Page 133 - The Tigris Expedition

The Tigris Expedition
disappeared around the island and no other living soul could be seen
anywhere.
Norman had gone to sleep at last after sending a blind radio
message into the night, repeating several times the same few words
we had sent with our flashlights. Detlef refused to sleep, as if it were
his fault that we had lost the anchors. He was on the bridge, fiddling
with the tiny radio box, when he heard a faint voice calling ‘Tigris,
Tigris, Tigris’ followed by babbling in an unintelligible language.
He called Rashad, who could only confirm that the voice did not
speak in Arabic. Then the two plainly heard the word ‘Slavsk’.
‘Yuri! Yuri!’
In two jumps Yuri was on the bridge. Slavsk was gone. Nothing.
Norman came and called ‘Slavsk, Slavsk, Slavsk’. Suddenly a voice
was there again: Captain Igor! Clearly now, so that we all heard
him. Yuri’s face beamed with pride and happiness in the first glow
of the rising sun as he translated: Slavsk was already weighing
anchor. Igor wanted our position. Yuri also learnt that a twenty-
knot wind from the same southerly direction was expected in our
part of the gulf that day.
As daylight broke we saw a few small huts far apart along the
coast. No smoke. No people. The sea around us was not blue and
clear like it was yesterday, but greyish-green, filled with sand or
mud. Sloppy brown branches of loose seaweed were dancing
everywhere in the choppy sea. We were deep inside the Failaka
shallows, with hardly room for a flounder to swim under our ship.
As we gathered in high spirits around the plank table to enjoy
Carlo’s Sunday morning oatmeal porridge we noted that all the
seaweed suddenly began to swim. As new clusters came towards us
from the bow, the others went away behind the stern. As we
checked the nearest cluster, we found it just circling up and down
with the waves in the same grainy water. It was Tigris that had
suddenly picked up speed and resumed the drift with the south
; wind.
The tide had played us another trick. The incoming high tide had
pulled in the same direction as the wind and at the same time lifted
the sea anchor free from whatever it had caught. Full of muddy clay
and heavy as a sack of cement it now dragged along the bottom and
we would hit the reefs before Slavsk had time to reach us. The drift
was straight for the island.
We had a choice. If we did nothing we would soon be wrecked
against the limestone reefs and cliffs of Failaka. If we hoisted sail
and used our rudder-oars we could take the wind athwart from
112