Page 283 - The Tigris Expedition

The Tigris Expedition
The weather had cleared, but there were other heavy clouds in the
making and thunder in the air. We sailed eastwards along Pakistan’s
most desolate coast and attempted no landing in an area where
. neither past nor present man could gain a foothold. No forts were
i needed here; a brief reference in the pilot book inferred that nature
had raised vertical limestone walls intersected with impassable
mangrove pallisadcs. This was perhaps the least known part of the
. Asiatic coast we could have found. We were to land, but had no idea
i of where we would end up. As the snake island of Astola sank in the
* sea behind us we saw no further sign of land before the sun set
among changing clouds.
A night of profound impressions and a feeling of high adventure
i awaited us as we said goodnight and crawled to bed in our two
i cabins. We all felt excited. Something was in the air. Not only the
\ awareness that a world unknown to us was our port-side neigh­
i bour. It was just that things did not feel quite right. We had never
r experienced a night like that in the open sea. No waves, not a sound
except peaceful snoring, grasshoppers singing, and then at intervals
the sharp splash of a fish leaping. The atmosphere was just as on a
mountain lake. It was as if the heart of the planet had stopped
beating. Perhaps it was the silence before a storm. Even the two big
seabirds were sitting motionless at either tip of our vessel as if they
were stuffed.
I was out more than once, nervously scouting for land, and each
time I seemed to bump into Carlo on a similar mission. It bothered
me that we seemed to be equally tense, and Carlo really got moody
when I rejected his idea of sounding the bottom with a piece of
string. ‘No need, we are far from land,’ I said, ‘it’s midnight, go
back to bed.’ ‘But look at the water,’ Carlo retorted, and leaned over
the side-bundle with his torch. The calni water was more white
than blue. ‘Must be mud from some river,’ I proposed. ‘We have no
string long enough to reach bottom out here.’ Somehow my
answer offended Carlo, who crawled back into the cabin visibly
unhappy and unconvinced. I remained seated outside the port-side
door opening, on the long and narrow bench we had lashed on
along either side of the cabin. Land had to be on this side, and for a
while I strained my eyes looking in vain for something, perhaps the
contours of a distant coastline. Nothing. According to our dead
reckoning we were still too far from shore. Then I, too, crawled to
bed.
At 01.30 I was awakened by a loud conversation between Norris
and Asbjorn on the bridge above my headrest. They spoke about

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