Page 279 - The Tigris Expedition

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The Tigris Expedition
was ready to go up, we set our course as close into the wind as our
steering with the added topsail permitted. We saw that the sea
around us was once more polluted. Bathing was only permitted on
a rope. For the first time we found that our side bundles were
covered not only with slippery green sea grass and soft-shelled
white goose-barnacles with long pink gills waving, but also with
1 ! large colonies of small conical barnacles of the common type, hard
and sharp as shark’s teeth, which scratched us badly if we did not
take care. Clearly this was another form of stowaway that had
found time to take hold in port while still only larvae, because
Tigris, unlike Ra, had spent days in harbour in Bahrain and Muscat.
I It was equally refreshing to body and mind to hang alongside our
i floating home and watch how beautifully the bundles maintained

‘J their shape and how high they still floated. The midline of the
3 bundles was scarcely below water level when we swam around
s Tigris for a check-up on a calm day seventy-three days after the
launching.
The weather forecast that day for the Gulf of Oman and the
I Arabian Sea had been ne wind at ten to twenty knots, but it was
dead calm. Norman now told Frank on Bahrain Radio that their
forecasts had invariably been completely wrong. But strangest of
all, the famous monsoon had not blown on our sails for a single
whole day. The most usual wind came from Iran, but we also had
! winds that varied between se and sw. No matter from which side
the wind blew, we struggled to keep a fairly steady course between
60° and 90°, that is to the north of east.
We succeeded. On the day after the calm Norman and Detlef
both shot the sun in its noon position and placed us at 23°50/ N and
62 05 e, about seventy miles off the Asiatic mountain coast known
as Makran. The barren and inhospitable coast of Makran begins in
Iran as the northern shore of the Gulf of Oman, and stretches well
into Pakistan, where it borders on the Indus Valley. Looking at the
map it struck me that Makran both phonetically and geographically
was surprisingly close to Makan. A single letter as well as the
narrow Hormuz Strait were all that separated the one from the
l other. Could it be that the legendary land of Makan had embraced
both sides of the Gulf of Oman and controlled the important
passage through the Hormuz Strait, the copper mines being in its
southern part and the northern part bordering directly on Meluhha?
This apparent possibility fascinated me as we steered eastwards,
well off the desolate Makran coast in the direction of the Indus
Valley.
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