Page 227 - The Tigris Expedition

! The Tigris Expedition

beach, with offshore water shallow enough for us to anchor. But
before we made up our minds to steer towards land, Norman
shouted from his corner in the main cabin that he had succeeded in
getting two-way radio contact with a coastal station. We were told
by the authorities in Muscat to keep away from the coast of Oman
until we received permission to land. Another message was relayed
from the bbc on behalf of the consortium: Norman was told not
to use his own amateur radio for any kind of message. He was not
to give our position to the radio hams. If he failed, as hitherto, to
contact land on the special wave-length of the consortium’s trans­
ceiver, he should give no position and tell no news to the radio
! amateurs except ‘all well’.
This prohibition made Norman furious. ‘What if we get
wrecked?’ he asked and tore off his earphones.
It was still broad daylight when the dhow stopped alongside the
floats of a large fishnet which this time we carefully avoided. The
men in the dhow began pulling in the net, and to our surprise they
started picking out splashing fish that were caught in the meshes.
This done, they tied a plastic bag to one of the floats and threw the
net back into the sea. They had placed three dinars inside the bag as
payment for the fresh seafood and beckoned to Rashad to come
over in the dinghy for our share.
Shortly after, steaming fresh fish was scooped out of Carlo’s big
pot, while Torn prepared some raw cubes soaked in soya sauce,
Japanese style. It was a most pleasant surprise to those on board
who had never tasted raw fish. Toru himself looked as if he too had
come out of a frying pan, with rashes and blisters all over. As if to
console his own discomforts, he had been sitting hectically stroking
the feathers of a big, bushy-headed kingfisher that had landed on
board almost exhausted. Toru had been the first to dive overboard
that day, into a sea that proved to be packed full of a species of small
jellyfish. These tiny, glassy coelenterates were suddenly around us
in endless quantities, waving coquettishly with their violet skirts
and trailing long stinging filaments behind while shamelessly mat­
ing everywhere on the surface as if intent on filling the world’s
oceans with their own kind.
Man, too, had left evidence of his own effort to dominate sea and
land. The surface of the open water outside the entrance to the gulf
was covered by a thin rainbow-coloured oil slick. We had expected
more tar balls, but solid oil clots were small and far between. There
were more to be seen a decade earlier, when our unexpected
* i observations from Ra I and II urged us to send a message to the
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