Page 144 - The Tigris Expedition

To Dilmun, the Land of Noah
And his men began to throw us a new tow-line from their tall ship.
No matter how they threw it, even with a life-ring on the end, it
was sucked in by the colossal propeller, and so were we. The
propeller had to churn around, otherwise the rolling ship would be
as much out of control as we were without a sail. Even with the
engine of Slavsk running, its tall iron wall was swaying over our
dancing reed-ship while both vessels were tossed to and from each
other. Our waving bipod mast and our elevated reed ends were
close to being crushed from above whenever we tried to fish the
rope end out of the whirls of the propeller. It was two hours before
we managed to toss our own thin line up to the men on the rolling
ship and pull it back with the thick tow-rope tied to it. Captain Igor
shouted that the ship’s engineer had unfortunately been tempted to
raise the speed because going dead slow in these seas was harmful to
the propeller shaft. But they would never again exceed two knots.
We also made clear that we wanted to hoist our sail and continue on
our own the moment the wind turned to normal and permitted us
to set course for Bahrain.
We on Tigris were all curious to see our position in relation to
Failaka and Bahrain, and Norman rolled out a very illustrative map
sent us by the National Geographic Society. It was a sort of
historical map entitled Lands of the Bible Today, with archaeological
annotations such as Abraham’s route from Ur and other pertinent
data taken from the Bible as well as from archaeological finds. The
‘Persian Gulf’ showed up beautifully in blue with yellow islands.
Norman put his finger at our approximate position. He then read
aloud the text that happened to be printed beside his finger: ‘Earliest
Sumerian records refer to shipwrights and seafaring people. Some
of man’s earliest ventures on the sea occurred in the Persian Gulf.’
This fired the curiosity of everyone. What were these records
about? Had I read them? Certainly not all. But probably all that
dealt with seafaring provided that they had been translated from
cuneiform script into European languages. Perhaps I had under­
estimated the interest of my companions in the actual background
of our adventure. We could hardly expect a better opportunity for a
quiet get-together than now as Slavsk towed us at sailing speed past
ships and oil platforms. I crawled into the cabin and came back with
a bag full of pocket notebooks replete with scribblings from my
own researches. Notes from museum exhibits and store rooms and
quotations from scientific books and learned journals, like those I
had studied in the Baghdad Museum Library. I opened them one by
one and looked for hand-written extracts underlined in red.
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