Page 284 - The Tigris Expedition

Ill

Tigris and the Superships: the Voyage to Pakistan
land, and as I crawled to the port-side doorway I saw it too. In the
darkness of the night, lifted above a low white mist, the wavy
outline of a continuous mountain chain was showing clearly, black
against a starlit sky. The moon was up, still fairly big. The moun­
tain range left us with the impression of being very high and very
far away. The bearings of peaks and passes did not change, although
we moved eastwards at a reasonable speed, taking a southerly wind
in from the starboard side. We had no maps showing anything
other than the main outline of this area, but the brief description in
the pilot book left the impression of level limestone cliffs and no
coastline as impressive as this. The water around us was still milky.
I sat for a while gazing at Asia and listening to the leaping fish, then I
headed back to bed.
At 2 a.m. I was out to share steering watch with Toru. The distant
coast was still there, almost unchanged. It could only be very far
away. Toru and I had no difficulty in keeping a course of85°-90°,
which would take us safely clear of Ras Ormara, estimated at 76°,
the only cape jutting far enough into the ocean to impede our safe
passage to Karachi.
During our watch the distant silhouette of a coast suddenly began
to change appearance. The valleys rose to the level of the peaks and
the undulating ridge straightened out to a flat plateau. At the same
time the dark range brightened before our eyes to a ghostly grey
and seemed moreover to move right up to shouting distance. But
there was no echo. Perhaps it was not even land, since parts of the
ghost wall rolled up and dissolved like clouds. Damn it. Had we
been fooled?
When I was expecting Carlo for the change of watch, Detlef
happened to come out instead to answer a call of nature. The milky
cloud bank left him unimpressed, but he noted the milky water. ‘It
is clay from some river outlet,’ he shouted up to me on the bridge.
That was almost a verbal repetition of my own words that had
somehow irritated Carlo, who just now happened to come crawl­
ing out with a roll of string to measure the depth before his watch
began. Carlo straightway threw the string back in through the
door, climbed to the steering-bridge and grabbed the tiller from my
hands without a word.
Don t steer below 85° or we will hit the cape,’ I said, and as I saw
how unreasonably touchy he was that night, a devil prompted__
me:
Don t worry, just clouds,’ I said stupidly and pointed casually to
the mysterious fog wall on the port side.
I regretted teasing him the moment I had spoken, for I was far
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