’

‘Only his wife. They are like me–too poor to buy a slave.’

‘Thank you, Juwaisir. Those steps lead up to your terrace?’

Ibn Saud in the lead, all his men climbed the steep, narrow stair to the flat roof, a terrace edged by a waist-high crenelated wall. It was not pitch dark. Everyone lay flat for the fort was only three hundred feet away. Sentinels in the corner towers could, if observant, see movement below. Abdul Aziz raised himself slowly and studied the menacing bulk for a long moment: an infinity of brilliant points in a dark firmament outlining silent towers of jet bounding a black oblong. Nothing moved. ‘They don’t know we’re here. Let’s go!’

Cautiously, all straddled the low walls separating the terraces of the two houses. Ibn Saud and ibn Jiluwi descended silently into the darkness of the stair in the second house. A stifled scream and two unfortunates lay tied and gagged in their bed. Back on the roof, Abdul Aziz dispatched two of his eight men (sons of ibn Jiluwi) to summon those waiting at the enceinte of the town. ‘When you come back with them, don’t bunch up, and stay inside this place until I send for you,’ he warned.

Then, much taller than his companions, he leapt high, grappled the bounding wall of the governor’s terrace and pulled himself up and over it. Feet on shoulders, upstretched arms pulled, and in moments the six were beside him. With their daggers loosened, Abdul Aziz led them down into the menacing, stygian blackness of the upper floor.

‘Make sure that the slaves don’t make a row, men,’ he whispered. Then to ibn Jiluwi, ‘Light the candle. Let’s see if Ajlan is here, or not.’

The two moved warily from room to room in the silent house, the taper in ibn Jiluwi’s hand guttering as they peered into each. A brass bed in this one–only a shaikh could afford that! Abdul Aziz held his rifle ready to fire into one of two mounds under the quilts. Ibn Jiluwi lowered the candle and went to the head of the bed: the light showed the two heads to be women.

A high-pitched, sleepy voice, ‘Who is it? Who is it?’

‘Abdul Aziz ibn Abdur Rahman. Quiet woman! And you too!’ he added as the other bundle stirred.

‘Oh, it’s you, Father of Turki. What do you want? You are in the harem.’ The woman had known Ibn Saud as a child, and was not afraid. Honest women were never molested.

‘No impudence! I want your husband, wicked woman who married a Shammari!

Where is he?’

‘I married only after you ignored me! He is in the fort with his men. When he comes back after morning prayer you had better be gone, if you value your life.’

‘If you value yours, you and your friend will not raise your voices. Or do you prefer to be gagged?’

The two women were herded into a lower room where four terrified slaves huddled: three Somali men and a woman. All were again warned to silence.

‘The others must be here by now. Have the slaves open a passage into the other house. It shouldn’t take long to loosen these mud bricks. But keep an eye on them. No noise!’ ordered Abdul Aziz. ‘Have the cook make coffee and bring whatever there is to eat upstairs.’

The troop of twenty-three was soon together, the newcomers voicing satisfaction at the handiwork of the nine. The room behind the latticed alcove facing the fort was large and furnished comfortably with cushions and rugs. All lounged at ease as a trembling slave served coffee, dates, and unleavened bread, stumbling in the darkness, for a light in the room behind the grated opening would have been visible to anyone in the fort.

‘Only two hours to sunrise,’ ibn Jiluwi commented, ‘we should get some rest.’

‘Yes. We’ll take care of Ajlan when he comes home. Find out which slave opens the door and select one of us of similar build to don her clothes so that Ajlan will suspect nothing when the door is opened.’

‘Abdul Aziz lay back against the cushions behind him. ‘Let’s recite a few surahs 7 together before we rest. Allah, look favorably on our affairs!’

The muezzin’s predawn call brought all to their feet for sleep had been fitful at best. Two lines of men, Ibn Saud before them, began the morning prayer, al fajar. The murmur of the prescribed orisons accompanied the ritual of kneeling and prostration toward Mecca.

Waiting began. The pale salmon-orange of the pre-dawn gave way to the brassy brilliance of sunrise. A dark shadow of the fort wall leapt into existence, its edge ruler-straight on the tan, trodden earth in front of the governor’s house. Ibn Saud and ibn Jiluwi peered anxiously through the lattice while sipping coffee. Bright lozenges of early morning sunlight marked their white robes as they knelt behind the screen. Four riflemen knelt behind them, ready to open fire when targets appeared.

Suddenly a loud grating groan broke the silence. The massive, iron-studded, wooden portal of the fort swung slowly inward. Ajlan ibn Mohammed ar Rashid and six of his retinue stood framed in the panel of light at the foot of the high wall. All bore arms, but carried them with the carelessness of the unsuspecting. This morning the Amir had decided not to ride the mare held in check by a groom, for as the weighty gate shut behind him he sauntered into the open, sword at his side. Abdul Aziz saw his arrogant bearing, stiffened, sprang to his feet, threw off head rope and scarf, and muttered, ‘I’ll kill him.’ He dashed down the stairs shouting, ‘Let’s go! Now! Come On!’ threw open the door and raced toward the Amir, bawling as a war cry, ‘Akhu Nura.’ (Nura’sbrother!) [She was his favorite sister.] The others streamed after him, ibn Jiluwi at their head.

Ajlan, a stately figure in his padded winter cloak, blue trimmed in scarlet, was startled and for a moment only stared, then drew his sword and held it high while backing toward the fort. As Ibn Saud neared him he slashed down. The young warrior parried with his rifle. Ajlan, seeing his adversary a giant, began to turn away. Abdul Aziz fired hastily, and the Amir, hit in the shoulder, dropped his blade and ran toward the great door. His guards had already retreated. One of them stooped to pass through the small wicket that had opened at the right end of the portal.

Ibn Jiluwi and the others in the forefront of the attackers engaged the retreating guards who battled courageously, sword against sword, but fell back continually toward the wicket. One of them fended off two assailants until he fell with a great gaping cut in the neck. Ibn Saud caught the fleeing Amir from behind as he bent to pass through the wicket and wrestled him to the ground. Desperately, the fallen man lashed out with a kick that caught Ibn Saud in the groin, doubling him up in pain. Thus freed, Ajlan again ran to the wicket. As he bent low to go through it, ibn Jiluwi threw his spear with tremendous force, but missed. Its point struck the door just to the right of the opening. Aided by men inside, Ajlan struggled over the high sill, and was at last pulled into the courtyard. Ibn Jiluwi, drawn blade in hand, bent low and plunged through behind him, braving a possible sword stroke that would have cut off his head. Ibn Saud was behind him in a flash. The defenders fled, Ajlan lagging behind because of his wound. The two paladins rushed to unbar the great portal, pushed open at once by a swarm of shouting attackers brandishing swords.

All pursued the fugitives, most of whom sought refuge in the guard room not far from the gate. Ibn Jiluwi caught up with Ajlan and cut him down. Led by Abdul Aziz the others hunted out those who resisted, and took the surrender of the rest. Many asked for mercy in the time-honored way: dropping their weapons they put the thumbs of both hands between their teeth with fingers widely spread. All was over in less than an hour.

Ibn Saud, flushed with victory, took Ajlan’s head to the battlements and threw it into the street, shouting, ‘Who is on my side–Who? Your own Prince is with you again!’.

Most writers who describe the taking of Riyadh say that the casualties inflicted on the defeated were heavy. They report that nearly half of the eighty defenders were killed or wounded; the remainder jailed or pardoned. On the other hand a few minimize the number of casualties. According to a ‘reliable source’, Ibn Saud lost two killed and four critically wounded – a quarter of his force.

Find out more about Ibn Saud: King by Conquest at SelwaDigital.

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

FOREWORD

INTRODUCTION

PROLOGUE

THE BLOWING HOLE

CHAPTER ONE

FROM FRENCH MUD TO ARABIAN SANDS

CHAPTER TWO

THE GOOD OLD DAYS OF CAVING IN THE DESERT

CHAPTER THREE

IN SEARCH OF MA’AQALA

CHAPTER FOUR

“SISTER” EXPLORES THE HAREM

CHAPTER FIVE

DAHL SULTAN

CHAPTER SIX

MISSING WHILE MAPPING

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE BOTTOMLESS PIT

CHAPTER EIGHT

THE MOURNFUL WAIL OF THE WHISTLING TEAPOT

CHAPTER NINE

THE SECRETS OF MURUBBEH CAVE

CHAPTER TEN

SURPRISES AND MORE SURPRISES

CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE GREAT PIT OF ABALHOL, FATHER OF FEAR

CHAPTER TWELVE

THE HOWLING WINDS OF THE FAR NORTH

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

THE CAVES OF KISHB

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

GHAR AL HIBASHI LAVA TUBE AND THE DUST OF AGES

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

THE LOST CITY OF SHUWAYMIS

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

ACROSS THE GREAT NAFUD

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

THE LONGEST CAVE: MYSTERIES OF UMM JIRSAN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

SAUDI ARABIA: A CAVING FRONTIER

EXCERPT

OUT IN THE BLUE: LETTERS FROM ARABIA 1937-1940

EXCERPT

IBN SAUD: KING BY CONQUEST

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Table of Contents

FOREWORD

INTRODUCTION

PROLOGUE

THE BLOWING HOLE

CHAPTER ONE

FROM FRENCH MUD TO ARABIAN SANDS

CHAPTER TWO

THE GOOD OLD DAYS OF CAVING IN THE DESERT

CHAPTER THREE

IN SEARCH OF MA’AQALA

CHAPTER FOUR

“SISTER” EXPLORES THE HAREM

CHAPTER FIVE

DAHL SULTAN

CHAPTER SIX

MISSING WHILE MAPPING

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE BOTTOMLESS PIT

CHAPTER EIGHT

THE MOURNFUL WAIL OF THE WHISTLING TEAPOT

CHAPTER NINE

THE SECRETS OF MURUBBEH CAVE

CHAPTER TEN

SURPRISES AND MORE SURPRISES

CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE GREAT PIT OF ABALHOL, FATHER OF FEAR

CHAPTER TWELVE

THE HOWLING WINDS OF THE FAR NORTH

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

THE CAVES OF KISHB

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

GHAR AL HIBASHI LAVA TUBE AND THE DUST OF AGES

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

THE LOST CITY OF SHUWAYMIS

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

ACROSS THE GREAT NAFUD

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

THE LONGEST CAVE: MYSTERIES OF UMM JIRSAN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

SAUDI ARABIA: A CAVING FRONTIER

EXCERPT

OUT IN THE BLUE: LETTERS FROM ARABIA 1937-1940

EXCERPT

IBN SAUD: KING BY CONQUEST