Читать книгу Round the Bend онлайн

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Next, a reply to my Sharjah wire came in, ordering me down to Sharjah at once. Three days in an Arab dhow had made my eight pounds an hour seem cheap to the water engineers, even though I couldn't carry the party in one load but had to ferry them everywhere in two trips. I took them down to Muscat and stayed with them for a week. In all I was away from Bahrein for ten days, and I got back at the end of the job with thirty-eight hours of flying done for them, and a cheque for three hundred and four pounds in my pocket.

That's the way it went on all the time. The Persian Gulf is full of industry--new oilfields being laid out, wells being sunk, pipelines being laid, new docks and harbours being built all over the place. There are no roads outside the towns and no railways, and no coasting steamers and few motor-boats. The country is full of engineers to whom time is money, and there are always people wanting to get about in a hurry. The country is mostly sand desert, good for landing a small aeroplane when you have learned the different look of hard and soft sand from the air, and I was right up to the neck in work from the day I got there. Most of the oil companies had their own aircraft, but there was plenty of work left over for me.