Page 204 - The Tigris Expedition

We Gain Control of Tigris
snake as passenger. All the wood was smeared and ^ n
from the seas that tossed it about. None of us had eve seen
pollution this thick out of sight of land. The contrast to the restot
the gulf was so marked that it made us fear that some 1
disaster had occurred. No local dhow would willingly dispose o a
this precious timber, nor would a dhow probably carry sue i
quantities of crude oil on board. Only with difficulty did we avoid
collision with some of the heavy logs and beams that rose like
torpedoes on the waves. The smaller ones we could not dodge.
Never had we raced this fast with a raft-ship. Detlef measured our
speed as more than four knots.
Time and again we lost steering control but were able to return
on to course. The moment the sail threatened to flap the helmsman
on the leeward side of the steering platform had to manage the tiller
with a single hand and use the other to pull sheet and brace until the
sail turned back into the wind. Palms and fingers were scored and
blistered by rope. Carlo and Yuri could hardly open their fists; they
were invariably called upon when rope-fighting was at its worst.
Attentive to the rigging, and searching for the dhow, we were
racing ahead at full speed when we heard Asbjorn’s calm voice from
the steering bridge: ‘Look, what is that? Is it a cloud?’
The sky was blue above us, but there were white cloud-banks
along the entire horizon ahead. Cloud-banks, but what the devil did
we see above the clouds? I grabbed the binoculars and what Asbjorn
had asked about jumped clearly into view. For a moment I could
hardly believe my eyes. Above the cloud-banks, raised above the
earth, was land, like another indistinct world of its own. Solid rock
was sailing up there, still so far away that the lower parts seemed
transparent and did not even reach down to the clouds; the upper
ridge seen against the clear sky was of a different shade of blue.
What we all were staring at seemed far too high up to be real. Were
we heading for the Himalayas? Was this an optical distortion, a Fata
Morgana?
Our navigation chart had given us no warning of what we were
to see. It showed nothing behind the coastlines. Land masses were
all equally white. We were so tuned in to the low profiles of the Iraqi
plains and the mud-flats and limestone shelves we had so far seen in
the gulf area, that we were not mentally prepared for a spectacular
sj£^t kke this. We dug out of our boxes a land-map of Oman. It
s owed that this Arabian dagger, with the Hormuz Strait at its tip,
rose steeply to an elevation of 6,400 feet above the gulf. This was
what we saw ahead of us. The whole peninsula was a lofty

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