Page 74 - The Tigris Expedition

In the Garden of Eden

Norman and his four companions never showed up at the
University in time for dinner, and in the end we had to begin. We
must have enjoyed a dozen or so savoury Arab dishes, every one
fabulously good, when a man all wrapped up mummy-fashion in
white was shown in by a nervous waiter and stood immobile like a
ghost inside the door. A red nose and a red ear were all we could see.
But the red was from scratches! It was Norman! All in bandages,
waiting to be introduced.
‘What has happened?’ I exclaimed, horrified.
‘The car rolled around three times off the road,’ Norman
mumbled.
‘And where are the dhow-sailors?’
‘In hospital for a check-up.’
‘And Shaker?’
‘At the police station. He drove.’
‘And the new car of the Soviet Consul-General?’
‘Wheels up, a total wreck.’
Norman had only surface wounds and there was room enough
between the bandages on his face to prove that his famous appetite
remained. But when the three unfortunate dhow-sailors came
limping in, one with an injured leg, one with an injured head, and
one with an injured back, they had no appetite at all and begged me
to send them back to India by the first plane. This I did, as fast as I
could get Baghdad on the telephone. They flew from Iraq, with
course for India, but were lost on the way and have never shown up
at the agency in Bombay.
We were in a real fix. In a few days we had to get the ship
into the water; the winter was approaching and there had already
been a few drops of rain, a month earlier than normal. Norman
was so impressed by the model testing report from Southampton
University that he insisted on a bigger sail and bigger blades on
the rudder oars than what had been made for me in Hamburg. We
had spare canvas for a dhow-sail, but no one to make it for us, so
he suggested we should forget the dhow-sail and use the spare
canvas to make our own sail much larger instead. ‘An easy job,’
said Norman, and fixed his eyes on our best sail and a pair of
scissors.
We had only one thick solid sail of about seventy square yards,
with rope reinforcements sewn in along the edges, together with
cringles’, lateral eyes for guide ropes to be used when tacking. Our
second sail was merely a larger substitute to gain more speed
without fear of capsizing in the event of feeble, following wind. It
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