The Ra Expeditions

by Thor Heyerdahl

  tracts of desert, with scarce wheel tracks following the caravan route between villages where rows of low sun-baked clay houses harbored a medley of Arabs, and their goats, donkeys and camels. Then we were heading for sheer open space.

  This was the desert. This was the southern border of the Sahara. The last thermometer we had seen registered nearly 50° C. (122° F.) in the shade. But where we were now there was neither thermometer nor shade. Behind us lay the savannah with fan palms and arid-looking trees, here and there enclosing stretches of genuine parkland, where gazelles, wild boars and troops of monkeys leaped clear of the track in company with gaudy tropical birds, while fat guinea hens scarcely bothered to hitch themselves out of the wheel tracks. The sand lay like snow on bare mountainsides, in drifts and dunes, over low, rolling crests and hollows in the landscape, where only sparse desert scrub broke the sun-drenched infinity of sand. Sun. It was directly above our heads, glittering on all the Jeep's metal, which was now so hot that we could not touch it. The brooding heat pinched our nostrils no matter where we tried to take in air—hot desert air, saturated with the dust that surged in from every side.

  We frequently got stuck in deep sand dunes, and one Jeep had to tow the other out on a steel cable while long, scorching metal plates were thrust under the wheels to provide a solid surface. At intervals, first one Jeep and then the other would break down in the heat, its motor stone dead. Baba and his friend were brilliant mechanics and, armed with wrench and screw driver, they always managed. Where the sand was firm enough we traveled at dizzying speed. Time and again we lost sight of all wheel tracks and drove on a looping course until Baba thought we were on course again. And so we drove into a lonely village, unknown to Baba and not marked on our map. On a bend beside the first mud huts both Jeeps became firmly embedded in sand and we had to get out and dig again.

  For the first time we felt slightly ill at ease. Desert sons swathed in gray rags and while burnooses, with expressionless faces and eyes fixed on us, came slowly—remarkably slowly—drifting toward us from all sides, never turning their gaze from our own. They showed no desire to greet us or to help dig out the Jeeps. Soon they were standing shoulder to shoulder, fixing us with eagle eyes, unresponsive to all our attempts at a smile or a greeting. No women. They were as dark-

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  skinned as our two raven-black drivers, but the sharp features, hooked noses and narrow Hps proclaimed them as Arabs. The harsh life of the desert had set brutal scars on their skins and minds alike. There was no charity here. No pity. And no telephone. The world beyond the sand dunes was represented only by our two Jeeps, which were stuck fast in the sand.

  The metal plates were not in position under us and Baba and his friend sat helplessly behind their steering wheels, accelerating until the sand flew. The Arabs stood quite still, as if waiting for something, holding something back. There was tension in the air, the look in their eyes made one think of a wary pack of wolves, ready to leap or run at the first move of one male. It seemed imperative to act first. I tramped over to an apparent leader type among them and politely handed him our two spades, indicating that he should get two of the other men to dig. He hesitated in some surprise, then responded to the promotion. He took the spades and began passing the orders on, barking like an irascible sergeant. As I beckoned to the rest of the pack to come and help push, the powerful shoulder of the newly designated boss was suddenly at my side, while we were nearly trampled underfoot by the helpful mob who fought for elbow room to join in and shove. We shook hands and thanked them, then drove off with our swirling dust cloud, through the village and along a well-worn camel track, as fast as our wheels could whiz.

  In midafternoon we passed through another sun-baked village, buried away between endless sand and sky. Here we felt equally unwelcome. The wheel tracks inevitably led to a market square in the midst of the adobe houses, and here we had to force our way through dense masses of people and closely packed flocks of resting camels, donkeys and goats. Angry, glaring Arabs pressed forward silently, without returning our greetings, as if by reading our thoughts they might find out if we were government representatives, come to impose Christianity or collect taxes. What else could strangers be doing out here in their desert realm? It was obvious that we were not welcome guests and again we bowled off at top speed into the desert.

  It was nearly evening, but the heat still kept its choking stranglehold. Baba had a headache and the two men in the second Jeep, surfeited with dust, dropped further behind. The drinking water we

  had in a large can was sickeningly warm, with no power to refresh because it burned on our hps. In the villages we had not seen a single fruit, only clay jars and dried calabashes filled with mud-colored oasis water and dirty goats' milk. We had driven all day without seeing refuse of any kind near our wheel tracks. No scrap of paper, no plastic or empty can. Only once, on the road just outside the capital, had we noticed fragments from a broken bottle. Everything here was home-made: houses, clothes, harnesses. The traffic consisted of long caravans of small, heavily laden donkeys, Arabs swaying high up on their tall camels, and barefoot women trotting behind with jars and baskets on their heads. What you did not need for yourself was taken to market in the next village. It was a world set apart from ours, self-sufficient, unaltered, independent. The whole of our civilization could founder and they would get on just as well, as simply, as modestly, as safely, bound to tradition and to the earth.

  Then the blue lake came into view. Shining like cold steel it lay behind a belt of sappy spring-green reeds—papyrus reeds. From the top of a sand dune we could see it, like a mirage, tempting us to leave the Jeeps and rush off, make our way through all that fresh green stuff and cast ourselves into the blue, blue water, drink, dive, cool off, get the dry yellow crust of sand out of our ears, nostrils and eye sockets, clean all the pores of our body, wash, drink again, drink, drink. We had been sitting in the Jeeps for thirteen hours and were just about to stagger, stiff and dazed, to the ground, when Baba stopped us: It was not safe to leave the Jeep here. Better to wait till we reached Bol. The village was on an open beach and if we kept going at full speed we would be there before nightfall. The desert was not safe at night.

  We managed to control ourselves with difficulty. Water, so near, so divinely blue and beguilingly beautiful in its cool nakedness behind the curtain of reeds. But we took our seats again with dust in our mouths, and roasted and frizzled in the hot metal Jeep, while Baba turned the wheels in the opposite direction and tore down off the sand dune and into more sand, sand and desert.

  We would be grateful to Baba later. When, just before sundown, the two Jeeps met the firm surface of the caravan route that runs to Bol from the desert villages in the east, we rushed straight through

  the empty market place and down to the beach below the houses. We were about to dive in with all our clothes on, when we heard a warning shout. There stood a serious, bearded young Frenchman who had been put ashore by the research team working in a boat on other parts of the lake. "Dive in and you'll be perforated with bilharzia in minutes," he said dryly. "The whole lake is full of them."

  We looked at Baba. He shrugged his shoulders and sat down again, all dusty, in the Jeep.

  That heavenly beautiful lake was home to some of Africa's most insidious creatures. Bilharzia, the little beast, is an almost invisible, millimeter-long worm, so thin that it can bore its way quickly right through a man's skin and lay eggs in his body, which is soon riddled with worms crawling about and eating him up from inside.

  We thanked the Frenchman for his warning and asked him if there was a place where we could wash. He shook his head sadly. All the water here came from the lake and must be either boiled or left to stand for a day or two before it could be used.

  The village seemed deserted until a giant black figure came striding out of a white-washed house with a small cortege, making straight for us. This huge man was the born chieftain type. He was a
cting sheriff in Bol, deputized to serve for another man who was on tour up-country. No one in Bol had received the promised advice of our arrival. Who were we, and where were our papers? Sheriff Adoum Ramadan had a toothache and was not in the best of spirits. Moreover he had Bol's total population of two thousand Arabs and Negroes to look after, of whom two hundred were village chiefs, so he had not much time to spare. Michel gave him a dose of aspirin and explained that we were looking for lodging, as we had driven continuously since leaving Fort Lamy the night before. "Then you have driven fast," said the sheriff tersely, affecting to miss the point. He inquired again why Fort Lamy had not advised him of our coming? The radio telephone was in order. What's more, we could thank the fates that we had got through, on the route we had taken. Five separate Jeeps had been burned by Arabs along the caravan route between Fort Lamy and Bol that month. The month before, sixty rebels had been shot in the area we had passed through. Two severed Negro heads had been found on the roadside and had recently been

  displayed by the authorities for identification. We were bluntly told to stay in Bol until there was a chance of leaving it other than across the desert.

  The sheriff with the gumboil sent one of his escort to show us the way to a solitary cement hut down by the beach, while he himself disappeared in the darkness toward the village with the rest of his silent staff. The hut consisted of a passageway off which were small rooms in the form of open cubicles. We had to step over men and women already lying asleep. This was BoFs public guesthouse, where any traveler could simply go in and lie down. The faces lifted to peer at us as we stepped over them were hardly angelic. In one corner there was a shower, but there was no water other than a dirty, soapy puddle eight inches deep in a hollow on the earth floor. We tried to pump, but gave up when we saw that the pipe led straight from the lake full of worms. We had no choice but to sleep dry in our desert dust.

  Baba had just swept the floor where we were to unroll our sleeping bags when the sheriff dashed in, his big face now lit by a huge smile. The toothache had gone. If he could have the rest of Michel's medicine three beds would be brought down for us from the sheriff's house. We slept with mosquito nets over our heads and pistols under our pillows. All night long invisible strangers prowled about in the pitch darkness, and several times I heard breathing close to my ear.

  As the sun rose over the sea we were awakened by the muttering of a row of Arabs kneeling along the wall, prostrated in prayer toward Mecca. Others sat silently brewing tea on tiny open fires of dry, broken papyrus reeds. We were taken to eat with the sherifiF, who was in radiant mood and refused to let us touch our own provisions. We were to take all our meals as his guests as long as we were in the Bol district. His cuisine was in fact quite excellent in its own way, only one had to be careful not to close one's teeth completely because they would then inevitably crunch on desert sand.

  That day I saw my first papyrus boat. It came drifting silently past me over the glassy water on that enchanted lake, which had completely changed its appearance from the day before. When we arrived, one large, low island had been lying in front of our hut; now it had disappeared without trace and three other islands had loomed up in dififerent places in its stead. The smallest of them moved

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  slowly as I watched it, drifting off to the right, leaving a faint hint of a wake behind it on the left. It looked like a big, well-arranged flower basket, a thick bouquet of bristly golden papyrus flowers. Unruly, long-haired crowns, the tallest in the middle and the shortest leaning gracefuly out at the sides, reflected their yellow wigs and green stems in the sky-colored water. Small climbing plants and other flowers and leaves were dotted about among the reeds to make the composition aesthetically complete. With its turf floor of interwoven roots and plant fibers, the whole island floated majestically away without benefit of oars or engine, and yet the papyrus boat was traveling smoothly and surely past the floating flower basket. On board stood two tall Africans, dressed in white and erect as toy soldiers, punting the boat with long poles. The yellow boat and the straight black bodies were also mirrored in the lake and the reflection, sailing upside down, reminded me of those other reed boats which now actually were sailing upside down in relation to us, because they were on the other side of the globe, in South America. The boats on Lake Titicaca were so strikingly like the boat we saw now that they could easily have replaced the mirror image.

  I was longing to try out one of these boats on the lake, but first of all I wanted to learn how they were built. The uninitiated could not hope to produce a boat in this particular shape by simply lashing papyrus reeds together on impulse.

  The sheriff took us in a very solemn audience before Sultan M'Bodou M'Bami, the religious leader of the district and the most powerful man in the whole area. The sheriff himself and his deputy were Africans from the south, sent up from Forty Lamy to foster the political interests of the Christian government, while the sultan belonged to the local Buduma tribe and had the whole Mohammedan population of the area on his side.

  The sheriff was broad and big-boned, like a good-natured gorilla, while the sultan was a beanpole of a man, a head taller then the average, with his skull and the lower part of his face swathed in a length of cloth over an ankle-length cloak, so that only the hooked nose and eagle eyes were visible. A large number of village headmen followed us, slipping off their sandals before stepping on the earth forecourt of the sultan's simple adobe house. Afterward we were installed around the wide sandy field in the middle of the town.

  the parade square where the sultan would appear on his rearing white thoroughbred in honor of his guests. While two men held the reins and constantly urged the stallion up on its hindquarters, the sultan sat immovable, surrounded by a flock of colorful brothel girls, who ran round and round him, brushing him with their airy veils.

  When they had completed their turn, accompanied by drums and wooden trumpets, a dense line of horsemen appeared at the end of the square and thundered past us at a furious pace, swords drawn, yelling hoarsely. One of the riders was particularly aggressive. Time after time he raced past, his horse's hoofs close to our boot tips, while he leaned toward us, howling and grimacing savagely, his sword whirling appallingly close to our scalps. I tentatively asked the sheriff what this meant and was told that the rider was simply showing off. But Baba added that he was showing his contempt for us, who were not Moslem. The sultan, on the other hand, showed no antagonism. On the contrary, he evinced the greatest interest when he heard that we wanted to learn how to build papyrus boats. He sent us to his own kinsman, Omar M'Bulu a splendid representative of the Buduma tribe, who lived in a large beehive-shaped straw hut like all the other dwellings in the Buduma and Kanembu quarter of the district capital of Bol. Only the sheriff and deputy sheriff had their own white-chalked bungalows with red bougainvillaea growing on the walls, the rest of the town, belonging to the dominant Arab population, consisted of long, low huts of hand-formed clay bricks.

  Omar was a stately man, tall, straight-backed, black as a stove pipe, with a completely smooth-shaven head and big, smiling eyes and teeth. He spoke both Buduma and Arabic in a low, friendly voice and ended every sentence with a hint of a smile. Omar was a fisherman, and did not hesitate for a moment when Baba asked him in Arabic to show us how to build a papyrus boat. He pulled out a long machete knife from the straw wall and barefoot he walked ahead of us to the lake with his blue cloak slung over one shoulder. The black sinews rippled as he bent and began to swing the knife at the root of the tall papyrus reeds, and long soft stems were thrown one after another in a heap at the edge of the marsh. His half brother, Mussa Bulumi, volunteered to help. He was older and smaller, equally shaven-headed, but without Omar's regal bearing. Mussa understood nothing unless it was said in Buduma, but

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  made up for that by laughing at everything, whether Baba spoke to him in Arabic, Michel in French,
Gianfranco in Italian or I in Norwegian. But Mussa was quicker than Omar at handling the reeds.

  Large heaps of green papyrus were dragged up and dropped beyond the swampy ground. Two big reed boats, each of which could carry a dozen men, lay moored at the water's edge. We explained, by drawing in the sand, that we wanted a little one, about twelve feet long, which we could later transport on top of the Jeep. Two other Buduma tribesmen were summoned. They sat down in the sand under the only local tree and began scraping the pulp away from the leathery leaves of the doum palm until the rough white fibers emerged, split as thin as sewing thread. These the Africans rolled between palm and thigh until they had spun them into a sort of twine, and this in turn was plaited into solid rope. Now Omar and Mussa could begin on the boat while the others worked against time to keep them supplied with rope.

  The papyrus reed was six to eight feet long and about two inches thick at the root, with a tricorne-shaped cross section. It was not jointed and hollow like bamboo but compact and spongy throughout its length, like a sort of stiff white foam rubber covered with a thin, smooth sheath. Omar began by taking a single reed and splitting it part way lengthwise into four strips, still joined at the thicker end. In the forks he stuck four whole stems, root first, and tied around them a loop so tight that the spongy ends were pressed together as compactly as possible. Between them again he inserted a steadily increasing number of reeds, which he lashed fast all the time with loops of rope so that the bundle gradually increased in thickness like the head of a projectile. Mussa joined him and the two boatbuilders each took an end of cord in their mouths and tightened the knots with all their combined strength, using black fingers and white teeth, arms and throat muscles swelling. The point was apparently to squeeze the cut end of the spongy reeds together until the pores closed. When the bundle increased to a thickness of about eighteen inches, it was continued lengthwise, keeping the same diameter, like a giant pencil. Finally the pointed end was lifted on to a sturdy tree stump and the boatbuilders began to jump and trample on the reed bundle until it curved like a