Page 263 - The Tigris Expedition

The Tigris Expedition
turning increasingly cast and to Norris’ delight forced us ever closer
to the mountain coast. That evening the unbelievable news came
from Frank in Bahrain that a new camera had been prepared for
Norris and would be flown to Muscat, if we could wait. What else
could we do when we saw the joy on Norris’s unshaven face - and
i the wind all on his side. We turned Tigris about and steered back
north, parallel to the coast. The uninhabitable rock walls which
emerged from the mist seemed a more compact threat than the
widely-spaced steel hulls of the shipping lane, and when the moun-
tain coast grew higher, wilder and nearer as night approached, we
orced the reed bow as far to starboard as we could take the east
wind on our return voyage up the Oman coast.
The nights and days that followed were among those which none
o us on Tigris arc ever likely to forget. We tried a rendezvous with a
is ing-vessel chartered by our agent to meet us twelve miles from
s lore, outside the isolated fishing town of Sur, hidden between the
! coastal mountains west of Ras al Hadd. But the fishing smack never
tound us, and at this position, under the lofty rocks and mountain
ranges, Norman s radio failed to get contact with either ships or
shore. Not even Frank at Bahrain, on the other side of all the
mountain ranges, could hear us now. We decided to beat north-
ri^0 ^uscat’ W^erc modem vessels would have less difficulty
i
m *[! we had no means to communicate this decision to
■ .
any o y, leaving the fishing vessel to search for us in vain,
l n113?10 Cfn do. *nJusticc to a place, and such was the case with Ras i
i a au , which in good old Norse meant ‘Landslide of Death’ to
me; a *cc°rdin8 t0 Rashad meant ‘Cape David’ in Arabic. We
sig tc t is desolate cape at night, vaguely lit by a stellar heaven and
i? 3 ghostly mist from the sea, and as we sailed close I began
i CC, * at ^nothing I had seen did more deserve the name of Death
an t is lfeless, sinister cape, standing in the midnight haze like a
giant gravestone, with a deep and empty valley, gaping like a tomb,
i 1 S,C *an vanishing into complete darkness under a veil of pale
ip . , Nothing moved but mist. There was probably a
i lnvisl c beach at the outlet from this narrow valley, and I had
mrlr try a Ending in the starlight between the steep
-f’ . Ut at c osc range the place looked so frightening that the
n^u°rS a?rccd me that we had better stand off from the
walls before it was too late.
The cape was already unpleasantly near and we tried to throw out
l! already too slow for the sea-anchor to take a hold, hanging straight
, C canvas sea"anchor to reduce our speed. But our wind-drift was

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