Page 221 - The Tigris Expedition

I

The Tigris Expedition
But Rashad’s warning was of no avail. The starlit sky was
blackened as the pointed tip of a bow filled the starboard door
opening, and in the same second everyone was awakened by a
violent shock in the mattresses.
‘Get away! You’re breaking our ship!’ Rashad yelled in despair
from the bridge, while the rest of us responded to the assault with a
i regular war cry.
Yuri’s legs were along the door opening where the bow entered,
and half-asleep, hearing Rashad’s voice, he raged at him through the
cane wall: ‘Tell them to scramble away, these arc international
waters!’
‘They arc not,’ Rashad retorted angrily. ‘We are right up under
the Oman coast, and besides, you don’t tell people to scramble
away when they are pointing a machine-gun at you!’
We now began to understand the situation. But not so our
uninvited visitors. I have never seen eyes as big and white with fear
and bewilderment as when we caught sight of the black face of the
uniformed Omani policeman at the wheel of the vessel the moment
he made full speed astern and left the door open for us to crawl out
like angry dogs from a kennel. We had been called upon by a
patrolling police vessel with three armed men from Oman’s coast­
guard. The crazy blips from our masthead, intended to keep ships
away, must have had the opposite effect. They had arrived for an
inspection. But coming close enough to sec the golden reed bundles
of our Sumerian ma-gur the policemen had completely forgotten to
steer or stop. No vessel like the one showing up in the searchlight’s
beam had sailed in local waters since long before the days of the
Prophet. Too confused to steer, they rammed us amidships so that
reeds and bamboo shook. Their surprise did not diminish when a
roar as from the falling Tower of Babel, in nine languages, arose
from inside the two ‘cubes’, and bearded savages, angry as lions,
crawled forth everywhere. The three stunned policemen backed
their vessel away faster than they had come.
Never will they sec again so many angry men swarming out so
fast on hands and knees from two tiny bamboo cabins. Half asleep,
but boiling over with mingled fear and fury, we all hurried to the
i starboard bundles expecting to find the side of Tigris damaged
beyond repair. Confronted with eleven men raising their fists and
roaring in a multitude of languages, of which they gathered the
meaning at least in Arabic and English, the three bewildered
patrol-men just went on backing away until they disappeared in the
dark behind our accompanying dhow.

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