Photographic Memory

Geologists Robert Maby and Syd Bowers unpacked their 1948 company Ford to see how much field equipment it could carry while on a geological expedition in the northern Rub‘ al-Khali in the early 1950s. The geologists made frequent trips to study the series of wells linking Baghdad to the Holy City of Makkah, starting with a statigraphic well in 1954 outside Rafha, near the Iraqi border and astride the historic Darb Zubaydah — a site named after the wife of the 8th century Abbasid Caliph Harun al-Rashid.