Page 225 - The Tigris Expedition

The Tigris Expedition
reluctantly, wc all laughed it off and tried to forget the message.
! But every once in a while, when Norman and I were together on
the two tillers at the steering platform, he would acquire a day­
dreaming expression and then let slip: ‘Gee, wouldn’t that be
something, to find a Sumerian ziggurat in a land facing the Indian
Ocean!’
The topic was fully revived at Bahrain, when Geoffrey Bibby
took us to the ruins of his Dilmun temple-pyramid. It had, he
stated, all the main characteristics of a Mesopotamian ziggurat. It
was compact, stepped and sun-oriented, with lateral stairways and a
temple on top. Nothing else like it existed outside Mesopotamia.
That is, apart from ancient Mexico and Peru. Bibby, in fact, referred
to his temple as a ‘mini-ziggurat’. He had even found Mesopota­
mian artifacts at this Bahrain temple. Bahrain was almost halfway
to Oman. I ventured a bold question to Bibby: had he heard
rumours of a Sumerian ziggurat found recently in Oman?
Never. He had heard nothing of the sort.
If Bibby had not heard of it, with his key position in gulf
archaeology, then the whole story had to be invented. We tried to
forget it once more.
But Oman maintained its magic grip on both Norman and me.
Outside the gulf, when he wanted to coast southwards and over­
haul our rigging in Oman, I suspected he had not entirely forgotten
the rumoured ziggurat. It was admittedly a major reason why I
discarded the unique chance of sailing on a visit to the Indus Valley,
a decision I took with much doubt and a heavy heart.
The idea that we could do with a general overhaul before wc took
off for distant lands was not entirely unfounded. Our superstruc­
ture had suffered more from two days of rolling in the wakes of
supertankers than from the stormy waters of the unsheltered gulf.
The mountains of Oman had given us shelter from the storm raging
in the gulf from the very moment we had rounded the cape outside
the Hormuz Strait. The sea should therefore have been just as calm
as the air but for the frantic traffic. We woke up in the very midst of
the shipping lane, with ships on all sides, most of them tankers. We
were so relieved at having sailed clear of reefs and cliffs, and at
suddenly being in shelter, that we did not fully perceive that this
was the most crazy place in which to rock about in a reed-ship with
a foul wind that barely permitted us to move.
In this exposed position we celebrated New Year’s Eve. The next
night our heavy sail hung down completely slack. Most of our
progress came from a strong current that pulled us parallel to the
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