Page 186 - The Tigris Expedition

To Dilmun, the Land of Noah
unloading as soon as the water went away. No wonder these people
built temples in gratitude to the gods of nature.
No sooner were we back from Jidda when Detlefwas back from
Hamburg. We rolled out the two sails on the asry mole for Rashad
to add the emblem of the sun rising behind a stepped ziggurat. This
symbol seemed all the more appropriate now that we had seen that
such a structure had been built by the maritime sun-worshippers of
Dilmun too. It was a relief to see our original mainsail back in one
piece again, small and easy to handle. But I took an instinctive
dislike to the new colossus when we all gazed at its size. Even
Norman and Dctlef scratched their heads while Rashad painted on
it a huge pyramid.
It was Christmas in a Moslem world and irrespective of beliefs or
disbeliefs the eleven of us celebrated the occasion in a dignified
manner together ashore. Very early on the morning of 26
December we reloaded our ship for departure from Dilmun and,
we hoped, from the Sumerian Gulf. Norman and I had barely
managed to solve another major problem before the big new sail
arrived: we had to prepare a very long yardarm to hoist it on.
Khalifa had shown us that we could choose from literally hundreds
of abandoned dhow masts and yardarms in the docks and lumber
yards of Bahrain. But as the weeks passed and we had seen them all
they were cither too short, too crooked, or too worm-eaten and
rotten. At the eleventh hour Khalifa found us an old carpenter who
helped us splice two fairly healthy booms together to form the
forty-foot yardarm our new sail would require.
Rashad declared his paint dry; we tied the new colossus to the
new yardarm and would be ready to depart as soon as we got this
important renovation on board. When the canvas was folded to the
wood, it took all eleven of us to lift it off the ground. My scepticism
grew into clear disapproval. It seemed as heavy as an elephant. It
began to dawn upon me that we had acquired a white elephant.
‘This is crazy,’ I shouted to Norman. ‘It will break our mast.’
Norman wiped his perspiring forehead. Poor man, he had been
struck again with an inexplicable fever and was ill for the fifth day in
a row. He admitted that the sail was too heavy. He had told Detlef
to order the thickest cotton canvas the Hamburg sailmakcrs had,
but had never realised they had anything this thick. We managed to
drag ourselves in procession with our burden to the edge of the
mole alongside Tigris, which was down below.
‘How shall we get it on board?’
‘We’ll have to hoist it across with the halyard.’

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