Page 226 - The Tigris Expedition

We Search for a Pyramid and Find Makati
coast of Oman in the direction of Muscat. Our kerosene lamps and
the faint blips at our masthead seemed like glow-worms compared
to the bright electric lights on all the big ships that passed us. For
this reason one of the helmsmen had to run up in front of the sail
every three or four minutes during the night, to watch for arriving
lights and to play with our strongest flashlight on the sail to disclose
our own whereabouts to such ships as still had human beings on
lookout. _ . ,
On my watch a huge and brilliantly lit oil platform was slow y
towed past us on its way into the gulf. I counted lights from up to
twelve ships at a time; they came and went and rushed so fast that
we swung in their wakes as in a hammock, and with a fast and crazy
rhythm that we had never experienced in any ocean. Ocean swells
give a sturdy reed-ship a slow and pleasant motion, soothing to the
most restless mind; even the short and choppy seas of the stormy
gulf dug up troughs wide enough for an almost decent rolling as
compared with the hasty, nerve-racking rocking in the man-made
wakes of the superships. We felt maltreated, as if put into a
cocktail-shaker, or as if galloping without reins on an unsaddled
bull. Everything inside us seemed shaken to bits; we were vexed
and harassed by tumbling about on deck or in bed, unable to set
proper sea-legs or lie down without rolling over like barrels. The
short intervals of calm sea between sudden wakes, cross-wakes,
backwash from other wakes, and the next set of wakes, made the
fitful rocking the more disturbing.
Bridge-poles and mast-legs started a regular stilt-dancing in the
sockets that held them to the reeds, and without wind-lift the heavy
sail rolled with the masts and helped strain and stretch all stays and
guys and other cordage securing rigging, cabins and bridge to the
reeds. Every time a huge tanker chased by at twenty knots the
sudden jerks, throwing us from side to side, were so rough that we
feared something would break loose from the deck bundles. The
two heavy rudder-oars again hammered left and right inside the
steering forks, until either of these thick blocks split into two and
had to be adjusted with new rope and wooden wedges. The brief
encounter with the police boat hardly improved this slightly jerky
condition of our woodwork, but in calm sea the straddle-mast and
bridge-poles stood as steady as any man setting sea-legs.
The day after the collision we lost sight of the wild mountains of
northern Oman, but in the afternoon we came close enough inshore
to sec low land with a few scattered tall trees. The landscape \\ as so
flat that the invisible waterfront almost certainly had to be a long
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