Page 153 - The Tigris Expedition

The Tigris Expedition
expert knowledge of all those foreign materials, where to locate
them and how to work them. The shipwrights and seamen of the
earliest god-kings buried at Ur must therefore have been of the
same high standard as the goldsmiths and the jewellers.
No wonder that people of today who have heard of spacecraft but
never of ma-gur could be fooled into believing that these god-men
of sudden appearance had come to Mesopotamia from outer space.
We ourselves had every reason to feel humble hanging on a rope
behind Slavsk.
The Russians continued to haul us at sailing speed towards
Bahrain. The abnormal winter wind did not relax its grip on the
gulf. During the day it maintained its southerly direction in varying
strength. In the early evening Norman took his radio equipment
out from under his mattress. He had a radio appointment to
transmit our whereabouts to the bbc with the set they had provided,
but was unable to reach any coastal station. He again rigged up his
own set and immediately had the eager voices of radio amateurs
raining down upon him from all directions. Our station call-sign,
LI2B, was the same as formerly used onKon-Tiki and Ra and a sort
of collector’s item to amateurs able to establish two-way contact.
So whenever Norman called blindly his earphones sounded like a
disturbed wasps’ nest, with the humming of numerous distant
voices who wanted contact. But as soon as he had answered one of
them, all the others got off the air and waited for the next chance to
come in. As an enthusiastic radio ham Norman spent all the evening
accommodating eagerly calling amateurs from east and west, north
and south, with the standard exchange of international codes for
identity, locality, strength and clarity of contact.
On one occasion Norman was about to answer a call when
another station broke in and said: ‘Don’t answer this one, or you
will get a lot of trouble!’ The first station then came back, saying:
‘This is a hobby, not politics!’ Norman was immediately on the air
again and said that he agreed: radio amateurs had the right to run
their hobby in any country; we were for international friendship
irrespective of frontiers; this was a hobby, not politics. He then
began to contact the first station again, which proved to be in Israel,
and this time all the stations on the air held their peace until the
exchange of customary phrases had been completed. Norman had
won a peaceful victory on the air. Rashad looked at him in silence as
they sat down together at the table. Norman was the son of a Jewish
family. Rashad was an Arab from Iraq, the nation most hostile to
the state of Israel. Perhaps their ancestors had been in boats together

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