Page 103 - The Tigris Expedition

The Tigris Expedition

As night approached they insisted on stopping. They showed us
where to spend the night and told us to throw out the anchor. We
did, near a bend where a South Korean and a Monrovian ship were
anchored near the Iranian bank. Detlef threw out the anchor, but the
rope did not follow. When he pulled in he straightway had the
anchor in his hand, dripping with mud. I tried to twist the starboard
rudder-oar. It sat like a spoon in butter, as did the port-side rudder
too. Rashad yelled to the pilots that we were in shallow water. They
yelled back that just where we were was the deepest part of the
river. We threw a line and asked them to tow us off. They tried, but
failed. There was little more than a metre down to the loose mud
that began to suck the whole bottom fast, like a quagmire. Even our
punt poles sank into the loose bottom and were hard to pull up
again.
We had to wait for high tide, said our pilots. But they admitted
that they did not know when high tide would come until they saw
it. It was never the same one day as the next, and tidal hours were
different here from further up the river. We all poked our noses
close to the dirty water. It did not move. It was high tide right now.
In fact the water was slowly turning and beginning to run away into
the gulf. We fought desperately, but cither we were sinking ever
deeper into the mud or else the mud was building up quickly
around us. It was a frightening situation. Led by Carlo and Yuri, we
managed to lift the rudder oars up and tied them on so that they did
! not reach deeper than the bottom of the vessel.
We sat there as the moon came up and had the horrible feeling of
being sucked down into some bottomless liquid clay by invisible
octopus tentacles. In the night big steamers, brilliantly lit, passed us
going up river. At least we knew they had professional local pilots
who certainly held them well away from our banks.
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In the moonlight Detlef and Toru crossed the river by dinghy to
the other side and asked the crew of the Monrovian ship if they
would help pull us off with their winch. They politely refused, from
fear of the Iranian police, as we were on the Iraqi side. Our two
envoys then rowed over to the Koreans. They were willing to
stretch their own rope to the midline of the river, but not into Iraqi
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waters. Anyway, we had to wait for the next high tide as they
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would otherwise pull our bundles to pieces. As both ships gave very
contrary estimates of local tidal hours our two men came back from
the Iranian side without result.
The situation got worse hour by hour. Surely our reeds would
gradually be buried in running river silt.
!
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