Post by Catsmate on Apr 7, 2016 12:26:12 GMT
"Where there is no water, that is the Empty Quarter; no man goes thither"
Bedouin saying.
Bedouin saying.
The Empty Quarter (Rub' al Khali) is the name given to the vast desert wasteland in southern Saudi Arabia known, considered one of the most desolate places on Earth. It's the largest contiguous sand desert at more than 650,000 km2, more than twice the area of the British Isles, and encompasses most of the southern third of the Arabian Peninsula
The terrain is covered with rolling, red-orange sand dunes, up to 250m high, with patches of stony gravel and gypsum plains. Climatically the area is described as "hyper-arid", very hot (averaging 47°C) and very dry (less than 25mm of rainfall per year).
In 1932, Harry St. John "Jack" Philby explored the area, searching for remains of the legendary city of Ubar, described in the Qur'an as being destroyed by God for defying the Prophet Hud.
- Which itself has possibilities. Was there perhaps a city in the desert, destroyed in early history by some titanic catastrophe? Alien intervention? Meddling with Things Man Was Not Meant To Know?
- Ubar is also, for those familiar with Lovecraft and Call of Cthulhu, known as Iram of the Pillars and is an important part of the Cthulhu Mythos linked to the Nameless City
- More mundanely some archaeologists believe that the legend is linked to the remains of a fort/settlement at Shisr in Dhofar which appears to have been devastated by a geological upheaval, collapsing into a sinkhole.
Basing his hunt on references by local tribesmen to "al-Hadida" (place of iron) Philby believed there would be evidence of the city, and artefacts to
The journey took about five weeks, through terrain so inhospitable that even the expedition's camels were dying but on 2 February 1932 Philby and his party arrived at an area about a half a square kilometre in size that was littered with chunks of rock; white sandstone, black meteoric glass and lumps of iron meteorite.
A volcano in the midst of the Rub' al Khali! And below me, as I stood on that hill-top transfixed, lay the twin craters, whose black walls stood up gauntly above the encroaching sand like the battlements and bastions of some great castle. These craters were respectively about 100 and 50 yards in diameter, sunken in the middle but half choked with sand, while inside and outside their walls lay what I took to be lava in great circles where it seemed to have flowed out from the fiery furnace. Further examination revealed the fact that there were three similar craters close by, though these were surmounted by hills of sand and recognizable only by reason of the fringe of blackened slag round their edges.
- Philby is a fascinating person. An expert linguist, diplomat (he worked for the British Colonial Office on various projects), spy and Civil Servant, he was also a dedicated socialist in a period when it wasn't yet fashionable. He served as Minister of Internal Security in the British Mandate of Iraq, spent much of the 1920s and 1930s exploring the desert, converted to Islam in 1930 and espoused a mix of pan-Arabianism that was compatible with Zionism.
- He was a classmate of Jawaharlal Nehru (later prime minister of India), a cousin of Bernard Montgomery (best man at his wedding), he was taught the fundamentals of espionage by Gertrude Bell, worked with T. E. Lawrence in policing the British Mandate of Palestine (where he met Allen Dulles, first Director of the CIA), advised the British government on the matter of Palestine meeting Winston Churchill, King George V, Edward, Prince of Wales, Walter Rothschild, and Chaim Weizmann. An interesting contact for someone in the Middle East in the Pulp era. During WW2 he was arrested and interned under Defence Regulation 18B as he was suspected of dealings with Nazi Germany.
- His only son from his two marriages, Kim, is rather more famous. Or infamous. His father heavily influenced Kim Philby's career and the son spied on him for the SIS...
It wasn't until 1966 that shifting of the desert sands revealed the mass: a National Geographic reported named Thomas Abercrombie wrote:
"Rumor has become a reality; the biggest iron meteorite ever found in Arabia lay at our feet ... shaped roughly like a saucer, it measured about four feet in diameter and two feet thick at center. A little quick geometry puts its weight at almost two and a half tons".
The impact craters are relatively recent and are probably linked to stories of "fireballs" in the sky in either or both, 1863 or 1891.
So far the story is pretty mundane, if interesting. Of course in the Whoniverse an impactor might be far more than a mere chunk of rocky iron that's been speeding through space for millennia.
Game use.
1. Did Philby find something far more than odd bits of rock in the desert back in 1932? What happened to them? Dis he realise what he'd found or was it not until the experts at the British Museum (linked to Torchwood perhaps?) examined the samples that their true nature was discovered? Pieces of a spaceship, strange minerals, whatever.
2. Did this lead to a clandestine expedition to the Empty Quarter before the next recorded one in 1937? What did they unearth?
3. Did something infect Philby during this time in the desert? Or others of his party perhaps.
4. While negotiating to preserve Arab neutrality in WW2 did Philby offer something more than Arabian oil (shipped via neutral Spain) to Germany? What was it? Did they accept? And what happened to it?
5. Or did the Nazis send their own people to explore the Wabar craters? Perhaps linked to Eichman's activities in the Middle East in the late 1930s (he may have met Philby).
6. And just what did fall to Earth in the desolate Arabian desert in the nineteenth century? A spacecraft damaged by an asteroid impact perhaps? Or a fragment of a asteroid ship passing through our solar system.
7. How much of all this did his son know?
Comments? Ideas? Suggestions?