Page 241 - The Tigris Expedition

The Tigris Expedition
from there it was easy sailing to the entrance of the gulf, with
Bahrain, Persia and Mesopotamia beyond. Exposed on the open
beach without sheltered harbour, Sohar was lost to the world when
Sultan Qaboos started modernising Oman, beginning with the new
capital. He built himself a spectacular dream castle, dominating the
former harbour of Muscat, and moved all traffic to the adjacent Port
Qaboos. His other initial efforts include so far a major international
airport, roads, public buildings and residential quarters above all in
and near the flourishing capital.
It was therefore the more interesting to me when the name Sohar
was brought up during our first evening ashore, at a dinner party
given us by the English-born General Manager of Port Qaboos,
Barry Metcalfe, and his wife Kate. Near Sohar, somebody said,
there were supposed to be small boats similar to our own. We were
just back hot and exhausted after our first day in the souk, and could
think of nothing else when the Mctcalfes and two of their neigh­
bours made us dance withjoy and gratitude under clean fresh-water
showers before we sank down, all refreshed, in deep armchairs,
balancing plates loaded with chicken curry and with huge mugs of
foaming cold beer.
It was all so good that it took me a while to realise that the
gentleman who had mentioned the bundle-boats up near Sohar was
the noted Italian archaeologist Paolo Costa, Inspector-General of
the Directorate of Antiquity in the Sultanate of Oman. In spite of
his pompous title, Costa was a most jovial and earthbound person,
and we were soon on first name terms and way back in the distant
millennia before Moslem beliefs and architecture had reached
Oman. Up north there were copper-mines dating from prehistoric
periods, said Paolo. There were also underground aqueducts, and
the hills of Oman were full of stone towers. They were burial
mounds of the same general period as those we had seen by the
thousand in Bahrain.
In southern Oman some remarkable prehistoric ruins had now
been found on the coast near the borders of South Yemen. But we
could not go there, for the Peoples Republic of South Yemen was
communistic and the Sultan’s worst enemy, so there was an almost
constant state of war in the border area.
I could no longer suppress my curiosity about the rumoured
ziggurat» and Norman moved his chair closer as I asked Paolo Costa
if it were true that a Sumerian temple-pyramid had been found in
Oman.
‘Something has been found,’ he replied to my surprise. ‘Whether

204