In the midst of the chaos our contact man from the BBC in London, Peter Clark, dropped out of the sky and boarded us from a motor vessel. He just had a bite to eat and returned to shore with Dimitri in a Russian motor launch.
It was hilarious. It was scary. Supposing we got no farther than down the river. Supposing the acids of whatever we had absorbed from the paper mill had damaged our reeds?
The noises faded behind us. We all cHmbed down on deck except the helmsmen. It had been fun. But we were hungry. Asbjom served hot Danish stew: hakkebof.
Our pilots had left us in Basra to refuel and we continued on our own, escorted by a couple of casual small boats southward through another truly beautiful area. Here and there, in a fertile terrain of dense palm forests, lay attractive villas in splendid terrace gardens; now and then a primitive but most picturesque village of mud-plastered huts appeared half hidden under the giant leaves of banana plants and date palms. But every now and then a new road reached the river at some newly built mole with industry under construction on the banks.
At about two in the afternoon we reached the border of Iran, and from here on Iraq's territory was restricted to the western half of the river. From now on all ships at anchor were on the Iranian side. Nobody reacted as we passed, and when the pilot balam finally caught up with us the men on board were in a panic that we might come too close to the midhne of the river.* The pilots were so afraid of crossing the midline that they led us aU the time as close as possible to Iraq's banks. So close that I occasionally suspected that the oars touched the bottom. I began to realize that our guides in the balam had never been farther down than Basra harbor.
* When I had visited Iraq a few years earlier the two countries were enemies on the edge of war; now they were on friendly terms except that Iraq had just beaten Iran at football. I did not feel too certain about how we rated with the Shah after the violent protests from his imperial court and embassy at our reference to the "Arabian" instead of the "Persian" Gulf. Now we were heading for that gulf, so what were we to call it so as not to ofiFend anyone? After all, Persia had changed its own name to Iran, and Mesopotamia had become Iraq, so why the problem with the gulf? We were traveling the Sumerian way, and the Sumerians too must have had a name for this gulf, before either the Arabs or the British Navy. So for our own internal use I suggested that we call it the Sumerian Gulf. The Sumerians themselves on their inscribed tablets refer to the "Sea of the Rising Sim," the "Lower Sea" and the "Bitter Sea," but we cannot know if these descriptive names do not comprise the sea even beyond the gulf area. But we had not yet reached that gulf.
As night approached they insisted on stopping. They showed us where to spend the night and told us to throw out the anchor. We did, near a bend where a South Korean and a Monrovian ship were anchored near the Iranian bank. Detlef threw out the anchor, but the rope did not follow. When he pulled in he straightway had the anchor in his hand, dripping with mud. I tried to twist the starboard rudder oar. It sat hke a spoon in butter, as did the port-side rudder. Rashad yeUed to the pilots that we were in shallow water. They yelled back that just where we were was the deepest part of the river. We threw a Hne and asked them to tow us off. They tried, but failed. There was Httle more than three feet down to the loose mud that began to suck the whole bottom fast, Hke a quagmire. Even our punt poles sank into the loose bottom and were hard to pull up again.
We had to wait for high tide, said our pilots. But they admitted that they did not know when high tide would come until they saw it. It was never the same one day as the next, and tidal hours were different here from farther up the river. We all poked our noses close to the dirty water. It did not move. It was high tide right now. In fact the water was slowly turning and beginning to run away into the gulf. We fought desperately, but either we were sinking ever deeper into the mud or else the mud was building up quickly around us. It was a frightening situation. Led by Carlo and Yuri, we managed to hft the rudder oars up and tied them on so that they did not reach deeper than the bottom of the vessel.
We sat there as the moon came up and had the horrible feeling of being sucked down into some bottomless Hquid clay by invisible octopus tentacles. In the night big steamers, brilHantly ht, passed us going upriver. At least we knew they had professional local pilots who certainly held them weU away from our banks.
In the moonlight Detlef and Tom crossed the river by dinghy to the other side and asked the crew of the Monrovian ship if they would help pull us off with their winch. They politely refused, from fear of the Iranian police, as we were on the Iraqi side. Our two envoys then rowed over to the Koreans. They were willing to stretch their own rope to the midhne of the river, but not into Iraqi waters. Anyway, we had to wait for the next high tide as they would otherwise pull our bundles to pieces. As both ships gave very contrary estimates of local tidal hours our two men came back from the Iranian side without result.
The situation got worse hour by hour. Sxirely our reeds would gradually be buried in running river silt.
Late at night the water stopped flowing out. The banks where we sat seemed almost dry in the moonhght. No further changes kept us awake, and one by one we dozed off with a night watch on the roof.
At 2:30 A.M. I woke as I heard water gurghng and swirling. I poked my head through the opening and the night watch showed me with his flashhght that the chocolate-colored water was gushing upriver, splashing past the portside rudder blade under my nose. It was as if we ourselves were shooting downstream through the rapids of a muddy river, though in reaUty we were sitting where we sat last night. But the tide was rushing in from the gulf at a frightening speed. Now, we would surely either be buried or else torn loose. We launched the dinghy again and Detlef and Asbjorn rowed out and dropped both our anchors in the deepest part of the river; then we on board puUed on the anchor ropes to try to drag ourselves into deeper water.
For nine hours we had been stuck on the mud banks, when at last the undermining action of the incoming tide, combined with our own struggles, began to have effect. At 3:30 a.m. the bow was slowly turning away from land. To help this movement we kept pulling in all rope slack to the anchor, while we yelled to awaken our sleeping pilots. I would have preferred to pay them off, but somewhere around the next bend was Iran's large modem city of Abadan, and we would probably have to take a tow between oil tankers and refineries. By five o'clock we were afloat in the middle of the river, able to lower the rudder oars into position and hoist our sail against a starht sky. A huge bright halo surrounded the moon, which had been full two nights earlier.
We had hardly rounded the first great bends before we saw the silhouette of Abadan against a dawn sky. Tall smokestacks, radio towers, a whole city of lofty oil tanks. A feeble wind turned against us and a faint current stiU ran against the bow, so we lowered the sail and let the balam tow us as fast as possible through the worst pollution we had ever seen. From a paradise of a kind our golden ship had suddenly found herself in a modem inferno. The surface between the big ships and the modem dock installations was neither sea nor river water, but a thick soup of black crude oil and floating refuse. In the cleanest spots it shone and reflected rainbow
colors as the sun rose behind the industrial fog. Sumerians would have been horrified to see the environment modern man prefers. Even the lower half of all the green berdi lining the undeveloped banks on the Iraqi side was black from tar or oil, clearly showing the level of high tide. The air smelled of oil. We were ashamed of our proud vessel that now began to get dirty with oil and grease above the waterhne from the wash of passing ships.
Rashad asked our balam to give full engine, even though it might be hard on our reeds. We had to get out into the open bay. To oiu- surprise we found the water cleaner as soon as we had passed the big city, as if the mess was floating in and out at the same spot. But surely it was bound to catch up with us again if we did not reach the mouth of the river before the tide flowed back toward the sea. The water turned from black to brown. There were a very
few date palms again in a naked landscape without beauty. It was indeed an area fit for industrial expansion. In the afternoon a town rose above the level wasteland on the Iraqi side. Fao. The last town at the river's mouth. In a sense the river continued; at low tide it wound its way like a shiny sea serpent through partly submerged bogs and empty tidal flats, until it sank where there was no more sign of land. We were longing to get there; out where brackish water would turn salt and seagulls waited to escort us into the freedom of the open sea.
Captions for the following four pages
9. The legendary Garden of Eden seen from the building site where the rivers Euphrates and Tigris meet.
10. Chemical pollution from a paper mill threatens to dissolve the reeds of Tigris before it reaches the open sea.
11. Entering the gulf at the rivers mouth as the wind died down, we were left adrift among ships of all nations, until a strong onshore wind blew up and forced us to sail toward Kuwait.
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Captions for the preceding four pages
13. In the shallows of Failaka island three dhows refused to assist; a Russian lifeboat came to tow us out, hut did not succeed until a ransom was paid to the third dhow, which helped the Russians to pull us out.
14. With both anchors lost we were towed away from Failaka by the Russian merchantman Slavsk, a hard test for the solidity of a reed ship.
15. Farewell to Captain Igor Usakowsky and Slavsk.
16. A big hole had been ripped in the bow of Tigris during the towing to Bahrain.
Chapter 4
TRAPPED BETWEEN THE REEFS AND PIRATES
X
HERE was no more river. No more land. The balam had been paid off in Fao and had returned upstream. The vast mudflats extending at water level into the gulf from Iraq and Iran formed an indefinable coastline around us as we entered salt water. We hoisted sail on a vessel that looked hke a floating fruit basket. Bundled reeds and plaited canes bobbed merrily along, with red tomatoes, green salad, yellow citrus fruits, carrots and potatoes topping hemp sacks and wickerwork containers. We were loaded with perishables for as long as they would keep on the surJit deck of an open raft-ship. In a few days all these fresh provisions would be consumed by eleven hungry men or else covered by mold just as fast as green seaweed would start growing on our submerged reeds.
We had docked at Fao at the transition from the sandy plains to the mudflats long enough to fill our vessel with these dehcate garden products, and also carried aboard a good supply of onions, gar-he, raisins and a variety of local nuts, seeds and grains that would keep at sea.
From the port of Fao a long and narrow channel had been
dredged through the vast empty tidal flats to the open sea for big ships to be piloted in and out along numbered navigation buoys. Tigris had been towed through this channel by a professional Iraqi pilot tug. Mud, mud, nothing but mud. All formed by the never-ending deposits of fine river silt from Mount Ararat in Turkey, and desert dust from the twin-river plains of Iraq. We passed lazily with the outgoing tide before sunrise.
We met the first sHght swells from the open gulf as we passed the Khafka hght buoy and the pilot boat left us to ourselves. The sun rose red in morning mist over an open sea. We were filled with expectation.
By leaving the mouth of the outer channel I felt as if I were once more about to break a scientific taboo. Vessels hke Tigris were not supposed to go any farther. We were trespassing beyond the limits of what competent scholars had set for the range of a Meso-potamian vessel of berdi reeds. Not until the Sumerians invented wooden boats did they have access to the open gulf, according to what we had all been taught. Textbooks and teachers repeated what some long-forgotten authority had assumed to be true: that people in Mesopotamia, hke those in Egypt, began river navigation in ships built from bundles of reeds, but had no means to leave the outlets until they abandoned the early reed ships and invented the first plank-built craft.
We were about to violate a well-estabhshed time barrier. Zero hour for marine history and cultural contact by sea were both tied to the change from compact bundle craft to the hollow hull. So important was this transition that we were led to take it for granted that, if there were an open stretch of water between them, cultures and civihzations must have developed independently if they existed before that fundamental jump in maritime history.
I knew as we hoisted sail beyond the Shatt-al-Arab that to scientists in many fields this would seem as a vote of no confidence in long-accepted teachings in anthropology. Perhaps it was. But it was fair play. To those who really beheved that a reed ship would sink at sea, we should now be about to prove that they were right, and I wrong. But with all respect for my own colleagues among the scholars, none of them had ever seen a berdi ship nor were they able to quote anyone who had. Nor was I.
And I did feel a bit uneasy myself after seeing the complete waterlogging of our two test bundles in the river Tigris. Less en-
couraging still: our own ship had begun to absorb. I was not exactly surprised when in Fao Yuri had pulled me aside for a quiet talk. The Russian reed-ship veteran had for once an expression as if he were about to summon me for a grave operation. He pointed to our shghtly sunken waterline. Had I seen it?
I had. And I tended to agree with Norman that some acid or pulp-producing chemical from the paper mill could have helped water penetrate the skin of the outer bundles. When the exterior reeds had swollen as much as the tight spiral rope permitted, they would probably block water from passing farther in.
Yuri looked at me without comment. Then he said calmly:
"Carlo and I agree that we should unload everything not absolutely needed. Better to leave it with people in Fao than to throw it overboard in the gulf.**
I studied Yuri's expression. Was he becoming afraid? No more than I was. I knew what he was referring to. We had only the word of the Marsh Arabs to rely upon when it came to the water resistance of berdi cut in August. On Ra II water absorption began to reduce the carrying capacity of our thirty-foot papyrus ship as soon as we were past the Canary Islands. We had to dmnp all spare woodwork and extra food and water into the sea oflF the coast of Africa even before we started across the Atlantic, for fear of sinking due to overloading. Yuri's somber expression was enough to remind me of the moments of horror we had experienced together on low-riding reed bundles at sea. Moments when we sat waist-deep in the salty Atlantic and sometimes had the waves washing over our heads. Ra II was not so bad as Ra I. We were waterlogged and had barnacles growing on deck, but at least we reached America without the loss of a single reed. Ra I had been the tough one. As the wave-beaten bamboo cabin had severed the bundle lashings the whole ship spht lengthwise along the middle and we could see the bottomless ocean between our feet. Moments of horror mixed with moments of triumph and joy. Days and nights with our hearts in our mouths when we faced death opening and closing its jaws beneath us and we never knew what disaster the next second might produce.
"Yuri, you are right," I said with a sudden impulse of support. "Let us carry ashore everything we can do without."
And at once Norman and Carlo were with us, making up a hst. Of course, we did not need a compressor for Gherman's aqualungs. Nor any spare tanks for diving. No one needed to dive deeper than
was necessary to inspect the bottom of our bundles, or to loosen a short-lined anchor if stuck in some rocks. This we could do without aqualungs. The boys who had never sailed a reed ship before did not understand what had overtaken the four old-timers. Gherman protested. He had bought aU this expensive equipment on my behalf, so that he and Toru could film sharks and other fish we knew would follow under a silent raft-ship.
His protests were of no avail. We had no need to film anything that required compressed air. In fact, we could do without artificial fight as well, so ashore went Gherman's incredibly heavy underwate
r lamps and batteries, together with the compressor and a large pile of Mexican souvenirs and such personal belongings as he would never need on a raft voyage. All this was nailed up in cases and shipped back to his home. The others among us had to go through a similar stripping, although we allowed a certain tolerance and few had brought more than was needed. The greatest cut in cargo came when Yuri laid his hands on our spare timber. Here I felt as if he was stripping me personally to the skin. The four of us knew that the wooden parts were most vulnerable on a reed ship. The rigging, the bridge and particularly the shafts of the rudder oars. While reeds flexed under strain, wood broke. The reed bundles were literally unbreakable. Like soHd rubber. But not wood. Wood broke in combat with the elements.
As on Ra II I had brought beams, poles and hardwood pieces for spHcing broken parts. To the amazement of the already puzzled newcomers Yuri now wanted all of it left behind. Our friends in the balam almost sank as they accepted this precious gift with open arms. I barely managed to save our long rowing oars, twelve in aU, and a few hardwood odds and ends for emergency sphcing. Better to reestabhsh mental peace right now if anyone already began to feel uneasy. In fact, was I not one of them myself?
Tigris was fully sixty feet long as compared with the thirty-nine feet of Ra II. But we were eleven men on board instead of eight. And we carried far more water and provisions than for a two months' journey like that which confronted the Ra I and II. And again, we stiU had only the word of the Marsh Arabs to counter those of the scientists. All we had done, apart from using berdi instead of papyrus, was to cut our reeds in August instead of in December.
The Tigris Expedition Page 11