Page 303 - The Tigris Expedition

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The Tigris Expedition
endless quantity of the man-eating monsters in the open ocean
outside Ras Ormara, to judge by the grotesque field of yawning
'
I heads, some piled up and others strewn about within the fences. But
it was not the sharp teeth of the beheaded predators that most
impressed us, it was the mask worn by those left alone: a close
mosaic of shiny bluish-black beads. We could scarcely believe that
normal house-flies could pack together so densely in such incred­
ible numbers until Carlo bent down with his camera over a big
I head. It was stripped to its skin in a second, while Carlo almost fell
over backwards, shrouded in a buzzing cloud. Wherever we
looked, on the fence, on the fish-piles, were compact blankets of
flics, sometimes seeming to crawl on top of each other in search of a
i vacant place to feed. And the odour of generations of old fish was
5 wafted for miles on the warm air and must have tickled the scent
organs of flies and set in motion a mass-migration to Ormara from
a every part of Makran.
Perhaps it was this strong stench that benumbed my senses and
-
made me impervious to lesser smells by the time we reached the
open beach and found two of the fishermen building themselves a
new plank canoe. The wood was white, but the other canoes drawn
up after use were dark brown and seemed to be covered with a thick
coat of hard, waterproof varnish. The boat-builders saw me
examining this covering and made it sufficiently clear that they had
made the varnish from shark liver oil. I put my nose to the canoe
and sniffed, but could detect nothing. I recalled that Arab fishermen
in Iraq had told me they had used shark oil in former times to
waterproof their dhows, and they suggested that we should do the
same with Tigris. I had refused. I remembered the horrible odour of
stale fish oil in warm weather, and was afraid we would be driven
j -
.» from our own ship when we started to stink like rotten seafood. But
these Ormara canoes were waterproofed with shark-liver oil and
had no smell. The Gilgamesh epic of the Mesopotamian king who
sailed to Dilmun was again brought to my mind. He mixed oil with
I his asphalt when he built his reed-ship. We had found that pure
asphalt cracked on reeds. Perhaps it should have been mixed with
pitch and oil, probably shark-liver oil. With our reeds cut in August
we would float for months still, but with such a cover there might
not be any absorption at all. We were learning from people with
centuries of experience, and were at any rate doing far better than
during the first fumbling experiment with Ra.
I counted more than fifty dogs full of fish entrails lying out­
stretched as if dead on the wet sand of the broad tidal flats. The sea
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