158 THE EMPTY QUARTER

to the legendary city, and I was particularly intrigued by the
form in which its name appeared—Aubar, the plural of
Wabr}- He pronounced the first syllable as a deep rich 0,
a letter which, of course, does not occur in the Arabic alpha-
bet.

Ya'qut, the classical authority for the legend (which he
repeated from Hamdani and others), gives the name as
Wabar ; and it was certainly in that form that I first heard
tell of the city from the companions of my journey down to
Wadi Dawasir in 1918. On that occasion Jabir ibn Faraj
had told me of a wondrous block of iron ' like a camel'—he
probably meant in size though I thought he might be refer-
ring to a statue—in the midst of the southern sands. He
declared he had seen it himself and gave me an indication—
bearing and distance from the Aflaj where we were at the
time—of its position. In speaking of this block of iron he had
used the term * Hadida' which I took to be merely the Arabic
for' a piece of iron,' while he had also mentioned that it was in
the midst of some ruins called Jafura. From another source—
either from another of my companions or somebody met in
the Aflaj—I heard of a group of ruins in the same sands, from
which Badawin had been reported as picking up relics of
human antiquity. For this locality also I got a bearing and
distance from the Aflaj together with the name of Wabar and
the details of its legend, which was supposed to link the
ancient city of 'Ad ibn Shaddad (? Kin'ad) with some (com-
paratively recent) ruins known as Qusairat 'Ad on the border
of the Aflaj province.

In such circumstances information is inevitably elicited
somewhat vaguely and in driblets, but I pieced the material
together as best I could and published the results of my
investigations with an account of my first wanderings in
Arabia.2 I also attempted to indicate roughly on the map
the resulting positions of the two localities under the names
of Jafura and Wabar.

The former name caused Major Cheesman a good deal of

1 Meaning * camel-hair * or ' coney.' Of. Ahl al Wabar=people of hair-
tents (vide Burton, Arabian Nights, note on 977th Night).
The Heart of Arabia, Vol. H, pp. 221-2.