O:
N Monday, January 30, the sky over Pakistan was blue and the sea was without breaking crests as the oceangoing salvage tug Jason of Norway shd around Ras Ormara and into the large bay on its western side.
The storm that had struck the coast three days earlier had abated, and Captain Hansen of Bergen was standing on the bridge with binoculars, looking for a wreck. There was none to be seen. He searched for dereUcts among the fallen rocks and treacherous sandbars at the foot of the lofty cliffs, but in vain.
But peacefully anchored in the middle of the bay was a moon-shaped boat, the strangest watercraft the captain and his Norwegian crew of twelve had ever seen afloat. Not an Arab dhow. Not a Chinese junk. Certainly not a Pakistani canoe. There was not even a name on the vessel's stern, for it was nothing but a sheaf.
At slow speed the 1,200-ton salvage ship moved up alongside the little boat and anchored. The vessel they had discovered proved to be abandoned, but secured to the bottom by ropes. There was not a living soul on deck nor inside the open doors of the two woven huts. But there were plates and cups and an empty frying pan on
the outdoor table, and shark tails and underwear hung side by side to dry on the cane walls. Stockfish was hanging in the mast stays, and rolls of toilet paper were hanging inside two tiny outboard balconies astern.
The captain and his men began to search the long sandy isthmus at the end of the bay and observed a crowd of people all gathered at one spot on the beach. They were huddled together in a compact ring, watching something, and others were running from inland to catch a glimpse of whatever they had found in the sand. Captain Hansen lowered the landing barge and hurried ashore with some of his men. He had come to this desolate bay on instructions from the Norwegian salvage company Salvator in Bergen, as a result of a message from Bahrain Radio reporting that the vessel Tigris of Larvik, Norway, had been wrecked west of Ras Ormara in Pakistan.
The ship's shallow landing barge hit the bottom before reaching the beach, and the captain and his first oflBcer left the men to hold the bouncing boat as they waded ashore and hurried over to the crowd. They forced their way gently into the inner circle and found themselves front-row spectators of a party which included drums, oriental dancing and wresthng competitions in the sand. Guests of honor within the ring were bearded foreigners of different ethnic types, strangely mixed, and they and their hosts were all so amused that the newcomers were scarcely noticed.
I myself was not there and was the next to be surprised. I had been over in the village with Gherman; and returning on foot across the isthmus we hurried so as not to miss the dancing which the village schoolmaster had arranged for our entertainment on the beach. Coming back over the dunes we had already sighted the most pe-cuHar kind of ship anchored beside our own, where we had moved when the weather had calmed down two days earher. I had never seen such a vessel, but realized I was to meet the captain when Yuri came to meet me with two blond Europeans.
"Do you speak Enghsh?" I asked, introducing myself. I could see that Yuri was having fun.
"Captain Hansen," repHed the stranger in Norwegian and added that, yes, he could speak English, but if I didn't mind we could use our mother tongue.
Sharkskin drums and Pakistani songs filled the air and dancers and wrestlers tumbled about in the sand during the improvised
beach party as I recovered from my surprise and asked Captain Hansen what he was doing with a Norwegian salvage vessel in such a desolate place as Ormara Bay. I told him that in spite of this friendly welcome dance the viUage police had confided to me that foreigners were not allowed to come to Ormara. The village people recalled only the visit of one foreigner before, and he had come overland to collect stones.
Captain Hansen rephed that he came with permission from the coast guard in Karachi. His Norwegian salvage tug operated all over the world. At the moment it was working in the Indus delta, pulling grounded vessels o£F the mudflats in the labyrinth of channels between the mangrove swamps. They had just come back to base in Karachi and rescued an old Greek ship on fire outside the harbor when they received radio instructions to salvage Tigris in west Ormara Bay. "But coming here we find your boat at anchor in the bay with everyone dancing on the beachl"
We tried to think out what might have happened, since we ourselves had sent no radio message when we sailed into the surf of Ormara Bay. Norman was in fact ashore with Rashad, and when he came back at night to ride the surf at anchor with us, we needed nobody, and nobody could have come to our help fast enough anyhow. Perhaps it had been this very silence, and the fact that a major sandstorm was known to have swept from the Arabian peninsula to Pakistan that day, that had led to speculation that Tigris had been wrecked. That night, however, my entry in the expedition journal had read:
Terrible onshore wind now howhng in the masts as we dance in the surf with wild splashes. So we go to bed fully dressed with an inferno of waves Hfting us up and down, Hght-ning in the sky, wind and water so noisy that the grasshopper in the galley can scarcely be heard. Dhow said before it left that this anchorage was safe for us but not for them. They would come back tomorrow or try to send somebody else. Insh Allah. It is not a pleasant moment for me and my men as we nOw go to bed. Right now the stormy wind is howhng. Will our anchors hold? Insh AUah.
Next morning we woke up to find ourselves in a calm bay. We were in shelter; there was now an offshore wind. At sea the waves ran white. I had been up and out by 4 a.m., aroused by the change
that I could feel even in my sleep. It was again this strange silence, as if we were back on the rivers of Iraq; suddenly there was no surf, no more jumping, only a slow rolling all along the broad bay on either side. But in the distance I heard a sound as of a great waterfall, coming from inland. Clearly a strong surf was running against the narrow isthmus from the other side and the weather had changed direction completely. The storm now struck the village bay east of Ras Ormara. The dhow would have been better oflF had it remained on our side.
The ch£Fs now protecting us stood hke the walls of a glacier rising from the sea. The shallow water was more milky than ever, although the tide had risen and left only a narrow beach a couple of hundred yards farther away. I found Torn in the galley and he offered me a cup of coffee. This was too good to be true. I crawled back into bed but could not sleep. As the clouds were chased away I could see the moon and the famihar Plow and Polestar.
The sky was clear and the wind still offshore when the sun rose. For once all eleven men could crowd around the deck table at the same time. Gherman served porridge and fresh eggs, which he had preserved by painting each one with oil before departure. A friendly group of Urdu-speaking fishermen brought along by Carlo volunteered to help us to a good anchorage out in the middle of the bay. Since Norman and Rashad had seen the village the day before, they were left on watch while the rest of us took shore leave. The dinghy ferried us two at a time into shallow water and we waded onto a broad and beautiful beach. Miles of white sand and not a human soul but ourselves stepping on shells and sponges and scaring little crabs into their wet holes as we trampled barefoot to the dry sand, where we put on our shoes.
It was good to see Tigris riding high and to remind ourselves that we were now ashore in Pakistan. We were still in part of what we call the Makran coast today, but to the Sumerians this might have been a transition area between Makan and Meluhha, since the westernmost of the Indus Valley mihtary installations were behind us.
The sand beyond the reach of the waves was full of potsherds. There were hardly any very ancient remains to be found on this low isthmus, however, because the sea level, as in Mesopotamia, had been higher in Sumerian times. The sandbar had probably been completely submerged, leaving the high rocks of Ras Ormara as an
island. Local geology was fascinating: Asbjom discovered that the limestone cliffs were full of perfectly round balls of soft chalky stone the size of oranges which, when broken, revealed the most beautiful fossils of fancy shells, clams and wormlike creatures. The men collected
large quantities as souvenirs. But the hard-packed crusts of sand forming the low isthmus were quite different from the hmestone cliffs and rose in a series of arched terraces parallel to the beach as a result of the successive formation of new beachUnes each time the ocean had subsided. This was important, for, as Dales had pointed out, it meant that the ancient forts of Sutkagen Dor and Sotka-Koh had been built by the early Indus Valley civilization right beside the former edge of the sea.
As we reached the upper level and started walking across the sandy isthmus the surface was so full of potsherds that it seemed as if the population had broken all the jars it possessed as soon as the merchants from Karachi had brought them modem metalware. In fact, the jBrst thing we saw were small groups of women escaping from us across the sands in their foot-length robes with tin jars on their heads. A weU had been dug not far from our beach and the women came from far and wide for its water.
As Rashad had pointed out, the houses we passed on our way were so similar to the characteristic reed dwellings of the Marsh Arabs that it was difficult to see how people hving in a desert and people Hving in swamps could build homes so similar without a common heritage. When we finally reached Ormara village, on the other side of the dunes, even the mat houses were rectangular, with gabled or flat roofs like the more recent stone huts. Otherwise the village gave us a fascinating taste of a community that reflected deep roots with sparse grafting from abroad; its environment was sea, cliffs and desert. Inland was all barren wilderness, with clean white sand dunes heaped like thick snowdrifts to the very edge of the settlement. There was no overland road to Karachi, only camel tracks and, in the opposite direction, a jeep passage westward to the prehistoric fort of Sotka-Koh and Pasni. While most of Pakistan became increasingly affected by the hubbub of modem Karachi, Ormara and its surroxmding desert, hke the swamps of the Indus delta, offered great natural obstacles to cultural revolution. Ormara patiently awaited its turn to take the leap into the twentieth century. In the meantime^ life continued closer to my image of a self-sustained, civilized community of the third millennium b.c. than
anything I had ever seen except among the fine Marsh Arabs of Iraq and the timeless momitain town dwellers of Oman. Here I felt, as more than once before in isolated communities, that the now utterly interdependent outside world, with its problems of oil and military prestige, may be shaky, but should it ever collapse, as did the empires of Sumer and the Indus Valley, the camel trains of Ormara will still go on loaded with palm leaves and canes for house construction, and fish, dates and vegetables for human survival. The proud women will still find a way of draping themselves in colored robes to sail over the dunes for milk and water; the men will still haul in the fish and till the plots between the palms.
But today intrepid traders were doing their best to convert the hfe-style of the Ormara fishermen into one of cash economy. Ormara already had an outlet for its products in the merchant mariners who came in dhows from Karachi, not far along the same coast, and from Colombo on the distant island of Ceylon. The local industry was shark fishing. The result so far for the poor villagers was more flies than money. Never had any of us seen such incredible quantities of flies: at first we brushed them away and concentrated our attention on the charming httle village, with its three tiny mosques and a market place straight out of The Thousand and One Nights. We passed through a mob of camels, donkeys, dogs, cats and chickens and, with a horde of children at our heels, were met by bearded men of mixed Pakistani and Arab physiognomy, most with turbans, but one with a marvelous silver fez on his head. Some had enormous hooked noses, while others had flatter, more Negroid faces, the same remarkable blend we had first seen in Oman. When we asked if they understood Arabic or Enghsh they shook their heads and spoke in Urdu.
They all received us with smiles and signs of welcome, except for one bushy-bearded villain who drew his curved saber, pointed the tip at his own stomach and then swung it over our heads. He then disappeared into the crowd with httle reaction from the rest, except that they tried to make us understand that he was a rehgious fanatic by pointing to themselves and to the mosque saying, "Allahl Allah! Allah! Allahl" Then they pointed after the savage-looking man, waving their bodies from side to side with eyes closed as in trance, and mumbhng spitefully, "AUi-allo, alli-allo."
Not much wiser from this instruction in local rehgious practices, we passed the shopping street, hardly larger than our own
reed ship, with about half a dozen small alcoves raised a yard above the sand on poles. Each was a shop the size of a doll's house with an open front waU where the stafiF of one sat crosslegged, with the merchandise before his legs. I took the inventory of the smallest shop: seven carrots and five potatoes. Most had saucers or small bowls with green, gray or white grains or seeds in front of them, but one had biscuits, Arab cigarettes and bits of crude soap and candy. The most elegant of all was that of the long-bearded tailor, whose needle seemed to strike the woven mats of ceiling and walls whenever he started sewing. In front of him we almost stumbled over a man who squatted in the lane selling tea made on an open charcoal fire. Not a single woman could be seen in this exotic crowd, except beautiful girls below the age of six or seven and old crones with green stones dangling from nose rings.
The flies were everywhere in abnormal quantities, but their numbers seemed modest compared with what we were to see as we reached that part of the Htde village beside the sea. Here were a few open yards or sandy fields fenced in with woven, man-high palm-leaf mats, but if we stretched on tiptoe we could peep over the fence and witness a barbaric sight. Right under my nose was a man standing knee-deep in a mudhole in the ground, trampling upon fish bodies as large as himself, while everywhere around him lay colossal sharks' heads gaping and staring in all directions. An old man was standing among the heads with a bucket, pouring water into the hole where the youngster was eagerly stamping on the beheaded sharks in the muddy water. And when he had trampled enough he dragged the bodies out of the soup and threw them on the ground, which was everywhere covered with soiled fillets, fins and heads. Most of the heads were of sharks and giant rays whose evil Httle eyes and great grinning jaws dominated the scene. Another barefoot boy moved around with a long rake, sorting out or turning over smaller fillets, raking them about into orderly rows and piles as if they were hay. In the midst of it all stood a long-legged camel with two huge baskets which were slowly fiUed to the brim by two men sorting out dry, sand-crusted fiUets, one apparently selhng and the other buying.
On aU my sea voyages we had occasionally eaten shark, and it is a good meal if sHces are soaked overnight in water to extract the ammonia from the cells. The shark is a primitive fish without organs to eliminate the urine, which thus enters its own blood. We now un-
derstood what these men were doing: they were pressing and washing the ammonia out of the giant shark fillets before they were dried and exported to distant markets. The camel driver was buying it as a delicacy for his own tribe somewhere in the Makran desert or beyond, and two dhows were anchored oflF the village beach, waiting for their loads. "Colombo," the villagers had said as they pointed to the dhows, and this was confirmed by the schoolmaster. Many hands were to share the profits from these sand-encrusted shark fillets before they were masticated in Sri Lanka to the south of India. This direct oversea trade with distant Ceylon by small boat seemed to rest on old traditions, and made much impression on me.
We had seen many sharks in our wake on the way to Ormara, but few as large as most of these. There must have been an almost endless quantity of the man-eating monsters in the open ocean outside Ras Ormara, to judge by the grotesque field of yawning 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 houseflies could pack together so densely in such incredible numbers until Carlo bent down with his camera over a big head. It wa
s stripped to its skin in a second, while Carlo almost fell over backward, shrouded in a buzzing cloud. Wherever we looked, on the fence, on the fish piles, were compact blankets of flies, sometimes seeming to crawl on top of each other in search of a vacant place to feed. And the odor of generations of old fish was 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 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 boatbuilders saw me examining this covering and made it sufiBciently clear that they had made the varnish from shark-Hver 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 odor of stale fish oil in warm weather, and was afraid we would be driven from our own ship when we started to stink like rotten seafood. But these Ormara canoes were waterproofed with shark-hver 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 his asphalt when he built his reed ship. We had found that pure asphalt cracked on reeds. Perhaps it should have been mixed vdth pitch and oil, probably shark-hver 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.
The Tigris Expedition Page 32