Page 219 - The Tigris Expedition

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The Tigris Expedition
could towards Ras al Shaikh, without any charts. Captain Said had
explained that he steered ‘by his heart*. They had first reached the
wild mountain coast more or less like us, and followed it until they
found a narrow cleft in the rock wall. Here they had steered in and
;
entered a channel where it blew so hard between the walls that
Tigris would have been unmanageable. But they had turned right
into an inner cove where Rashad felt he had entered something out
of a fairy-tale. Where the rock walls ended there was a sort of scoop
in the mountains and here was an almost prehistoric village, still
inhabited, stepped in terraces between the cliffs. Even in this
i
sheltered place the wind penetrated and blew in wild gusts as if from
bellows; but they were able to anchor beside some small fishing
boats and were totally invisible when we passed Ras al Shaikh
looking for lights. They had repaired the rudder and what else they
could with wire and wood, but all that needed welding would have
to be done in Muscat. They had come out this morning at six
o’clock to look for us, and, failing to see us they had steered north
and left the gulf by turning in a tighter curve than that of the main
shipping lane. Finally they saw us and everybody had been amazed
at the speed we had made. The food on board had been fish, rice and
curry, and the company had been good, except that they were all
close to exhaustion from pumping and repairing.
For Rashad, to be back on the sturdy Tigris was like returning
from a floating bathtub to a stabilised luxury liner, and never had
we seen such extravagance at sea as what Yuri produced from his
personal case when the sun set behind the hills of Oman: Russian
champagne and caviar, astronaut bread and turkey-a-la-Space, with
moon-cheese and a whole variety of Sputnik tubes from which we
squeezed our mouths full of pastes, creams, jams, deserts and juices
— all the pocket-size dishes that make up the menu of Yuris
countrymen when travelling away from Planet Earth. Dr Yuri
Alexandrovitch Senkevitch was a serious space scientist, occupied
with living conditions in capsules when he was not floating about at
water-level with us on prehistoric raft-ships. Whether ma-gur or
spacecraft, none of us would deny that night that there was still a lot
of fun to be had on Planet Earth. We enjoyed the Sumerian view of a
thin sliver of moon as we squeezed astronaut mouthfuls between
our jaws and celebrated the fact that we really had three very special
reasons to make the most of the evening:
Rashad was back with us. We were safe outside the gulf. It was
the last day of the year!

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