Page 258 - The Tigris Expedition

Tigris and the Superships: the Voyage to Pakistan
Wc had been up before sunrise to try to carry out this manoeuvre
and fight our way out of the big harbour before the wind rose and
other people got out of bed. But somehow the news of our
departure had spread faster than wc were able to take farewell of all
our local friends, and people who could not get in through the
police gates had lined up on the main city road along the bay. The
crews of all the ships in the harbour were also standing as silent
spectators when at last we began to move, pulling our bow away
from the pier with the anchor rope and pushing off.
At first nothing seemed to happen. Then slowly we began to
move. Very slowly. Scarcely one knot, but enough to give me
steerage. The Tigris, sail down, crawled out from our dock and
wormed its way out through the labyrinth of concrete piers and
steel hulls. Filthy flotsam began to circle and drift behind us in the
harbour. Three blasts of the siren resounded from each ship in turn
as we reached and passed it - salutes from modern ocean craft to a
replica of their earliest ancestor as it struggled to reach the sea. Two
helicopters circled overhead as if to check that we really left. His
Majesty the Sultan in his escorted car chased along the city road to
Port Qaboos, where he turned around and dashed back to his
Muscat castle.
All this was a stimulus to the toiling oarsmen, and the sudden
silence was almost oppressive as we left the last ship behind and the
long way lay open to the outer breakwater. It was eight in the
morning when we were ready to cast loose, and by nine we began to
realise the dimensions of this huge modern harbour, for we still had
to clear the outer breakwater with a faint sea-breeze now impeding
our advance.
By this time the men, untrained in rowing, began to feel really
exhausted. Tigris was indeed grossly undermanned. The ancient
rock-carvings rarely showed less than twenty oars in the water on a
reed-ship of fair size, sometimes twice that many, and we had only
eight. With twenty we would have flown through the harbour with
three times the speed and little effort.

35. Young and old in Ormara bay. The man sleeps in a vaulted hut
and the woman uses a scale, both of the types used from
Mesopotamia to the Indus Valley four or five thousand years ago.
36. The ruins of Mohcnjo-Daro, major city of the long-lost Indus
Valley civilisation which suddenly emerged about 2500 bc and as
mysteriously disappeared about a millennium later.
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