Page 112 - The Tigris Expedition

Problems Continue
from their shores in the winter months, and could return with their
cargo when the winds changed in the summer.
But the weather of recent years seemed to have forgotten earlier
habits. It was as if the age of the sailing vessels was gone anyhow.
Indeed, the winter rains had surprised us by arriving at the Garden
of Eden over a month too early. In Fao, the Arabs had warned us
that during the last two years the winds had been crazy. And now
we had a feeling of being stuck in displaced doldrums.
We just had to accept the flimsy and feeble gusts we got and
decide on a steering course. This was the place where we should
have had some Sindbad-type with us. Until we had left the river I
had hoped to find a dhow-sailor who would join us, just any
old-timer from the gulf, but one who knew the tides and shallows
close to the coasts. Such people were gone with the wind. The last
vessels we saw in the river was a whole fleet of old gaily-coloured
dhows anchored on the Iranian side, but every one of them had the
mast sawn away and a motor installed instead.
The-Sumerian world had changed at sea as much as ashore. Sand
had conquered their fields and cities and filled their navigation
canals. Silt had changed their coastline by adding mud-flats to their
waterfront. And their open water was no longer a playground for
many kinds of silent watercraft, gliding about propelled by oars and
sails. Speedboats and supertankers had taken over. The clamour of
motors and engines was everywhere. Independent of winds and
reefs, Arabs and their neighbours and visitors coasted around oil
installations and criss-crossed a network of modern shipping lanes.
This once peaceful area beyond the Mesopotamian coast had turned
into the worst possible place for novices to fool about in, experi­
menting with a reed-ship’s steering.
Certainly, we had to keep out of the way of others. We had to sail
away from this vast stretch of water separating the Arabian penin­
sula from the rest of Asia. The plan was to follow the Arabian side as
close to shore as reefs and shallows would permit. There the
streams of big ships would not interfere with our free movement.
Our two navigators had carefully studied the charts to find the
best route beyond the traffic and clear of oil platforms and islets.
Norman suggested steering 135°. Detlef proposed 149 . But a voice
from the top of the mast recommended that we first take a good
look ahead. We did. The morning haze was still quite thick But in
the binoculars we detected ships at anchor wherever we looked.
From left to right I counted forty and then caught sight of some-
thing almost frightening: a colossal and lofty oil platform with a
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