“Black glass,” Ana said excitedly.
“In the desert?” Shane was confused.
“It’s from a meteorite,” Ana said. “This whole area was hit sometime in the past. There was a meteor seen over Riyadh four hundred years ago that may have impacted the area. When it did, the heat turned the sand to glass.”
“I thought Ubar disappeared thousands of years ago, not hundreds,” Shane said.
“You’re right,” Nate interjected. “The dating of the Wabar craters and the meteorites that caused it is disputed. Some people think it happened much earlier. Or perhaps more than once.”
“It’s true,” Ana conceded.
“For example, there’s conflicting evidence that the city of Tall el-Hammam in the Jordan Valley was destroyed by some type of cosmic cataclysm roughly thirty-six hundred years ago,” Nate continued.
“Like another meteorite?” Tim asked.
“Close,” Nate said. “They think it was actually a meteor.”
“What’s the fucking difference?” Tim asked.
“A meteor is an object that enters Earth’s atmosphere,” Ana clarified. “Usually it burns up on entry. When it impacts Earth’s surface, it’s called a meteorite.”
“Learn something new every day,” Tim mumbled to himself.
“In the case of Tall el-Hammam, the theory presented was that it was destroyed by an airburst,” Nate said. “The paper that claimed this was later retracted, mostly for procedural issues, but the theory still exists.”
“Like the Tunguska event back in the early twentieth century,” Tim added.
“Exactly!” Nate said excitedly. “In that case, a meteor exploded in the atmosphere and detonated with a yield of fifteen megatons, significantly more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima back in World War Two. In fact, some experts think an airburst is the explanation for the destruction of the biblical city of Sodom.”
“Another city destroyed by God for its wicked ways,” Tim noted.
“But there was no crater, right?” Shane asked.
“Right,” Ana said. “Airbursts like that don’t generally leave craters.”
“But imagine a large meteor detonating over the Jordan Valley,” Nate added. “It’s entirely possible that debris flung from that explosion could have made its way southeast to the deserts of Arabia.”
“Right, part of a larger system of debris that broke up entering the atmosphere,” Ana said. “One meteor could have detonated, but fragments could have easily made their way to impact solid ground if the event was big enough.”
“So not the same meteorites that caused the Wabar craters, then?” Shane asked.
“Could have been,” Nate confessed. “But there’s also the fact that we’re not at the Wabar impact site. It’s nearly twenty miles northeast of here.”
“Really?” Ana asked. “I didn’t realize there were impacts this far to the west.”
“No one did,” Nate replied. “Philby didn’t chart it, and there hasn’t been much scientific interest in it since then.”
“Why not?” Tim asked.
“Because no one is lining up to toil in the extreme heat of a remote desert to study meteorite impacts,” Ana said.
“Can’t say I blame them,” Tim quipped, squinting up at the rising sun.
“We are,” Nate said, “and we’re in the right place to start searching. You see there?” He pointed across the desert toward an almost imperceptible line. “Those are the ancient camel trails. They run from the east and then disappear in this area.”
“Where Ubar was supposed to have been,” Wally said.
“Precisely. And we’re standing over the underground river from the report that Ana provided. The same one that feeds the treasure well down south where we refilled our jerry cans. And somewhere out there to the north, along this line, is the well that Philby found.” He stared out over the desert into the distance. “He was so close.”
