Page 261 - The Tigris Expedition

The Tigris Expedition
Before we sailed from Oman he sent an emergency cable to the
consortium. We comforted him with the prospect of borrowing a
film camera from Toru or Gherman, who each had one, although
theirs could admittedly not record sound. But this underestimate of
Norris’s professional needs made him even more depressed. The
whole reason for his presence on board was that the National
Geographical Society and wqed had sent him to shoot an expedi­
. tion documentary with synchronised speech and sound, and a
common 16mm camera could not fulfil this requirement.
I With his camera unusable, Norris had struggled as one of the
eight rowers when we left Muscat, but despite this struggle, when
we were safe out at sea and he still had been unable to repair his
!' camera, he wanted to get back to shore and airfreight his equipment
for repair. For a moment I was almost glad there was no sound
recorder working as most of us had begun to raise our voices.
Norris insisted on being put ashore. The rest of us could not care a
damn about the film at that moment; with the wind so good all we
wanted was to get into the open sea and away from cliffs and moles.
So we sailed with latent problems stowed away on board. Now Nor­
man was angry as Norris gave him endless emergency messages
to transmit via Bahrain Radio, urging spare parts or new equip­
ment to be shipped by air from England or the USA to Muscat
and then by surface vessel to some rendezvous in the Gulf of Oman.
1 I agreed with Norman; it would take hours to get the messages
through and we had to get away from the Arabian peninsula. It
would be madness to jeopardise the whole expedition for a camera.
The result was that the tall, good-humoured Norris seemed to
shrink into himself; he gazed in the direction where land had been as
if planning to swim ashore, now that his special services with us had
come to an abrupt end. It gradually dawned upon me that this was
serious: Norris was growing more frustrated with every passing
moment. Norman managed to transmit his desperate messages via
Bahrain. The Bahrain operator, Frank de Souza, seemed by now to
be part of our group; he was the only person in the outside world
who managed to hear our confounded consortium transmitter and
come back with a reply. I began to hope that something would
happen to help Norris while we were still within reach of Oman,
before we sailed past the final cape.
We had successfully wriggled our way through the shipping
lane and were beyond it, but we entered it again as we steered
closer to land in the direction of Ras al Hadd. By night we felt as if
we were travelling across prairies with light from scattered homes
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