Page 251 - The Tigris Expedition

The Tigris Expedition
parts of the Middle East and elsewhere, man has misused his
environment by turning woodlands into deserts and rivers into
wadis. The smelting had required enormous quantities of wood that
once had been available locally. The bottom of the wadi was
smooth, water-worn river pebbles. There was no other reason for
placing the one-time capital of Oman here but the outlet of a broad
water-course from a once most important mining area.
The wide sandy beach stretched for over a hundred miles along
the local coast, open towards the ocean. We reached the white sand
in front of some modest huts of mud and reed-mats at the outskirts
of Sohar. Friendly Arab fishermen were sitting in the sun mending
nets. Old women and young girls in colourful gowns, but with
black masks on their faces, stood calmly in front of their mat walls
instead of running into hiding as in the inland villages. Out at sea
was a man in a small vessel struggling with long oars to come back
to shore. Soon he entered the moderate surf and came riding
straight up on the sand. He pulled his boat ashore, full of glittering
fish. His boat was a reed-boat, or more correctly, a boat of slender
palm-stems precisely of the type we had seen on Bahrain. There
were three more of the same kind pulled ashore where the fisher­
man came in. The name for this kind of boat was shasha. They were
now gradually disappearing. We were told that they were used for
landing cargo from the dhows which had to anchor outside.
I inspected the shasha with keen attention. They were built just
like the farteh of Bahrain, so similar in all details that we found no
difference at all but the name. Two Arab nations on opposite sides
of the Hormuz Strait had inherited the same type of watercraft, but
in times so ancient that they survived with different names.
If modern regulations had not forced us all the way down to
Muscat, we would have anchored at a convenient depth off this
beach, just as the present dhows and the former ma-gurs from Ur
and Dilmun, all of which were too big to come right in to the sand.
We could just visualise Tigris at anchor in the clean blue water
outside this beach, with the local shasha coming out to give us
I shore-to-ship service in the same way they had served merchant
. : mariners who came to load tons of copper in Sumerian times. Tigris
had been idle in the polluted water of Port Qaboos for a full week
now. The reed-ship, which according to current assumptions
would waterlog too fast to leave a river, already had seaweed
growing on its bottom as long as Neptune’s beard, and crabs and
! sea-hares were breeding among the bundles. We were in no hurry.
We were all fascinated by the rare opportunity of visiting Makan.
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