The Tigris Expedition Read online

  water penetrated only at the cut ends berdi had at least one advantage: there was nothing to cut oflF at the top, so that water could only enter from the root section, whereas the truncated flower stalks of the other reeds drew water from either end.

  As it became cooler toward evening, the four Aymaras came down to take a second look. With Senor Zeballos as experienced mediator, Gatae and I succeeded in convincing them that if they would just show us how to combine the bundles into a boat, the Marsh Arabs would make the bundles themselves to any measure the Aymaras ordered.

  Nothing on the whole expedition was more pleasing to observe than the spontaneous friendship and mutual respect between the Indians and the Marsh Arabs as they sat down together and began handhng the reeds. The eyes of Senor Zeballos and the four Aymaras reflected astonishment and approbation the moment they saw the marshmen select the best reeds and throw them together with loops around until they became bundles as compact and smooth as if made of the best totora. The Aymaras concluded that the Arabs of Iraq were superior to the Arabs of Morocco, who could not work reeds like this. Obviously the Arabs here descended from Adam.

  The conversation began with the Indians speaking to Seiior Zeballos in the Aymara language, which he translated to me in Spanish, and I to Mr. Shaker in English, who then told the marsh-men in Arabic what the Aymaras wanted. The system was cumbersome, but it did not last long. When I emerged next morning, I found the Aymaras in their caps and ponchos and the marshmen in their caftans and long gowns squatting around a long mat they had already produced together. They were talking to each other, nodding and smiling, asking for strings and reeds and handing each other what was wanted as if they all had a fluent knowledge of Esperanto. At first I stood behind a pahn to make sure I was not mistaken, then I ventured closer to hear what language they had in common. I found that I did not understand a single word. Zeballos and Shaker came and could testify that the Aymaras spoke Aymara and the Arabs spoke Arabic and the two languages were as different as English and Chinese. But these people had the reeds in common and were equally earthbound and alert. With such fine people as those of the Iraqi marshes, the Titicaca group declared themselves wilhng to make a boat of any size. And Gatae, beaming with satisfaction, said that his men had never worked with more pleasant and

  able persons than these South American gentlemen. One more day, and I found the tall, dignified Gatae in a short brown poncho with llama cap, and Zeballos and his square-built Indians, all hidden like five white ghosts in long Arab gowns and headgear. The change of attire was just too comical; the Indians kept stumbling about in the too-long sarks, and Gatae suffered from heat and itching. In Basra we tried to find some straw hats for the Indians; they were worn for one day only and then the woolen caps with earflaps were on their heads again.

  What the Aymaras had taught the marshmen on the first day and without interpreter was how to tie together the very special mats that would be folded around each half of the twin-bodied ship like a tight sausage sldn. These smooth mats were as long as the entire ship and hand-woven in such a way that all reeds pointed one way and not a single reed end would jut outward. This was important for two reasons: to increase the speed of the ship through the water and to decrease absorption. When several mats had been made in strips about sixty feet long by three feet wide, they were carefully carried one by one into the cradle-shaped jig by thirty men. The giant sausage skins were now ready to be fiUed with the compact bundles. I had worked out that thirty-eight bundles two feet in diameter would be needed to give the ship the desired proportions. Open spaces between them would be filled with thin bimches of reeds. The marshmen and Aymaras worked so fast that they averaged three of these large bundles each day instead of one as estimated. The bundles had to be much longer than the total length of the ship, since they must curve upward, sickle-shape, at each end.

  A difficult decision was whether or not to use asphalt. Scientists argued that the Sumerian boat models from Ur were thickly covered with asphalt. Clergymen reminded me that Moses started his life in an asphalt-covered reed basket on the Nile, and that Noah had saved the lives of his companions by coating his reed ship in the same way. But Gatae agreed with what old Hagi had said: the bundles would float well enough just as they were. We had two identical twelve-foot test bundles prepared, and one of them was brought to the boatbuilding village of Huwair, where a red-haired, blue-eyed marshman spent his life coating mashhufs in the same manner and with the same kind of wooden spatula and roUing pin as was used in this trade five thousand years ago. His speed and

  precision were admirable. The asphalt came from a natural well up-river. He coated our roU in the same manner, and we noted that an estimated burden of sixty kilos of the black bitumen was added to the little bundle to cover the reeds well. The two identical test rolls, one asphalted and one not, were now launched side by side in the river Tigris and anchored to the bottom with heavy burdens of bricks and scrap iron. They were to remain submerged for six weeks or so until our vessel was fuUy built.

  Parallel with this experiment HP began his own. He filled my room with truncated and transparent plastic bottles holding bits of berdi set on end, some in fresh water, some in salt water. Some had their cut base end tightly bound with string. They all floated so well that even a complete ten-foot reed set vertically in a bottle of water remained floating upright without touching the bottom. But the results were confusing: after a few days some of the reeds to our surprise started to rise higher in the water, probably because their bases had swollen. HP became optimistic and suggested that we might end flying across the ocean like a Zeppelin. As the weeks passed all the reeds in fresh water sank quite insignificantly; those in salt water not at all.

  But as the Aymaras started the shipbuilding we ran into a no less dramatic water problem on dry ground.

  "Maku mail There is no water!"

  This was the first Arabic I learned. We heard it every day. Then: "Aku mail There is water 1" This was the standard phrase of our httle Arab engineer, Mr. Ramsey, who happily shouted back to us from the rest-house roof.

  Without water the berdi was as brittle as a match and broke if we bent it. Since green berdi was worse still, the reeds had to be sim-dried first, but then drenched on their outside to become pliant before they could be tied into mats and bundles. With Baghdad and other major cities upstream, the river Tigris was probably so polluted that it might affect the dried reeds if we daily poured bucket-loads of river water over them. This we reluctantly did at the beginning. But Mr. Ramsey solved the pollution problem: he had two big tanks brought from Basra and, after endless problems, installed on the roof. They were pumped full of filtered drinking water from Quma, and Seiior Zeballos could spray the reeds and bundles all day long. But the pipelines of the rest house passed through the same tanks, and the busy kitchen department and crowded guest rooms competed with Zeballos and his thin rubber hose.

  "Maku mail" Zeballos and all the rest of us learned to yell in despair as the bone-dry reeds cracked under our feet. "Aku mail" we heard a moment later from the Httle man wielding the big pHers on the roof. His happy message was not infrequently followed by an angry roar from some soap-covered television man or journalist under a shower that had run dry. I was so afraid of losing Mr. Ramsey that on one occasion I dragged him out of his car as he tried to escape for a day's visit to Basra.

  Before we moved into the Garden of Eden Rest House, the ministry had generously oflFered to close it to all but men of the expedition group. This I refused to accept as I knew that the big restaurant hall and the adjacent riverside terrace were the favorite meeting place for local people. The mayor and other officials of Quma, as well as the incredibly large number of schoolteachers from the marsh area, used to come here in the evenings and on Moslem hohdays to enjoy a cup of tea or a cool Iraqi beer, and I knew the country was closed to tourists anyhow. But I had not counted on the tens of thousands of foreigners who were already inside Iraq on government contracts to develop the indu
stries of the Baghdad area and down near Basra and the oil fields. When local television had shown that South American Indians were working in the Garden of Eden, they all flocked to our fence, and while Russians, Japanese, Germans and Poles were invading the rest house for cool beer, AH and Mohanmied turned the water to the toilets and Ramsey turned it back to our hose in an endless internal batde.

  "Maku mui!" "Aku mail" "Aku maku!"

  During this chaos the ship took shape under a burning sun. Bundle after bundle was carried on the shoulders of thirty men, and, winding like sixty-foot Chinese dragons between the date palms and stacks of reed, they were carried up on to the feeble scaflFolding and down into the huge sausage skin.

  The air cooled sHghtly. Three weeks had passed since the Ay-maras arrived at the beginning of October, and the big body of the vessel was now ready in two parallel halves. Each half was separated from the other by a wide passage where the backbone of the peculiar vessel was to go: the invisible third bundle that was the professional secret of the ingenious building system.

  At this stage I began to feel in desperate need of the three Indian dhow sailors who should have arrived from Bombay long be-

  fore. Without them I could not start preparing the special dhow-type sail for which I had brought extra lengths of spare canvas. The dhows, a type of sailing vessel pecuhar to the local waters since time immemorial, had a sail that looked hke an ancient Egyptian sail set at a slant. Undoubtedly it was the surviving transition form between the earhest prehistoric type and the modem lateen sail. Such a sail would be of great value for our experiment, but the sail-maker in Hamburg did not know how to make one.

  I had been down the banks of the river all the way to the gulf, and had even visited Kuwait in search of dhow sailors who could help us first to rig the vessel and then to guide us through the chaos of reefs and tankers in the gulf until we reached the open ocean. But there was not a single Arab left in the area who had not sawn down the mast of his dhow and installed a motor, for fuel was now as cheap as the wind in the gulf countries. Everywhere I got the same reply: today only dhows from Pakistan and India still use sails.

  Twenty years ago the Shatt-al-Arab and the Tigris as well were full of white sails hoisted on open dhows bringing dates from the plantations to Basra. Today these proud sailing dhows can only be seen as trademarks decorating the box-hds of stoneless Iraqi dates.

  When I first came to Iraq, Indian sailing dhows used to ply regularly between Bombay and Basra, but due to smuggling this tra£Bc had come to a temporary standstill. The Indian consul in Basra had therefore promised to get me three professional dhow sailors through the Seamen's Union in Bombay. However, before he could complete the transactions he was transferred from Iraq and I was planning to go to Bombay myself and handpick the men, but too many other tasks held me down to the boatbuilding site. The BBC then promised on my behalf to locate dhow sailors through a seamen's agency in Bombay: the requirements were three men thoroughly famihar with sailing in the gulf and at least one with some knowledge of Enghsh.

  Cables from London confirmed that the three men had been hired and were on their way by plane from Bombay. Two weeks later the men were still missing and a new cable confirmed that they were temporarily lost in New Delhi, where they had gone to get their promised Iraqi visas.

  While the BBC and the Bombay agency tried to relocate the lost dhow sailors, the ex5)edition members started to arrive to assist

  with the launching and the final superstructure. HP flew home to Norway to cool oflF and rest before the voyage started, and a new acquaintance, Detlef Soitzek, a young captain in the German merchant navy, came to take HP's place as my right-hand man in the shipyard. Then came three of the experienced reed-boat sailors who had been with me on both Ra I and Ra II: the expedition navigator and second in command, Norman Baker from the United States; the expedition doctor, Yuri Senkevitch from the Soviet Union; and the Itahan mountain climber Carlo Mauri. The new men followed a few days later: Tom Suzuki, underwater cameraman from Japan; my Mexican globe-trotting friend Gherman Carrasco, who had been back home since escorting the Aymaras from Bohvia to Iraq; As-bjom Damhus, the young Dane from the United World Colleges; and the mystery man Norris Brock, the American film photographer sent to us by the National Geographical Society as a sort of independent outsider.

  We were seated at a greatly extended table in the big hall eating an excellent supper on November 2 when Ah came in with the happy news that he had "found" the lost Indian dhow sailors: they were standing in the reception with their duffel bags. We all left our plates in sheer excitement to welcome our lost companions, who were to join us for at least the first leg of the expedition. There they were: three real, darkly tanned Indian dhow sailors. I felt I had known them all my hfe and introduced them to my friends: Sale-man Taiyab Changda, Ibrahim Harun Sodha and Abdul Alim Vasta. We hardly gave them time to wash their hands before we dragged them into the restaurant haU, extended our table and seated them beside us to enjoy all the dehcacies Ah and Mohammed could pile onto their plates. At first embarrassed and then dehghted at our obviously unexpected comradeship, they grabbed half a fried chicken each and poured down one beer after the other. Saleman spoke Enghsh. He translated to his friends.

  With Indian added to Aymara, Arabic, Japanese, Russian and all the West European languages, someone suggested that we should forget the ship and rebuild the nearby Tower of Babel instead. Once it was restored we could place an Esperanto school on top. The multinational spirit was high, and Mohammed kept on carrying loads of full beer cans in from the kitchen and empty ones out onto the terrace. Curious, I followed him, and saw that he dumped all the empties into the river.

  "Mohammed," I said, "you people dump all your rubbish into the Tigris. Where do you think all these beer cans will go?"

  Mohammed's face ht up in a happy smile: To America?"

  The three newcomers were tired from the journey and it was already dark, so they had to wait till next morning to see the vessel. All our rooms and even the lobby and its adjacent soft-drinks bar were full of beds and mattresses, so the three had to squeeze in on camp beds in our storage room between popping bamboo and coils of rope.

  Next morning at sunrise I woke them up. In pajamas they followed me up the stairs to the flat roof, where we had a magnificent view of the river and the garden. Our crescent-shaped vessel looked marvelous in the half hght; it was as if a golden new moon had landed on the banks of the river Tigris and was ready to take oflE again. In recent days the Aymaras had organized the most difficult job: they had managed to pull the two big halves together to form one complete ship. Each half still retained its circular cross section with the many big core bundles now all nicely wrapped inside the w-oven-reed sldn. The open space which imtil recently separated the two half vessels and made them appear like two parallel canoes, had now been filled in with a slim bundle serving as a sort of common backbone. This backbone bundle was tied to each of the huge side bundles by a half-inch rope hundreds of yards long, wound in continuous spiral from bow to stem. First the backbone was boimd in Wth one side of the ship, then with the other, by separate ropes which ran in complementary spirals. When these two spiral ropes were pulled tight by all our men, aided by blocks and puUeys, each of the two half bodies moved slowly in toward the central backbone, until this was Hterally squeezed into the two main sections and became completely invisible between them. The result was a sort of a compact catamaran with no gap between the twin huUs.

  From the roof I let the three sleepy Indian dhow sailors look down up>on the beautiful vessel from which only cabins and rigging were missing. For a long while they seemed to admire the ship in silence. Then Saleman said slowly:

  "And where is the engine?"

  "Engine," I said. "There will be no engine!"

  "But how will it move?" Saleman was curious.

  "By sail, of course. Aren't you dhow sailors?" I asked and looked at the three chocolate-colored men who gazed at the reed ship.

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sp; "Ve are dhow sailors. But our dhows go with engines," said Saleman calmly.

  None of them knew how to sail, or how to make a dhow saill I was horrified. But at least they could serve us as pilots through the gulf. How many times had they made the voyage between Bombay and Basra?

  Basra? Saleman looked at Ibrahim and Ibrahim looked at Abdul. None of them had been to Basra. None of them had seen the gulf.

  I gave up. We had to send them back to Bombay. They were visibly relieved at this decision and showed clear signs of horror when they took their last look at the reed ship. But before I sent them on dieir long and costly journey home I had the brilliant idea that we might still be able to use Saleman because he spoke Eng-hsh. We had seen several big Indian dhows at anchor in the river at Basra, but all attempts to get any sense out of the idle crews failed because none of them spoke any European language and not even Arabic. If some of them could sail, I thought, Saleman could be interpreter.

  That evening the expedition members were going to Basra by minibus to be guests of honor at a dinner oflFered by the president of Basra University. But before the party, Norman, as our navigator and sailing master, was wiUing to accompany the three Indian dhow sailors to Basra harbor and use them to get some information out of their countrymen at anchor in the river. Yuri had just borrowed a beautiful new Russian car from the Soviet consul general, and our museum interpreter. Shaker, offered to drive.

  Norman and his four companions never showed up at the University in time for dinner, and in the end we had to begin. We must have enjoyed a dozen or so savory Arab dishes, every one fabulously good, when a man all wrapped up mummy-fashion in white was shown in by a nervous waiter and stood immobile like a ghost inside the door. A red nose and a red ear were all we could see. But the red was from scratches! It was Norman 1 All in bandages, waiting to be introduced.