Page 230 - The Tigris Expedition

We Search for a Pyramid and Find Makan
official request
again. Once more it was Bahrain Radio. We sent an
to Gulf Agency in Muscat to help us obtain permission to land. We
told that the harbour authorities would give us their a
were
next day, but that in no circumstances would we be allowc o
come ashore anywhere except in the port of Oman’s capital,
Muscat.
There was no oil slick off the Suwadi islands; only some tiny tar
balls and bits of plastic drifted by. But when Toru again insisted on
diving to the bottom, this time to film us weighing anchor next
morning, he came up and said he could see neither rope nor anchor
at seven metres depth, for the sea was full of small white particles.
We all put goggles on and had a look. It was like watching a calm
snow-drift through a winter window. The whole mass of sea water
was on a slow move past our anchor rope in the same direction we
had sailed. The current was made visible by billions of tiny white
shreds and morsels too minute for us to identify, but looking very
like dissolved breadcrumbs or pulverised papier-mache. Where it
originated was anybody’s guess, but the current came from the
Hormuz Strait, as we had done.
At 8 a.m. we hoisted sail and left the islands. Said did not object to
our sailing on our own, but he never went out of sight. The wind
was feeble, from south-west, and gave us some leeway towards the
open sea, but the favourable local current and a new topsail Norman
had devised and hoisted on a bamboo boom helped us to keep a
steady course parallel to land. Only some big rollers came in from
the sea at irregular intervals and in groups of two or three at a time,
clearly distant salutes from the big tankers now well outside the
eastern horizon.
We followed a long low coast with the blue mountains barely
visible in the background and were passing the town of Barka when
Norman again made contact with Bahrain Radio and received a
new message from Muscat: we were not permitted to land, but the
matter was now being discussed at ‘high levels’.
At 3.15 p.m. a large patrol-vessel bearing the word ‘Police’ and
the name Haras II in European letters caught up with us from
astern. A friendly officer waved and shouted: ‘Arc you all right?’
Yes, thank you/ I shouted, and waved back from the bridge. But
my waving turned to frantic gesticulations when I saw the heavy
vessel turn to come straight for our side like a charging rhinoceros.
Fora moment I thought it was a joke, perhaps a humorous reference
to the behaviour of the other police vessel further up the coast. But I
was soon to learn that this was no joke. There was apparently
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