Memoir of the Career of Thomas Edward Rogers [‎30r] (59/118)

their uniform, did some discreet highway robbery on their own. When I had
covered without incident three of the five passes, enjoying the experience and
hoping that word of my passing would help to advertise, however modestly, our
vigilance the pony went lame on the very rough and stony going. It had to be
left behind to recover and I got a lift to Shiraz and on to Teheran. On the way
at Isfahan the hotel was pretty clearly giving guest room to one or two ladies
of, as I recall, Bulgarian nationality who were sympathetic to the Germans and
probably collecting information on their behalf. My suspicions were confirmed
by a British army officer I met and he told me he would make a report.
In late 1942 the Royal Navy reported from Hormuz that the Jask lighthouse had
not been working on a night when red and green light signals had been seen.
Jask was a tiny fishing village where in 1616 the East India Company who were
seeking new markets for an excess of broad-cloth, which was unsurprisingly
selling poorly in India, had set up its first trading post in Persia. It was on
the Persian coast of the Gulf of Oman just at the point where that coast runs
north at a right angle towards the narrow strait of Hormuz. To the north of the
strait was the Royal Navy's convoy assembly point for oil tankers leaving the gulf.
The lights, thought the Navy, could mean that enemy agents were signalling the
departure of convoys to submarines, possibly Japanese but more probably German.
To avoid alerting agents or the Persian authorities at this stage, I asked to be
put ashore in darkness from an armed merchantman of the Royal Indian Navy. Off
Jask half a dozen sailors rowed me slowly shorewards with the oars muffled both
for quiet and to avoid any observer noticing the brilliantly bright phosphorescent
plankton which is a feature of the Jask area. But I fear the phosphorescence was
hardly less detectable. With my maps, and the air photographs I had asked to be
taken, all in a waterproof package, I was carried the last short distance to the
steeply sloping beach so that I could be dry for the few hours ahead. Inland I