The Tigris Expedition

by Heyerdahl, Thor

  This was a professional job. Beautiful symmetry and exact in every detail. The material was not reed, but the slender midstem of date-palm leaves, just as on Failaka, where reeds were equally lacking, at least today. Apart from the usual lashing, each stalk had been sewn neatly to its neighbor with a result strikingly similar to the cane-boats I had seen in use among the Sens Indians of Mexico. Apparently canes and palm stalks were too hard, not spongy enough, to be lashed together with outside loops only. Nor would they probably maintain their buoyancy as long as reeds. I asked the old man. He did not know. They used to sail these farteh to Saudi Arabia in two days in former times, but after use they were always dried ashore. He doubted they would float more than a week. Probably the palm stems would not even survive more than a week in seawater. He now propelled his farteh with oars, but drew the shape of the former sail in the sand. He referred to it as a sherd. It was precisely like the trapezoidal sail of the former Iraqi dhows, now sur-

  viving only as a symbol on the date boxes. In all essentials it was nothing but an ancient Egyptian sail set at a slant. In theory, nothing more should be needed than to tilt a square sail to make a bim-dle boat tack to windward.

  We walked along the beach and found two more boats of precisely the same kind pulled up among the palms. One was quite new and a masterpiece of workmanship. These raft-boats obviously had the one advantage that they could come right in across the limestone shallows and be pulled ashore while other boats were anchored far out.

  I found a single palm-leaf stem tossed up by the waves on the beach, which I first picked up for its beauty. It looked Hke a splendid white flower, as the thin end was densely overgrown with a colony of chalk-colored, conical mollusks. I was showing it to Bibby as a curiosity when it dawned upon me that here was silent testimony that these palm stalks did not dissolve quickly in seawater. This one was still as complete and tough as new, and it must have been months in the sea for all these mollusks to have grown to such a great size.

  We ran after the old fisherman. He promised to bring two hundred such palm stems to the asry docks next Friday if we sent a car for him. And he would personally repair our big farteh.

  Friday came, and so did our driver with the big load of palm stems. But no fisherman. His wife had told the driver that some years ago another foreigner had come and asked the fisherman to build him a farteh. The foreigner had filmed the fisherman as long as he was building it, but when the boat was ready he had departed, saying, now they could keep the boat. So, no more boatbuilding for foreigners.

  But the fisherman had dehvered the two hundred stalks against cash. And that was, after all, what we really needed. Carlo worked above water and Tom and Gherman below. All the Iraqi berdi reeds we could spare were stuffed into the gaping wound. Then the long and tough but slightly pliant palm stalks were stuck down under the loops and sewn on, Dilmun fashion, side by side like a breastplate. To look at, the palm stems were amazingly similar to papyrus reeds. But they were heavier and harder. When the slack spiral loops were so full and tight that not a single further stalk would enter, a crisscross net of string was tied over for extra security. Then Tigris looked as trim as when we raced toward Failaka.

  We had another problem to solve. Khalifa, the fine young Arab the minister had chosen to help us on arrival, came back the next morning with a discouraging report. With the bearing of a true gentleman and always in spotless white but for his shiny black shoe tips, Khalifa looked like an Arab film star; he had also played as such in some Walt Disney production. His dehghtful old father had been one of the last pearl divers on Bahrain, a local profession which Bibby had traced back to Dilmun times. He could tell us at once that there was not a single soul left on the island today who could sew a sail, and the last dhow sailors were so old that they had left the sea to the younger generation. Perhaps we would have better luck if we went to Pakistan.

  We could not continue with our mainsail in separate pieces. Besides, we had discovered that we ought to experiment with a much larger sail to get the speed we needed for tacking. The moment Khalifa brought his discouraging news, I had a crazy plan ready. I dug into the box under my mattress and counted my dwin-dhng supply of cash. Barely sufficient to risk sending Detlef back to Germany with the dissected sail. The Hamburg sailmaker could put it together again. It was he who had made it. And he could also make us the big dhow sail I had hoped to have made in Iraq. Norman, our sailing expert, begged to have it as big as the Southampton University test had suggested. Only then could we do justice to our ship. Taking oflF to look with Bibby at Dilmun archaeology, I gave Norman carte blanche to design the sail. With him were Detlef and two old pearl divers, former dhow sailors, brought by Khalifa to give us advice.

  Waiting for Detlef to come back we remained for more than three weeks on Bahrain. Tigris rose and sank with the tide, up and down the lofty wall of the concrete mole. We even swung madly to and fro as the tanker harbor was not protected. The emir and dignitaries from aU Arab nations inaugurated the world's largest drydock with a supertanker entering a lock a few yards from our side. Modem mariners gazed down upon us in wonder from Texaco Japan, a vessel of 325,000 tons. They shook their heads at the idea of going into the Indian Ocean in a haystack hke ours, but I felt dizzy and unsafe as we clambered up the endless gangway hanging down the monstrous iron wall of their island-sized tanker.

  We got the same friendly treatment in Bahrain as we had experienced in Iraq, although the leaders of these two Arab nations were

  not on speaking terms. They represented opposite political systems. From the day I heard of the prison island I never missed a chance of trying to get there. Gherman commented that usually the difficulty was not to get in but to get out of a place like that. He had a whole assortment of criminal suggestions of how to get inside, all according to how long I would hke to remain there.

  In the meantime Sheikh Abdulaziz Al-Khalifa, the Minister of Education, gave an unforgettable Arab dinner for the expedition. And the son of the emir and heir to the emirate, Sheikh Hammad, invited Bibby and me to the palace and gave me an ebony walking stick with handle of pure gold, seen by Bibby as a peaceful modem substitute for the sword once donated by Arab rulers. And on the last day before Detlef s return I got the great news. The commander of the prison colony. Major Smith, would personally fetch me with the police boat on the pier of Budayia village on the northwest coast by sunrise next morning. Khahfa would take me there. Bibby had unfortunately aheady flown back to Europe. I was permitted to bring two of my men on condition that their nationahty was approved: I was not permitted to bring the Russian expedition member. I asked to bring Norris, my cameraman from the United States, and Carlo, my photographer from Italy, and this was agreed.

  Major Smith, a husky pohce oflBcer and former professional British soldier of long service in the colonial army, was punctually at the spot to receive us. His pohce launch was moored at a Httle pier between modern plastic boats and old dhows, some complete wrecks. The friendly Englishman apologized that he had to get us up so early, but we had to reach Jidda Island before the tide went out.

  No land was seen for the first quarter of an hour, until a most beautiful httle palm-clad island rose into sight with a single but rather impressive house. Umm-al-Saban Island, said the major. There was a well on it, like those on Bahrain, and the whole island belonged to Sheikh Hammad, the emir's son.

  Then Jidda Island appeared on the horizon. High cHffs. White like Dover, with a single small house visible; the major's. The water was certainly shallow long before we docked at the end of a long, crude stone pier. To the right of the landing area was the high land. To the left were nothing but date pahns and in front of them a number of huge rocks that seemed to be the remainder of a bluff blasted away by man.

  I walked over to examine the surfaces of the fractures. This was indeed the work of man. Old. But not old enough to date from bronze-age quarrying. On a well-sheltered overhang I detected an Arab inscription cut into the rock face. I called Kha
lifa and he translated: "In the month of shah'ban the year 978 rocks are being cut by the honorable Mahmud Sar Ali to renew the towers at Bahrain fort."

  Translated into the Christian calendar this would become a.d. 1556, thirty-five years after the Portuguese had conquered Bahrain. This honorable Arab had apparently worked for the conquerors to rebuild the Arab fort above the buried Dilmim city. Fortunately neither he nor his conmtiissioners had suspected that a whole city of quarried stone lay under their own feet at the building site.

  There was apparently nothing more of interest among the blasted blocks, but Major Smith said he would show us something else. And he did. I sincerely regretted that Bibby was not with us. Walking inland with the major as oxu: guide along a much-trodden trail, we were greeted by calm and poHte prisoners. They apparently walked about with no other guards than the sharks swimming around the island outside the wide shallows. Major Smith led us past his house, which seemed empty, and up on the elevated Hmestone plateau that was by far the largest part of the island, scarcely a mile long and much less in width. And it seemed as if a fair part of it had been taken away by ancient stoneworkers.

  We could hardly believe the evidence we saw of the extent of former quarrying. In a few places were obvious traces of the early Portuguese, or of the Arabs working for them, as we had seen at the landing place. But these quarries were easy to distinguish from those that dominated the whole island. The quarries from Portuguese times had large flat surfaces which, after more than four hundred years, still Ht up the mountainside with a yellow-gray color and occasionally showed the marks of the driU holes used for powder. But these quarries were superimposed upon and surrounded by other quarries that filled almost every part of the island hills and the coastal cliffs. It was difficult to locate an area not cut into terraces, escarpments, niches and steps in times so long ago that aU surfaces had so darkened as to be indistinguishable from the natural rock face, and so eroded as to lose the sharpness of all edges and comers. In these, by far the most predominant quarries, the stoneworker, ignorant of explosives, had removed his blocks by rub-

  bing deep grooves behind them. And no two blocks had been cut the same size. Most were no larger than four men could carry to the shore on poles, but some must have been truly gigantic to judge by the gaps where they had been removed, and by some unfinished blocks still in place. In some areas bizarre formations remained for no apparent reason, resembling petrified mud houses or cubist monuments. On the northwest plateau all rock had been removed and had thereby created a convenient site for the cluster of small fenced-in prison barracks. Extensive screes of eroded quarry rubble filled the area, sometimes in large heaps resembUng burial mounds. In the midst of all this old gravel a square outcrop rose like a lonely building. It seemed as if intentionally left there to give an impressive idea of the quantity of rock that had been removed from all around it.

  I was quite familiar with prehistoric quarries. I had hved with them for months on Easter Island and had studied those left by the pre-Inca master builders of Peru and Bohvia. Also those that yielded the largest one-piece blocks for Egyptian, Phoenician and Hittite megalith builders. The bone-hard limestone chffs of Jidda Island had not been worked by amateurs, but by a people belonging to the great old clan of true stone experts. Everywhere were vestiges of an incredibly skilled activity, but no sign of buildings: large portions of the island had Hterally been carried away, not only from the quarries, but from the coast. So much rock had been removed that it far surpassed the sum total of quarried blocks in the structures so far excavated on Bahrain. It would therefore be tempting to prophesy that more buildings are yet to be discovered beneath the Dilmun sand. There was another reason for this suspicion: no columns had as yet been discovered in the Dilmun palaces or temples, whereas colonnades of roimd stone pillars were common in antiquity from Egypt to Mesopotamia. Among the niches in the Jidda quarries were some circular cavities, marks of the removal of cylindrical blocks the size a man could barely encircle with his arms. Stones of this shape do not reappear in the knovm buildings on Bahrain. They can hardly have been used for anything but segments for a column.

  Most of the prisoners we saw went to and fro at a distance as if they did not notice us. A few came close and looked at us with big eyes and an expression as if they were pleased to have visitors on the island. Some even ventured a broad smile. The major explained

  that many of them were dangerous fanatics against the government. Perhaps these were not among the men who walked around loose. As we sat down among the niches to have our picnic lunch a friendly prisoner came up to us with a jug of milky tea. The only domesticated animal we saw was a white mule. But an incredible number of cats lurked everywhere, and the major estimated there were about four hundred of them running wild among the rocks. And never had I seen so many cormorants. Packed together into regular cloud formations they could blacken the sun as they sailed past and out over the sea.

  The southern part of Jidda was so remarkably different from all the rest that I began to wonder whether it was due to the work of ancient man. The hmestone rocks here suddenly fell away to shghtly above beach level, and were no longer naked but covered by fertile black soil. Date palms and a few ornamental trees grew here, and between their trunks were truly luxuriant vegetable gardens. They were so unusually tidy and well kept that it could almost be suspected that the rulers of Bahrain hated gardeners and had sent all the best to this penitentiary. The whole area surrounded a basin with a large natural well from which ice-cold, crystal-clear water welled up from somewhere below the bottom of the sea in such a quantity that we had to jump aside when the proud major somehow forced it into a garden hose.

  No wonder that the Sumerians who had been to Dilmun thought there were two seas, one of fresh water below the salt one. Bahrain also hterally means "Two Seas." Jidda Island and tiny Umm-al-Saban were in every respect typical satellites of Bahrain, barely seen from the highest cliffs. Paradise to Noah and the early Sumerians was hell to the modem Bahrainians, who were squeezed together on this same piece of quarried rock. If I had been the emir I would have picked Jidda Island for myself and sent the prisoners back to the oil fields on Bahrain. Carlo and Norris seemed to agree.

  Major Smith was visibly flattered at our enthusiasm for what he could show us, but none of us envied him his Httle green comer when he confessed to a httle lonehness. For many long years his life had been that of his own prisoners, except for his fine uniform, and except for his loneliness. They after all had each other for company. He seemed to apologize as much to himself as to us when time forced him to rush us back to the landing place. The tide was in again. The pohce boat could come right to the tip of the pier and

  take us to the free world before the salt sea withdrew from Jidda once more.

  Major Smith stood alone like a statue at the tip of the pier as long as we could see him. The emptiness almost seemed measurable both in time and in space. At his back was the rock with the written message from an Arab who left four centuries ago. All around him were the empty niches abandoned by Dilmun workmen four thousand years before.

  The Dilmun transporters had certainly loaded their tons of burden from Jidda Island onto strong, sturdy and shallow vessels, whether they called them farteh, like the Arabs today, or ma-gur hke the Sumerians in the days when the quarries were worked, and the big blocks of stone were surely not unloaded on the nearest part of the Bahrain coast where we stepped ashore from the pohce boat. There was no need to drag them overland to the building sites when the floating vessel wiUi sail or oars and punting poles could bring the tons of cargo straight to that part of the coast where the stone was needed. TTie tidal changes over the shallows seemed a gift from the ocean god just for this purpose. The vessel came easily in to Jidda Island on the tide and was beached as the water withdrew. Sitting sturdy on the rock bottom the broad reed ship would be as steady to load as a four-wheeled cart ashore. It would be ready to float seaward with its cargo when the tide next came in, and might
even reach Bahrain to come in with the same flow, ready for unloading as soon as the water went away. No wonder these people built temples in gratitude to the gods of nature.

  No sooner were we back from Jidda when Detlef was back from Hamburg. We rolled out the two sails on the asry mole for Rashad to add the emblem of the sun rising behind a stepped zig-gurat. This symbol seemed all the more appropriate now that we had seen that such a structure had been built by the maritime sim worshipers of Dilmun too. It was a reUef to see our original mainsail back in one piece again, small and easy to handle. But I took an instinctive dislike to the new colossus when we aU gazed at its size. Even Norman and Detlef scratched their heads while Rashad painted on it a huge pyramid.

  It was Christmas in a Moslem world and irrespective of behefs or disbeliefs the eleven of us celebrated the occasion in a dignified manner together ashore. Very early on the morning of December 26 we reloaded our ship for departure from Dilmun and, we hoped.

  from the Sumerian Gulf. Norman and I had barely managed to solve another major problem before the big new sail arrived: we had to prepare a very long yardarm to hoist it on. KhaUfa had shown us that we could choose from hterally himdreds of abandoned dhow masts and yardarms in the docks and lumber yards of Bahrain. But as the weeks passed and we had seen them all they were either too short, too crooked or too worm-eaten and rotten. At the eleventh hour Khalifa found us an old carpenter who helped us splice two fairly healthy booms together to form the forty-foot yard-arm our new sail would require.