by Gavin Young
What followed, in the engineering sphere, was beyond me. The crew set on our cargo of cars like bulldogs baiting bears; they ripped wires loose and ran them into Al Raza’s engine, and the car engines were revved, then revved again. Evidently the driver had forgotten that we might need some engine spares – dynamos, for example. We slid on through oil slicks that smoothed the sea into a flat, glittering sheet of purple, yellow, green and blue like brocade. Dead sea snakes, ivory-coloured bellies uppermost, floated on the surface. The coast of Oman to the west slowly disappeared; in the evening it was replaced to the east by smudges of Iran.
In one of Al Raza’s motionless interludes I tried out the thunderbox. It was suspended over the sea but felt reassuringly solid when I clambered over the stern rail and down into a thick wood box. It was open to the sky and had walls some three feet high. The hole was a wide pear shape, with two raised footrests on either side. In the sea below, swarms of small jellyfish floated near the surface. Muslim sailors never use toilet paper. A tin can on a long cord stood by the footrests to be swung down into the sea and had to be hauled up carefully, or else all the water would slop out before it reached the thunderbox. The only tricky aspect of the arrangement was the possibility of your foot slipping as you climbed out of it in rough weather. What you had to do was to keep a firm grasp on the wooden stern rail.
The weather held. I thought of Al Raza caught powerless in a storm. That night, dark continents of angry clouds formed in the sky, but there were plenty of stars between each continent. In the sea off the Iranian coast an unexpected and mysterious fragrance drifted across the water, not unlike the scented breezes off the lush tropical islands of Borneo and Celebes. Yet the Iranian coast is a bleak desert region. Gleaming blobs of phosphorescence streamed past Al Raza’s low rail like reflected stars winking in spun sugar. I noticed that the nakhoda kept an eye on the Iranian shore because we had no charts or radio, much less radar. Now and then he borrowed my glasses as the helmsman changed course at the heavy wooden wheel behind the brass compass housing.
The compass’s little light had returned, but for some reason other lights were less reliable. Our navigation lights came on and went off mysteriously so that the crated air-conditioning units, washing machines and sacks of cotton piece goods heaped on the deck were either looming up in a half-green, half-red glow or receding into blackness.
During the day I began to take Polaroid pictures of the crew. They posed together and singly, always demanding just one more. Even the nakhoda joined in. We had been getting on well in a shy, tentative fashion, but the Polaroid broke the ice once and for all. I began to know them as individuals.
The nakhoda was a quiet, stocky man who had been on this run several times. He was shy, but seemed glad to have me on board. He was baffled by Al Raza’s half-cocked engine, and depended as much as everyone else on the driver, Hasan, the thin Pakistani of Indian birth who spent most of his time streaked with oil in the boiling depths of the machinery for which he had been denied adequate spares – or which he had neglected to buy through an excess of Islamic fatalism.
Hasan’s two assistants, Shapur and Osman the Iranian, were respectively young and wild-eyed, and elderly and impassive. Shapur was given to loud, impulsive, cheerful cries in my direction, while Osman did no more between Sharjah and Karachi than gravely incline his head and say, ‘Zen,’ the Iraqi for ‘good’.
Sumar was the big, bulging, huffing-puffing bear of a man with the muttonchop whiskers – big, happy whiskers he fluffed out proudly, booming, ‘Ha, haaaaa! Arabs say these are Israeli whiskers! I am Israeli!’ He invariably wore the baggy Baluchi trousers and knee-length shirt. To counter any new setback with the engine, he would point his forefinger to the heavens, roll his big eyes up until they almost disappeared into his thick Groucho Marx eyebrows, and slowly intone in sonorous Arabic, ‘God will see we reach Karachi. Oooh, yes.’ After which he would roar with laughter and pump my hand energetically.
That left three: Lal Mohamed, Mir Mohamed and Khalat. Khalat was the youngest, about twenty, a dusky sprite who brought me a plate of rice from Mir Mohamed’s ‘galley’ now and again and, when I said I wouldn’t eat before they did, replied, ‘Baluchi peoples eat finish’ – which demonstrated the level of his English and meant, ‘That’s all right. We’ve eaten already.’
Lal Mohamed was twice Khalat’s size, a thick slab of muscle who looked as though he might have been carved out of a single piece of mahogany. He was built like those Olympic Games wrestlers traditionally bred in such surprising numbers in Turkey, Iran and Baluchistan, and I believe he could have been one if he had chosen to be. He looked as if he could break a man’s neck with a flick of his fingers, though not like someone who would ever want to. I guessed he was in his mid-twenties.
Finally, Mir Mohamed, the cook. Every barrack room and ship in the world has a clown like Mir Mohamed – sly, canny, harmlessly dishonest (‘fly’ is the army word), the disreputable butt of everyone’s practical jokes. He could fry an egg, cook rice, make curry, gut fish, and no one asked him to do more.
With the exception of Khalat, Mir Mohamed and Lal Mohamed, the crew were practising Muslims, or, at least, praying ones. But there were no religious fanatics aboard Al Raza. ‘Ha!’ Sumar yelled at Khalat and Mir Mohamed for my benefit. ‘You infidels don’t know the meaning of “Allahu akbar”!’ But he was only laughing at close friends.
In any case, Islam didn’t stop some of them, including the nakhoda, from chewing the mildly intoxicating leaf drug they call mushok in Baluchi – all except Khalat and Hasan, the driver. When I asked Khalat what effect mushok had on him, he laughed and made circles near his temple with a forefinger to denote tipsiness. Mir Mohamed, the clown cook, and big Lal preferred gin.
Another day went by. In Dubai the holiday period of the Id had begun, and we were suddenly alone on the Arabian Sea; all the dhows that regularly plied this route remained tied up in port, their crews ashore celebrating. Now we had a new crisis; the clouds of steam issuing periodically from the engine suddenly turned to black and oily smoke, which rose out of the engine hatch like an evil genie from a bottle. The sight of it was frightening, the smell of it appalling.
The nakhoda rallied his men with urgent cries and they began to wrench feverishly at the crates in the bows, revealing a small, buckled, coffin-shaped bathtub of flimsy metal; this was our lifeboat, the only one. I climbed down to lend a hand, but the scrimmage was so hectic – it was particularly dangerous to approach the bull-like Lal Mohamed’s flying elbows and knees – that I retired to my wheelhouse perch. The nakhoda shouted to Shapur at the helm and Al Raza swung off course, aiming for the bleak cliffs of Iran. The smoke was pouring out so heavily that any onlooker would surely have thought we were on fire. I worried about the driver. I could see his frantic silhouette in the stinking black fog, coughing and swearing, and was afraid he would be suffocated by the fumes.
Al Raza limped shorewards, trailing a black scarf of pollution like a mourner at a funeral. A school of dolphins came alongside, lazily leaping and diving. Perhaps, I thought, they are curious to know what will happen to us. Perhaps they will wait and carry us ashore when Al Raza finally goes down; after all, the Romans told stories of drowning seamen rescued by dolphins.
The driver emerged from the smoke with a coil of rope, and Sumar tied a lump of lead to it and swung it over the side, testing the depth. It was too deep, and we puttered on for half an hour before the anchor went down. Al Raza’s engine expired with a sigh, and she lay smoking and motionless on the abandoned sea.
Hasan wasted no time. He plunged back into the engine room, hammering and shouting. Under his orders, Shapur and Khalat threw open the hoods of the cars on deck and began detaching collars, pipes, a radiator, wires and batteries. The nakhoda came up to me, looking hot but unflustered. He said, ‘We stop here maybe two hours. Then go….’ He pointed vaguely towards Iran, or did he mean Pakistan? I wondered if we were going to end up engineless, foodless and waterless on some r
emote beach in the wild west of Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran.
As I took a discreet nip of gin behind the wheelhouse, the hoarse voice of Mir Mohamed murmured at my elbow, ‘A little for me?’ I poured him a couple of fingers, and he gave me a sly grin and a wink before going back to chop fish in his ‘galley’. After a while I heard him singing a lugubrious Baluchi lament.
The dolphins had disappeared; I hoped they were lingering somewhere within earshot. To pass the time I opened Decision at Delphi and immediately found Helen MacInnes’s Greek Special Branch man musing on Westerners: ‘Totally incomprehensible … living as they did in a child’s world of indulgence and pleasure, out of touch with reality. Did they really believe that life owed them happiness?’ It was not a belief that touched people east of Delphi – certainly not these Baluchis straining and sweating, their chests and backs naked, their cotton trousers sticking to them like cellophane.
The Iranian coast reared up in shapes like organ pipes and castle turrets. Sometimes there were grotesque protuberances in the skyline that could have been fortified Sassanian towns or Babylonian terraces, and shafts like the first New York skyscrapers. But my binoculars told me that these shapes were illusions in weathered sandstone, and that there was nothing on this coast but drought and death.
Fifteen
After three hours Lal Mohamed, the bull-like wrestler, and young Khalat heaved up Al Raza’s anchor, and with a splutter or two the old launch cleared its throat and chugged on again. God knows what repairs had been carried out while we were at anchor, but they had been extensive: pipes and other bits and pieces cannibalized from the cars on deck had been sawn in half (one hacksaw snapped in Shapur’s hand), or hammered into shapes to fit the Japanese engine. The lean driver, Hasan, sat on the engine hatch with his helpers and drooped with fatigue. Poor man, he had little chance to rest on this voyage.
As soon as Al Raza moved on, oily smoke belched out of the inadequate funnel, thicker, if possible, than before. ‘Damn,’ I said to myself, and heard Mir Mohamed tut-tutting behind me. This time the smoke was so heavy with oil that the breeze could hardly lift it clear of the vessel before its black coils slumped down on the waves like an undulating black sausage.
We continued to move forward through that perfect sea, but I knew it couldn’t last. I wasn’t sure what was causing the smoke – the last thing I am is an engineer – but surely, if it was a question of overheating, wouldn’t there be a fire sooner or later? Sooner, to judge by the solid density of the smoke.
I clambered over the balustrade and across the bales and crates to where the driver and the nakhoda sat in dismal palaver near the engine housing, the black opaqueness of the smoke coil overhead throwing them into deep shadow. I, an ignorant passenger, didn’t want to risk irritating them by interfering, so I said cautiously, ‘Why not try going slower? Half-speed. Reduce heat.’
They both looked at me passively, not irritated, and then the driver slowly swung his legs over the edge of the hatch and dropped down into the choking heat and fumes of the engine. The rhythmic thumping moderated and Al Raza slackened speed. At the same time, the sun burst down on us and the long, deep shadow overhead began to fade; the colour and density of the smoke was returning to normal. Spluttering, the driver reappeared, wiping his sweat-and oil-streaked face with a dirty rag, and the three of us sat on a soft bale of cotton clothing labelled ‘Abu Dhabi to Kabul’. (I never discovered why Abu Dhabi should be exporting clothes to Afghanistan via Karachi.) The nakhoda called out, ‘Khalatu! Bring tea,’ then turned to me and said, ‘Like this to Karachi three days. If the engine works. The engine,’ he added in a dreary voice, ‘is tired.’
‘You’re telling me,’ I said in English, and added in Arabic, ‘That I see.’ I could also see that even this self-composed and experienced seaman was uneasy.
Then the nakhoda unveiled a plan. ‘Tomorrow night we should get our first sight of the Pakistan coast, the coast of Baluchistan. We’ll stop at a small port there. Get a new, good launch, and tow this one to Karachi. Or,’ he went on, tapping my arm, ‘from that small port we will fly. To Karachi. Pakistan Airways.’
‘Who will fly?’
He pointed to himself and then to me. ‘We fly, and send a launch from Karachi to tow this one.’
Fly? The idea astonished me. Could we even make that small port? We had no chart on board, so I couldn’t see where it was in relation to us, to Karachi or anywhere else.
The nakhoda was smiling and pointed to the heavens; God will help us, he was telling me. Tea arrived with Khalat, who handed us each a mug, took one himself, squatted down with us and murmured sententiously (I knew from Sumar’s remarks that he considered himself a nonbeliever), ‘Insh’ Allah’. If God wills. He began to crack his knuckles with an abstracted air.
I had no desire to fly from Baluchistan to Karachi; I wanted to stay with Al Raza – at least until she actually began to sink. I can see us now: Hasan streaked with oil and silently cursing his moribund engine, the nakhoda lost in dreams of finding a small port with an airstrip, Khalat and I drearily sipping tea. Lounging in the sun on a sack of men’s shirts and women’s bloomers destined for Kabul, we made a dismal little group.
That night we had no electricity, or next to none. I awoke in the dead of night to see the navigation lights of two small boats to port: fishing boats from Iran, which meant that some scattered life existed on that awesomely barren coast. I slept again, and woke up two hours later to find the same lights in the same position on our port bow. Then I saw that our helmsman, the old Iranian, Osman, was bent so low over the pathetically dim compass light that he must be either losing his sight or nodding off to sleep. Every now and then he straightened up with a jerk and frantically began spinning the wheel like a demented croupier, first one way and then the other – far over to port and immediately afterwards all the way over to starboard. Through the wheelhouse windows Orion arched wildly through the sky into sight, then suddenly out of it as we tacked back and forth. Our wake had become a series of S-bends. I could hear the voice of Peter Barton of the Pacific Basset demanding, ‘What’s he bloody doing, then? Writing his fucking signature?’
I didn’t feel I could put the question to Osman, and was relieved when Khalat came up from the dark bunk area below the wheelhouse. He peered at the compass and said something to the old man. The veering lessened and I lay down again on the red and yellow mattress. Khalat wrapped a white cloth around his head and went outside to sit with his back against the front of the wheelhouse, his knees drawn up under his knee-length gown, his feet on the balustrade. It was cold, but he was going to stay on the bridge. The two men talked in low voices through the open wheelhouse window while Al Raza sputtered on through the night slowly, feebly and without lights.
I pulled my blanket up to my chin and the low ebb of 2.30 a.m. took over my imagination, filling it with pictures of Al Raza in flames or helpless, her engine finally an inert mass of scrap, overwhelmed by gigantic waves. I thought morbidly of the ‘Casualties’ pages of the Lloyd’s List I’d pored through in Chris Pooley’s office in Dubai. I remembered the bulletins telling of the disappearance of the Greek motor vessel Myrina somewhere between New York and Naples: ‘Assumption is that the Myrina had broken up or sunk…. The US Coast Guard reports the search was negative, and therefore they are suspending further active search….’
The next day I took out my copy of The Mirror of the Sea and read what Conrad had to say about missing ships:
The unholy fascination of dread dwells in the thought of the last moments of a ship reported as ‘missing’. Nothing of her ever comes to light – no grating, no lifebuoy, no piece of boat or branded oar – to give a hint of the place and date of her sudden end. The Shipping Gazette does not even call her ‘lost with all hands’. She remains simply ‘missing’; she has disappeared enigmatically into a mystery of fate as big as the world….
I thought of our wooden hull and wooden wheelhouse, and of our dented tin bathtub of a lifeboat buried unde
r a small mountain of heavy cases in the bows. The only other lifesaving possibility lay in a huddle of dirty, moth-eaten life jackets on the wheelhouse roof; what good they would be in shark-or barracuda-filled seas I wasn’t sure. Some of the cargo might float – the crates, perhaps – but if the Al Raza was burning like a torch it was unlikely that the fire and inevitable (I supposed) explosions would spare anything as flammable as a wooden crate. We would disappear enigmatically….
‘The word “missing” brings all hope to an end and settles the loss of the underwriters,’ said Conrad with finality, and I put him back into my bag.
The next morning the smoke was back, pouring like black treacle from the funnel and in shimmering waves from the hatches. Once more the driver dropped down into the engine hatch, and the nakhoda and others busily siphoned petrol into jerry cans from all the cars but one. This they poured into the remaining car, whose engine had to be kept running. At least one battery was needed to illuminate the compass and one masthead light.
To port lay the savage Baluchi coast and a white line of surf. To distract everyone from gloom, I took still more Polaroid pictures, which never fail to steal attention. Mir Mohamed loped up winking and smirking, rolling his eyes towards the hidden gin bottle. Khalat, who wanted to be snapped at the wheel, hopped on to the helmsman’s stool, squatting on it cross-legged, his thobe drawn up over hairy ankles and calves. ‘You have jig-jig pictures?’ he asked eagerly. Miming obscenely, he jabbed a forefinger into an orifice formed by his forefinger and thumb. No, I apologized, I had no pornographic pictures in my bags. ‘General Zia ul-Haq says’ – I drew my finger across my throat – ‘forbidden! Death!’ Khalat, his eyes fixed dutifully on the compass, sighed unhappily. ‘Bhutto dead, Pakistan jig-jig dead,’ he said. Whatever his virtues and failings, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the former president of Pakistan executed by General Zia, had certainly had nothing against jig-jig.