Arabia Felix by Thorkild Hansen

Author:Thorkild Hansen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781681370736
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2017-05-15T04:00:00+00:00

[1] An ell was equivalent to about 2 modern English feet.

part two

A THOUSAND AND ONE DAYS

5. Spring in Tehama

One calm summer’s day, 5th October, 1762, the six men of the Danish expedition were once again standing in a rowing-boat and being ferried out into the sun. The oars creaked in the rowlocks; not a breath of air stirred in the sheer heat that lay over the glassy water. Behind them lay Suez, where the sharp shadows and the white surfaces of the houses formed a slowly changing pattern of relationships as the boat moved farther out. Before them lay four large ships; they saw only one side of them, the side lying in the shade; but the light was so intense that the tips of the masts and the rigging seemed to be glowing points, and sparks of light were struck and extinguished in the water fore and aft of the ships. These were the ships which in three days’ time were to make the voyage south down the gulf, then sail obliquely across the Red Sea to Djidda, which served as the port of Mecca.

The six men stood in the rowing-boat, surrounded by the chests containing their baggage and equipment. More than eighteen months had passed since that cold winter morning when they were rowed out in similar fashion to the man-o’-war in the Copenhagen roads. From their outward appearance it was difficult to believe they were the same people. The sun had scorched and tanned their faces; Forsskål and Niebuhr wore full beards, and in their long Oriental garments, which they had now been wearing for more than a year, the six of them looked more like a group of traders than anything else, making their way south from Cairo. Nor was there much inward similarity to the men who had left the Tollbooth in Copenhagen. In contrast to the gloomy silence that hung over the rowing-boat on that earlier occasion, they were probably chatting to each other about wind and weather; they had long since grown accustomed to their strange surroundings, and even their own individual peculiarities had long since become commonplace in the group. The sense of impending drama evident in the air at the time of their departure seemed—after reaching a crisis in von Haven’s buying the arsenic, in Forsskål’s angry letters, and Niebuhr’s threats—to have subsided. They could not be bothered to waste any more of their energies on it; the hot climate had had a soporific effect; their sarcasm and abuse had become trivial and repetitive, while on the other hand their small talk about ordinary commonplace things gave them repeated pleasure. After von Haven’s humiliating appeals in Suez and his subsequent fiasco on the Sinai peninsula, nobody could take him seriously, let alone fear for anything he might do. They realised quite clearly that he would be so occupied in future with spicing his own dishes properly that there would be no time for poisoning others.

After sampling the boredom of Suez for several weeks, the irritable Forsskål had also become milder in temper.

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