Free Sandstorm by James Rollins

upper limbs and head had been blasted away, she recognized the figure. The life-size statue had once stood guard by a tomb in Salalah. It dated to 200 B.C . It depicted a man with an elongated object lifted to his shoulder. Some thought it looked like a rifle, but actually it was a funerary incense lamp, borne on the shoulder.
    The destruction of the statue was a tragic loss. All that remained now were the torso and two broken legs. Even these were so blasted by the heat that the sandstone had melted and hardened into a crust of glass over its surface.
    By now, others of Kara’s red-hatted forensic team gathered around them.
    The man who made the discovery pointed his metal detector at the ruined statue. “We’ll have to roll the block out of the way. See what’s under it.”
    “Do it,” Kara said with a nod. “We’ll need crowbars.”
    A pair of men slogged away toward the stash of work tools.
    Safia stepped protectively forward. “Kara, wait. Don’t you recognize this statue?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Look closer. This is the statue your father discovered. The one found buried by that tomb in Salalah. We need to preserve what we can.”
    “I don’t care.” Kara pulled her aside by the elbow. “What’s important is that there could be a clue to what happened to my father under there.”
    Safia tried to pull her aside, keeping her voice low. “Kara…you can’t really think anything of this has to do with your father’s death?”
    Kara waved to the men with the crowbars. “Give me one of those.”
    Safia remained where she was. Her gaze swept around the other rooms of the gallery, contemplating it all in a new light. All her work, the collection, the years spent in study…was it more than just a memorial to Reginald Kensington for Kara? Had it also been a quest? To gather research material all in one place, to determine what actually happened to her father out in the desert so long ago.
    Safia remembered the story from when they were both girls, told amid much weeping. Kara had been convinced something supernatural had killed her father. Safia knew the details.
    The nisnases …the ghosts of the deep desert.
    Even as girls, she and Kara had investigated these tales, learning all they could about the mythology of the nisnases. Legend said they were all that remained of a people that once inhabited a vast city in the desert. It went by many names: Iram, Wabar, Ubar. The City of a Thousand Pillars. Mentions of its downfall could be found in the Koran, in the tales of The Arabian Nights, and among the Alexander Books. Founded by the great-grandchildren of the biblical Noah, Ubar was a rich and decadent city, filled with wicked people who dabbled in dark practices. Its king defied the warnings of a prophet named Hud, and God smote the city, driving it into the sands, never to be seen again, becoming a veritable Atlantis of the deserts. Afterward, tales persisted that the city still remained under the sands, haunted by the dead, its citizens frozen intostone, its fringes plagued by evil djinns and the even nastier nisnases, savage creatures of magical powers.
    Safia had thought Kara had set aside such myths as mere fables. Especially when investigators had attributed her father’s death to the sudden opening of a sinkhole in the desert. Such death traps appeared not uncommonly in the region, swallowing lone trucks or the unwary wanderer. The bedrock below the desert was mostly limestone, a porous rock pocked by caverns worn by the receding water table. Collapses of these caverns occurred regularly, often accompanied by the exact phenomenon described by Kara: a thick, roiling column of dust above a whirlpool of swirling sand.
    A few steps away, Kara grabbed one of the crowbars, meaning to add her own shoulder to the effort. It seemed she had not been convinced by those earlier geologists’ explanation.
    Safia should have guessed as much, especially with Kara’s dogged persistence about ancient Arabia,