10
We rounded up our hadabs and continued on our journey. An hour later we crested a sand dune some hundred feet high and looked down on a valley. Below us was a large bowl-shaped depression, and in the center stood a walled city of dried mud. The yellow tint of the thirty-foot thick walls was like a beacon in the empty desert. Beyond the walls lay a maze of single-floor houses that were packed tightly together. Narrow streets, placed like an afterthought among the hodgepodge of houses, wound their way through the houses to the center of the city.
In the middle of the metropolis where all roads met there arose an acropolis. The vertical climb rose some two hundred feet above the desert floor and its steep slopes were speckled with rocks and worn brick walls. The buildings scattere
