The Tigris Expedition Page 6

  About this time another extremely friendly and polite middle-aged man turned up, also with his suitcase, Mr. Shaker al Turkey, appointed by the museum authorities to be my local guide and liaison ofiicer. This was just when the second shipment of food had gone astray, so, happy suddenly to have two interpreters, I sent Shaker to Basra, his own hometown, to search for the lost consignment. No sooner had he left before Baghdad managed to get through on the phone: the ministry had learned that I now had two interpreters, so Kais was immediately ordered back to the capital.

  Kais hated what he had termed the wilderness and left that same night. Thus I was left with no interpreter at all when an army of Arabic-speaking truck drivers and marshmen knocked at my door next morning. Not even AH or Mohammed was around. The Arabs

  showed me that the road outside was lined with trucks laden sky-high with dry golden berdi. Here they aU were, aU waiting for me to explain what to do. I ran and opened the iron gate to the Garden of Eden where the trench was dug. The trucks could barely pass between the brick piUars flanking the entrance. I have never seen so many trucks, trailers and bulldozers as in Iraq; the government imported them by thousands at a time, and when the mayor of Qurna got orders from Baghdad to help me fetch the berdi from the banks of the marshes near Al Gassar, he sent a battaHon of trucks so as to have the job done in one day. As they aU began their shuttle operation, I had up to nine trucks at a time around me inside the narrow fence, trying to get rid of their loads, all blocking the passage for each other, and in a struggle to get in and out driving over the brittle stalks unloaded by others. I ran between the drivers, who shouted angrily to each other in Arabic and smiled happily at me, ignoring with good conscience all the orders I gave in various European languages that were all Greek to them. When the evening came I was exhausted from waving and pointing and stumbhng among the reeds. At sunset I finally found myself alone with the silent river, beside Adam's tree, both gateposts having been broken by the trucks and the whole garden a dense chaos of reed piles, leaving no place to build a ship or even place a foot.

  No sooner was all the sun-dried berdi there before Gatae and his chosen men showed up next morning as if by magic. Gatae was a bright personahty, and language problems were no obstacle. With Mohammed as a sort of interpreter, I had the marshmen make me the first tightly bound reed bundle sixty feet long, which they did with astonishing dexterity and speed. But to my surprise the result, very much thicker than a man could embrace, was so heavy that Gatae estimated that possibly eighty men would be needed to lift it and carry it to the intended scaffold. We clearly needed many more but much thinner bundles to make up the final ship.

  When Shaker came back from his successful mission we set all men to work for two days assembling the berdi within convenient reach of the building site, piling it into parallel stacks as high as a man could reach and with ample space to walk between. All the broken stalks were thrown on the banks and those that were not carried away by old women for kitchen fires were in no time turned into a flotilla of reed rafts filling the river with jubilant boys and girls.

  Material to build a wooden jig, a temporary cradle for the ship,

  was not easily located in Iraq. Through the earliest works of art and inscribed tablets we know that Sumerian territory was originally covered with forest, but that these were gradually destroyed by man in antiquity so that timber became a major import, judging by the cuneiform records listing ships' cargoes. The price of imported timber is today so high that we were delighted to find a modest lumber yard near the Basra docks where long natural poles and rods from forests in the northern mountain regions were available. We needed them in himdreds and selected those with least bends and twists. HP, as expert army bridge builder, succeeded in raising the barkless poles and sticks into a sturdy crisscross framework, measured and designed to give size and shape to the reed ship when the bundles were assembled inside it. A serious problem was the lack of gangplanks for the high scaffold. The main body of the final ship should consist of two compact reed cyhnders each ten feet in diameter amidship, getting narrower as they curved up in bow and stem to the height of about twenty feet. We had to reach this height by means of the combined jig and scaffold.

  Aladdin's Lamp must have been working for us, for two truck-loads of used scaffold planks and crate boards were dumped outside the fence for our use just when they were needed most. Indeed, strange rumors had spread up and down the river to other Europeans temporarily at work in the coimtry. The gossip was that we were erecting building scaffolds in the rest-house garden and had already bought tons of reeds, so we were certainly about to set up another paper milll Far up the river was a German paper mill actually under construction, and the Germans who came down to look at us learned that we were about to build a reed ship to sail away with one of their own countrymen on board. Far down the river, below Basra, was a barely finished Danish cement factory, and the Danes who came up learned that one of their compatriots was also to come with us. The result of the German and Danish visits were two stacks of boards and planks, which are worth their weight in gold in Iraq today, even as in Sumerian times.

  HP's wooden jig was a master construction that merited permanence for its architectonic perfection and elegant hnes. We were just about to turn our attention to the actual reed work with the berdi beautifully stacked within easy reach, when another committee of European-looking Arabs marched in with tape measures and began pacing about between our stacks.

  I smelled new problems and approached the party pohtely. In-

  deed, they were about to build a fountain, and the berdi had to be moved, since we had placed them just where the fountain was to stand.

  "A fountain?" I said. "But can't the fountain wait until we have finished the ship?"

  No, the fountain was needed now.

  **But there is a big foimtain out of service between the trees just across the road," I said. "Can't you use that?" I pointed to a large wreck of a structure, dry as a bone, with rusty tubes and spouts, fifty yards from our fence.

  No, the fountain had to be right here, and they generously gave us a week to clear the center of the garden. Our stout friend, the mayor of Quma, explained to us in a friendly way that the fountain was something important.

  We spent another day carrying the brittle reeds again in all directions, away from the building platform and up nearer to Adam's tree, so as to leave a clearing in the middle. Two old Quma workmen then came with pick and shovel and began to dig a big circular hole for the fountain, knee deep and the size of a httle swimming pool. Nothing further happened to it as long as we were in the Garden of Eden, but our own poor workmen who had to bring loads of berdi on their heads from the stacks near Adam's tree kept stumbling into the new hole and had to chmb up again to get across to our building site with their burdens.

  The calendar now showed that the day was very near when the Aymara Indians from South America would come and turn the bundles made by the Arabs into a boat. Without them we would never be able to obtain a sickle-shaped ship that would neither capsize nor lose its shape in the ocean waves. The marshmen were still masters in reed work of all kinds, but shipbuilding from reed bundles was to them a lost art, just as it was forgotten in modem Egypt and the many other areas of early civilization where it formerly existed. There was one marked exception: the intricate construction system stiU sm^ved in perfection in the region around the ruins of South America's most spectacular prehistoric civilization, Tiahua-naco. There, on Lake Titicaca, high in the Andes, the Aymara, Que-chua and Uru Indians stiU build watercraft identical with those of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, f

  f When the Spaniards reached this area after the discovery of America, the Indians around the lake told them that their ancestors had first seen such boats built by strangers who had come to their land and erected the colossal stepped temple-pyranud and the giant stone statues at Tiahuanaco, before

  Since time immemorial the art of reed-boat building had survived among all the Indians aroun
d the lake where reeds, stone and mud are the only building materials. The Uru Indians, who formerly dominated the area all the way down to the Pacific coast, not only

  they were driven away by hostile tribes and moved on to the coast to sail away into the Pacific.

  The Indians told the Spaniards that the leader of these foreign visitors was a divine priest-ldng known to them as Kon-Tiki, with the Quechua suffix Viracocha, which means sea foam. He claimed descent from the sim and had his divine ancestors depicted in pottery and stone reUefs as human beings with birds' heads and wings. Kon-Tiki and his men, however, were human beings themselves; they were tall, white and bearded like the Spaniards, but differently dressed, for they wore long loose robes to the ankles, with a belt and sandals.

  When the Spaniards found the old stone statues and golden figurines depicting Kon-Tiki-Viracocha just as the Indians described him, they suspected that some apostle from the Holy Land had crossed the Atlantic before them, as they had heard precisely the same story as soon as they landed in Mexico. Surrounded by colossal stepped temple-pyramids and giant stone sculptures, the Aztecs had welcomed Cortez in Mexico just as the Incas had welcomed Pizarro in Peru. They told the Europeans that white and bearded men in long gowns had come across the Atlantic long before the Spaniards and instructed the ancestors of the Aztecs and the Mayas in pyramid building for sun worship, in hieroglyphic writing, and in all the other aspects of civilization unknown to the primitive masses of American Indians north of Mexico and south of the restricted Andean area of South America. Everywhere within this continuous belt ruins of some lost civilization were found among different tribes of Indians who invariably ascribed them to white and bearded foreigners whose leader descended from the sun. In each country he had a different name. The Aztecs called him Quetzalcoatl, the Mayas Kukulcan, and the Incas Viracocha. The Spaniards were at first so confused that in Mexico the monks mistook Quetzalcoatl for St. Thomas, and in Peru they formed a St. Bartholomew order to venerate a large bearded statue of Kon-Tiki-Viracocha at Kana, north of Lake Titicaca.

  On an island in the lake itself, later called the Island of the Sun, the sun king and his escorts of white and bearded men were said to have intermarried with local women. Then they had set forth in a flotilla of reed boats to civilize the local Uru Indians and build the impressive cult and culture center of Tiahuanaco.

  I had taken four Aymara Indians with their interpreter from Lake Titicaca to Africa to build the papyrus ship Ra II, and with the experience of their stormy mountain lake they had built a reed ship that stood up to the test and crossed the Atlantic Ocean without a reed lost. But when Ra II was brought afterward to the Kon-Tiki Museum in Oslo and the swollen, waterlogged reed bimdles gradually dried out, the proud vessel sank like a coat without a hanger, and neither boatmen nor scientists were able to make it stand and give it back its sickle shape. So ingenious was the ancient building technique that, even though we had seen it done, the Museum Board had to invite the same iowc Indians and their interpreter to Oslo to restore the vessel. Since nobody else could do the job like them, I would try to get them across the Atlantic for a third time, this time to Iraq.

  build reed boats; they also live in reed houses on floating reed islands, just like the marshmen of southern Iraq.

  I had decided to try to bring across the Atlantic once more the four Lake Titicaca Indians with interpreter who had so successfully built my papyrus ship Ra II. This time they had to come to Iraq.

  It would be preferable to launch and even be out of the entire gulf area before the winter rains began, so the Titicaca Indians were needed as soon as possible after the reeds cut in August had dried. But September was stiU burning hot in the lowland marshes of southern Iraq, while the Aymara Indians hved in the cold, thin air of their stormy lake twelve thousand feet above sea level, with the snow remaining on the highest neighboring peaks aU the year round. For them such a sudden change of climate could be disastrous, so I had to delay their arrival until the September heat was over, though it would still be necessary at both ends to modify the climatic shock. From their barren island in the mountain lake the Indians were escorted by their interpreter on a journey down into the Bohvian jungle at the sources of the Amazon. There they all ate and slept and got used to the heat for two weeks before they flew from La Paz to Baghdad with my Mexican friend Gherman Car-rasco, who was later to join the expedition.

  On the Iraqi side the Ministry of Information had generously offered to install air conditioning in one of the two rooms we had prepared for the Indians in the upper part of the rest house. The cagehke apparatus was torn loose from a window downstairs and soon became to me a nightmare. For days it just hung there as dead and useless as if the canary had escaped; then it was suddenly filled with wild and snarhng tigers, while sometimes it began to shudder hke a roaring hehcopter faihng to take off, until the miracle happened and the ugly monster began to spew an Arctic breeze into the empty room just as the Indians arrived.

  But by this time the peaceful river house had within a few days become hke an overcrowded seaside resort, if not a madhouse. Loaded front and back with cameras and tripods, a five-man Arab television team from Baghdad tumbled through the door. They came to stay and began at once to shoot at us from every comer. They needed Shaker's room and he squeezed in with the manager and the engineer. They were hardly unpacked before a five-man British television team, sent by the BBC, conquered the house with 103 cases, boxes, crates and bags that filled all the stairs and corri-

  dors until their Arab colleagues kindly left them Shaker's room and moved into the attic beside the "helicopter room," which I was keeping for the Aymaras. The next to arrive was a gentle, soft-spoken young Arab who spoke flawless EngHsh as he introduced himself: Rashad Nazir Sahm, art student from Baghdad, recommended by the Norwegian consulate as expedition member to represent Iraq. At first impression he looked too sophisticated for a rough sea adventure, but we put him in with HP. Then tired, perspiring persons unknown to me dropped in one by one, seeking beer, bath and bed after a seven-hour drive in a Baghdad taxi through a sun-scorched landscape: a German reporter, a press photographer from the United States, a reporter from Baghdad, a Swedish journahst, two Norwegian journalists, and another German. Then I lost track of the newcomers. The peace-loving manager welcomed them all. The last were squeezed into a tiny windowless laundry closet on mattresses between towering piles of linen of all sorts that menaced to collapse and bury them if they snored.

  The Garden of Eden Rest House was virtually bursting from the inside before the key people had arrived. Apart from the South American Indians, we expected three Asiatic dhow sailors from Bombay, and aU the expedition members due from Asia, America and Europe. In panic I got through to the ministry in Baghdad and learned that the country was still closed to tourists and journalists, but according to their promise they let anybody in who said he was coming to me. They promised to look at my own list from now on, but added that other reporters were already on the way to us.

  The mountain Indians were supposed to be driven through the hot area by night. The sun was burning from the zenith, however, when a station wagon roUed up in front of the overcrowded building and five short and broad men in heavy ponchos of llama wool and woven caps with earflaps tumbled out and embraced me in silence, giving me the greeting reserved for chiefs, just as they had done to the King of Norway. They then shook the others' hands and followed me upstairs, each with a httle bag in which I knew they brought the round water-worn stone and wooden hook, all they needed for working the ropes and reeds. They all posed in a row in front of the confounded air conditioner that now sounded like the cage of a snarling polar bear, and as they cooled off I recognized five great friends who began to smile from ear to ear: the three

  brothers Juan, Jos6 and Demetrio Limachi and Paulino Esteban, all Aymaras from Surild Island in Lake Titicaca, and their Bolivian interpreter, Luis Zeballos Miranda from the Tiahuanaco Museum in La Paz.

  Our stoic Aymara boatbuilders
showed no sign of surprise when they entered the Garden of Eden and saw the endless stacks of reeds. But their eyes grew bigger for a moment, and they tore off their woolen caps to expose their raven-black hair, when Adam's tree was pointed out. Then they turned again to the berdi, which they tore to bits with their hands and calmly condemned as no good for boatbuilding. Gatae and our marshmen stood curiously in a circle around us and looked at the short Indians as if they were creatures from the moon. They were amazed that this tribe of South American reed-boat builders called themselves Aymara, the more so when I could add that their neighbors on the lake were called Uru and hved on floating reed islands like the Marsh Arabs. Our Arab builders were surprised, for the nearby town of Amara and the ruins of Ur were for them two of the most important names around the marshes.

  Gatae asked me to explain to the skeptical Indians that the reeds were brittle as paper now, but once they were wet they would be tough and as flexible as rope. This the Aymara Indians knew well, for their own totora reeds at Lake Titicaca had that same property. But still berdi was no good for them. These were not simple stalks hke totora or the papyrus we had provided for building Ra II in Africa. Papyrus was even bigger and better than totora. But this plant fanned into thin branches like grass with no real stalk, and they did not know how to handle it.

  The Aymaras hurried back to their own cool room and I was afraid they wanted to go home.

  I had to agree that there was a big difference. For us this would be a completely new experiment. Only the sweet smell and the fluffy inside pulp seemed the same. In the totora and the papyrus this airy pulp was completely surrounded by a thin, watertight skin, and the straight stalk was hke a rod with a rounded triangular cross section all the way from the root to the bushy flower on top. The berdi, however, had many separate layers of sldn and pulp rolled up inside each other hke an onion, and the oval stem at the base gradually opened up into long, sharp, separate leaves. The skin was waxy and surely as watertight as the skin of papyrus, and since