160 THE EMPTY QUARTER

reached with the specific object of finding them and with
guides professing to be able to locate them.

On the strength of the information gleaned by him Mr.
Thomas suggested on his map a ' probable site of the ancient
city of Ubar' approximately in Long. 50° 30' E. and Lat. 19°
X. That spot is more than 200 miles south-east of mine, and
it may be that there are ruins there, though the catalogue of
relics found between Mitan and Fasad by his Rashidi com-
panion Mayuf, who * had long ago forgotten the precise site/
is not particularly impressive. My own experiences did not
tempt me to divert my wanderings in that direction when I
might have done so from Shanna. Nevertheless the caravan
tracks—if they are more than camel paths leading from the
steppe pastures to waterings in the sands, which are numerous
in the neighbourhood in question—are intriguing enough and
merit consideration. To judge by their direction they might
well lead to the once important and prosperous province of
Aflaj, which would doubtless have been a customer of the
exploiters of the Qara frankincense forests. In that case
they would probably have passed through the watering of
Tuwairifa, where, as already recorded, I saw similar tracks
of the same orientation though on a narrower front. And
incidentally they could scarcely have failed to pass by or
close to my suggested site for Wabar.

At any rate Mr. Thomas, like myself in 1918, was left with
the impression of a ruinous site somewhere in the sands,
while later in his journey he was told by his Marri guide of
the very ruins that now lay before me and of the great block
of iron of which Jabir had spoken to me. At Faraja one of
his men collected some potsherds and broken glass from a
neighbouring patch of the exposed desert floor—we also
found such things at many spots on our route—and he was
told of a well called Umm al Hadid ' with a tradition of
remains—two large blocks of so-called ironstone—whence
its name/ As a paatter of fact the group of three wells
known as Umm al Hadid—one of which was actually dug by
Salim our guide in the distant past—is only two miles from
Faraja. I visited them in due course and, finding no trace
of any iron, was told that the name of the well was merely