the second millennium B.C., be beating up the Gulf to Dilmun and be beached upon its shores, under the walls of its cities. The ships from Makan would be heavily loaded with their cargoes of copper, while the ships from the cities of the Indus Valley civilization would have cargoes, then as now, of timber (and perhaps, though there is no evidence, of cotton), in addition to their hghter and more valuable stores of ivory, lapis lazuli, and camelian.'*
Bibby even ventured a wild but interesting theory. He pointed out that the Sanskrit-speaking Aryans who had entered India from the north and probably overthrown the original Indus Valley civilization used the non-Sanskrit loan word mleccha to denote non-Aryans, people who did not worship Aryan gods. He asks: "Could it be that Mleccha was the Indus people's own name for themselves and their country?**
The Indus Valley, until recently part of India, was now the heart and soul of Pakistan. Nobody on board Tigris objected to the idea of turning back north and taking the alternative route we had rejected as we came through the Hormuz Strait.
For ten days we sailed northeast with no other company than patrolling sharks, a faithful escort of dolphins and brief visits from playful porpoises and a few curious whales of larger species. Colorful tropical birds landed on our deck to rest, and, attracted by the broad shadow beneath our bundles, multicolored fish swam with us hke domesticated animals in quantities the like of which I had not seen since drifting over the Pacific on KorirTiki. Every day HP, Asbjom and Carlo diverted themselves and extended our provisions by fishing and spearing two of the most savory species: the dolphin, alias gold mackerel, which shone in colors of green, rust and bright gold when patrolling in all its splendor down in its own kingdom, but was flat and disproportionate and faded to become a silver re-hef of a fishtail with a buUdog head when brought on deck. And the streamlined rainbow runner with its slim torpedo shape which merited its name in or out of the water. Triggerfish, pilotfish, rem-oras and any other kind keeping us company we tried to leave alone, and we threw them quickly back if they rushed on the hook before the fisherman could get his flying-fish bait out of the way.
This was when Carlo insisted he had heard a grasshopper during his night watch. We refused to beheve him, but then I found one in my own bed, yellow-green and as long as a finger. On my own watch I heard one singing near me in the stern and another answering from the bow. Soon we aU heard grasshoppers everywhere. We saw them crawling and jumping about on reeds and bamboo, and even taking to wing on short circles over the sea, but always coming back to our marine haystack. They seemed to be happiest among the bushy ends of the reed bundles at the top of the high bow and stem. Having obviously embarked as silent stowaways in Oman, together with a number of crabs on our bottom, they had never seen such a wealth of vegetation in any part of the barren Arabian land from which they came.
The wind was so strong at times that our mainsail ripped and we had to take it down in the middle of the night at a moment when it bulged like a parachute and pulled us ahead with such speed over the swells that I was worried lest any man in the dark should make a false step. For thirty-two hours we rolled about in a strong current with a northwest wind and the sea anchor out, but unable to steer. We had passed 6o°E, the longitude of Ras al Hadd, and when Tom, HP and Asbjom reported that they had mended the sail and that it was ready to go up, we set oiu: 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 sHppery green sea grass and soft-sheUed white goose bamacles with long pink gills waving, but also with large colonies of small conical bamacles 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 stiU only larvae, because Tigris, imlike Ra, had spent days in harbor in Bahrain and Muscat. It was equally refreshing to body and mind to hang alongside our floating home and watch how beautifully the bundles maintained their shape and how high they stiU floated. The midline of the bundles was scarcely below water level when we swam around Tigris for a checkup on a calm day seventy-three days after the launching.
The weather forecast that day for the Gulf of Oman and the 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 wdnd 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 was all that separated the one from the 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 possibihty fascinated me as we steered eastward, well off the desolate Makran coast in the direction of the Indus Valley.
Next day again we were still farther east and a mere fifty-five miles from the coast of Pakistan. Only a stiff and steady NE wind could now prevent us from reaching our goal, but that should indeed have been the prevailing vdnd at this time of the year. It was not. Southerly winds began to dominate, and the problem now was not whether we could reach the Makran coast, but whether we could avoid being pushed ashore before we got far enough east to find a safe landing place. This part of the Makran coast was nothing but cliffs and impenetrable mangrove swamp.
We were twenty-two miles off Pakistan and expecting to see land at any moment. Norman consulted our copy of West Coast of India Pilot, 1975, and read on the very first page that the charts for coastal navigation were adequate everywhere "except for part of the Makran coast." In these parts, we learned, the charts were based on surveys made in the last century with lead and hne, and "such charts cover areas subject to sudden shoalings and shifting sandbanks or where, as on Makran coast, they coincide with small scale soundings which, because of later (1945) volcanic disturbance
of the sea bed, are now of doubtful value." Also, "A small volcanic island was observed in 1945, 3 miles SW of Jazirat Chahardam, but in 1947 it had submerged."
It sounded like an exciting area, with many possible surprises. The waters around us were HteraUy full of fish. And an infinity of tiny white worms. Carlo, our professional alpinist, had turned into a passionate deep-sea fisherman and caught six large dolphins one after the other before I could stop him. Yuri got the idea of hanging some up to dry on bamboo rods, to produce stockfish. During a delicious lunch on dolphin with polenta we sighted a white dhow sail on the horizon ahead. We made a good three knots in that direction, but when the dhow came near enough to see us well, it made a wide semicircle past us and disappeared. We had at last seen another vessel under sail. This looked promising.
On January 24 problems began to develop. Heavy clouds formed over the Karachi area in front of us, and a changing wind struck us in violent gusts, quickly whipping up a choppy sea. We tried to get the topsail down before it was too late, but the topping lifts that held it were stuck and it would not come down. At dusk we saw incessant flashes of Hghtning one after the other in the black clouds over Karachi. HP tied a knife to a short bamboo rod, and after dinner, when the wind got tempestuous and there was no other choice, Norman an
d Detlef climbed to the footplate on top of the bipod mast, and one held the other as they cut the topping lifts and brought the madly flapping topsail down. A full moon peeped at us in fleeting gaps between rapidly accumulating clouds, then it disappeared as the rattling, rumbling blitz came over us and over the unseen coast of Makran. We had sailed into reaUy bad weather.
I fell asleep before my midnight watch; then, as I grabbed my flashlight and lifeline to climb up on the steering bridge with Tom, we foimd the masts naked: no sails. As Norris and Asbjom huddled away and left further problems to us, they reported that the wind had swung about in all directions each time an extrablack thundercloud had passed overhead. It had been impossible to undo and refasten sheets and braces fast enough every time they had to trim the sail, and the roUing had been so bad that they had feared the dancing yardarm would break and the mainsail be torn to shreds. Norman had been out to help them save the sail, and we were now adrift with only the sea anchor to help keep our stem to the wind. The coast was near and there was an island somewhere, so we had
to be alert. The West Coast of India Pilot left no doubt that it was risky to be adrift completely witliout steering control in such treacherous waters. A faint wind began to blow in our favor from the direction of tlie Hormuz Strait, and after half an hour I woke up enough men to hoist the mainsail in a heavy roUing sea. Three whales came up around us, breathing deeply in the dark, and by our sparse light we noted two big white birds riding high at either end of our vessel. The sail came up, but no sooner was it filled than the wind changed to NE, the proper direction of the monsoon. If it really was the monsoon that had now come to stay, then we would run the risk of never seeing land in Pakistan. Never had our desire to get on to the Makran coast been stronger.
We studied the chart again. The dead reckoning would place us oflF tlie fishing village of Pasni. Land was just below the horizon. This was still Makran and not yet the Indus Valley. But the Indus Valley civihzation had dominated tliis coast. Archaeologists had found ruins of prehistoric forts built by the founders of the Indus Valley civilization; they blocked access to the only two vaUeys leading inland from this coast. One was at Sutkagen Dor, which we already had behind us, very near the borders of Iran. The other was at Sotka-Koh, the passage that opens at Pasni, which we now had right inside us. In a report on recent surveys of these prehistoric coastal forts, the archaeologist G. F. Dales had shown that they contained numerous Indus Valley potsherds, and that these were attributable to the earliest period of Indus Valley civihzation. According to Dales, this special type of ceramic ware had been brought from the lower part of the Indus Valley, and the archaeological evidence left no doubt that the mighty city-states of Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa, farther up the Indus River, had possessed maritime traditions and built these forts at the only possible landing places on the Makran coast to defend themselves from other seaborne intruders. The testimony of these Indus VaUey settlements along the coast strengthened Dales in his conviction that "none of the great civilizations of the world originated or thrived in a cultural and economic vacuum."^
Such words were more meaningful to me than ever as I lay rereading old notes between our cane walls within a few miles of the Sotka-Koh fort.
"I have discovered Pakistani" I was torn back to reality by Norman's voice high above the ceihng. He was yodeling with joy
from the top of the mast. I stuck my books back in the case below my mattress before I crawled out and climbed up the mast ladder. This was the eleventh day after leaving Muscat. It was crowded up on the ladder, for we all wanted to see this new land. It was 9:05 A.M. on January 26, and to me it was a great moment. The land Norman had discovered at port quarter of the bow was a table-topped island, first hght blue and then, as we turned past, showing bright yellow in the morning sun. Yuri, with an Antarctic expedition behind him, likened it to a flat iceberg.
This was Astola Island. We still could not see the mainland coast of Makran because of haze. There was nothing to tempt us ashore, there being nothing on the island but allegedly an abandoned Hindu shrine and an infinite quantity of small poisonous snakes. This island has been identified by some as Gamine or Nasola, visited by Alexander the Great's admiral Nearchus. But Phny,® the Roman historian, refers to it in a.d. yy as the Isle of the Sun or the Gouch of the Nymphs, "on which aU animals without exception die, from causes not ascertained." Perhaps the Romans did not know about the snakes? We were sailing in historic waters. Alexander's biographer, Arrian, who had access to the actual logbooks of the admiral, tells that when the Greeks reached India after their exhausting inland march through the wild mountain deserts of Persia, they built a fleet on the Indus River and sailed back to Mesopotamia along the Persian coast. This happened in the winter of 326-325 B.C., two thousand three hundred years ago, yet it seemed like modem European history to us who came in the wake of ships that had forced Indus Valley rulers to build forts along the coast twenty centuries or more before the days of Alexander.
The weather had cleared, but there were other heavy clouds in the making and thunder in the air. We sailed eastward 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 needed here; a brief reference in the pilot book imphed that nature had raised vertical limestone walls intersected with impassable mangrove palisades. This was perhaps the least-known part of the Asiatic coast we could have found. We were to land, but had no idea 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 feehng of high adven-
ture awaited us as we said goodnight and crawled to bed in our two cabins. We all felt excited. Something was in the air. Not only the awareness that a world unknown to us was our portside neighbor. It was just that things did not feel quite right. We had never 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 calm water was more white than blue. "Must be mud from some river," I proposed, "and 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 portside 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 contomrs of a distant coastline. Nothing. According to our dead reckoning we were stiU too far from shore. Then I, too, crawled to bed.
At 1:30 I was awakened by a loud conversation between Norris and Asbjom on the bridge above my headrest. They spoke about land, and as I crawled to the portside 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 mountain 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 eastward 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 coast-
line 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 of 85°-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 gray 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 Hke clouds. Damn it. Had we been fooled? There were no mountains!
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 next to us 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 crawling out with a roll of string to measmre 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 eighty-five degrees 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 portside.
The Tigris Expedition Page 30