The Ra Expeditions

by Thor Heyerdahl

  it, another man fell out, and yet another, it was frankly a contest, faster and faster, yes, now one really had to breathe hard, there was only one other dancer left, there he dropped out also, I was dancing alone, the trumpeter fell on my neck and secured the bank note. I stopped. People pressed in from all sides in the darkness. Staring white eyes and a medley of indefinable expressions; everyone wanted to have a good look.

  I gulped in the night air, pleasantly tired and relieved to have escaped the man with the sword, I could no longer see him, but a heavily built man came up to me, pulling two hefty female figures out of the darkness. They were not particularly young and not particularly beautiful by comparison with many of the well-proportioned women one could see on the shore by day. Moreover, their skins were gleaming with sweat that was running from their foreheads. Perhaps these were the women who had been involved in something I could not see in the melee within the ring earlier. They were discreetly placed at my side like trophies. Hundreds of Arab and Negro faces thrust toward us in the dim lamplight. What now? How to slip away from this increasingly involved situation, away from the mob, back into the peaceful night from which I had come?

  It was then that I felt a powerful hand slap me on the shoulder and there was Omar, his face shining like a sun in the lamplight.

  "Monsieur, brave tamtam," said he, his teeth flashing approval. That exhausted his stock of French. Omar was my salvation. One familiar face. This was obviously a celebration for the masses, because neither sultan nor sheriff was present. Omar was respected, and when the onlookers saw that I was on friendly terms with the sultan's kinsman the ranks parted and we went off together through the empty village to the music of the cicadas.

  Next day my standing in Bol had risen. Lively rumors were circulating about my prowess as a tom-tom dancer, as well as the large sum I had paid to the musicians. The sheriff, on the other hand, had received new reports of terrorist activities and Arab uprisings in the interior and insisted on our being his guests until we could leave safely by air. It was hopeless trying to contact Fort Lamy by radio telephone, but the African telegrapher could wire to say we wanted a taxi-plane whenever one was available.

  We had a number of good friends in Bol by now and were enjoying the days spent in papyrus boats on the lake. A week passed. Then the sound of engines was heard over the floating islands and a little aircraft flew in low over the papyrus, skimmed the roofs of the village huts and landed on a leveled strip of sand, where we met the French pilot a moment later. He was ready to set off with the three of us at once, but the little plane could not carry our little reed boat nor the heavy film equipment, only essential clothing. The newly made papyrus boat was hoisted to the roof of one Jeep and all the equipment stowed inside the other with Baba, because both sheriff and sultan thought that no one would attack the two African drivers if they drove alone through the desert, with no strange white faces on board.

  The last people to whom we said good-by were the two boat-builders, Omar and Mussa, and the interpreter, Abdullah. Both sheriff and sultan assented with obvious pleasure when I asked if the two Buduma brothers could join me later, in Egypt, if I needed expert reed boatbuilders. When Abdullah had translated my question from French into Arabic for Omar, and Omar from Arabic to Buduma for Mussa, the brothers were so delighted that they shook with laughter and nodded repeatedly, gripping my fist in both hands to confirm their enthusiasm.

  "They say yes," Abdullah explained solemnly, "and I am coming along to interpret!"

  We were already sitting in the aircraft, which would not start, so I did not pay much attention to my own reply, but time should show that Abdullah obviously did. Cables were coupled to the plane from Baba's Jeep and with their help we trundled forward and into the air over the Buduma huts, kadays and papyrus swamps. We had a perfect view of limitless golden sands behind us, which we had jolted over on our way to Bol, and below us lay Lake Chad, the world's most extraordinary island community. Beyond Bol it was a green-speckled jigsaw puzzle on a blue ground to which someone had given a casual shove. The floating islands were all the pieces, with their infinite variety of sinuous outlines, and an endless chaos of narrow blue channels wriggled round them like gaps in the disintegrated puzzle. On some of the green pieces there were tiny round grass huts and flocks of toy cattle moving about and grazing, and

  here and there in the bhie cracks the httle yellow mustard seed of a kaday appeared. Tlien we saw only blue and more blue until we reached the mouth of the Shari River.

  It took no more than an hour to fly straight across the lake, up to Fort Lamy. And there we waited for our Jeeps, one day, two days. Three days. Something serious had happened. The radio telephone to Bol was in operation and the friendly sheriff was able to confirm that the Jeeps had left there long ago.

  With the help of the garage owner in Fort Lamy we sent out another Jeep which drove halfway back to Bol and returned without finding anything but our own outgoing wheel tracks. Then we sent the little aircraft to get a better view. It crisscrossed the desert route for three hours vdthout finding any Jeeps stuck in the sand. The French scientists who had the research boat on the lake sent a Jeep searching from Bol to Fort Lamy and back again. When it returned the driver had no news to report.

  We informed the authorities. They could do nothing. The chief of police explained that this was not robbery, it was civil war. We missed the scheduled flight we were to have taken, which stopped at Fort Lamy once a week. The two cameramen should have been on another job in Ethiopia, but they missed out on their appointment because they could not go without their expensive equipment.

  Then we had an idea. With Michel as spokesman, we went to the headquarters of the French military forces. Chad had become an independent republic. The French had withdrawn discreetly from the government offices, where there was not a white face to be seen, but it was not difficult to find them when they were needed and it proved a small problem for the French military chief to locate the two lost Jeeps. Ovidng to the risings among the Arab tribes in the north and east, the French had military patrols stationed at strategic points in the desert. They had mobile radio stations and were prepared to summon French parachute troops if terrorist action took the form of organized rebellion. This happened some weeks later. But it did not take the military chief many hours to report that the two Jeeps had been found hidden in the shade of a big tree in a remote desert village. Our two drivers had taken off on their own with their valuable booty and tried to sell it to the Arabs. The newly made papyrus boat, so important to us, meant nothing to

  them so they had simply discarded it in the desert. To their disappointment they had found no one prepared to buy movie-making equipment, so all they had been able to sell was the gasoline, of which they had managed to tap the last drop from each tank. The patrol which caught the two fugitives reported on the air that if the Jeeps were wanted back in Fort Lamy we would have to send out another Jeep with fuel.

  What happened to the faithless Baba and his fellow conspirator we never knew. They were not in the Jeep which a week later swerved in at the aircraft steps and delivered the stolen equipment as the big airliner stood ready and waiting to leave for Europe. On the other hand, our loyal interpreter Abdullah was later arrested and imprisoned by the local authorities, suspected of being my agent in Bol for the black slave trade to Eg)pt. But no one yet knew about that.

  So the fascinating not yet amalgamated melting pot of Central Africa slipped away under our wings, with jungle and desert, Negroes and Arabs, blinding sun and our own giant aircraft casting the racing shadow of the twentieth century over the limitless Sahara as it passed, leaving no trace in the sand.

  Farewell, Africa.

  Chapter Five

  AMONG BLACK MONKS

  AT THE SOURCE OF THE NILE

  1 o BUILD a reed boat you must have reeds. I needed papyrus reeds. Where would I find them? In Chad, the desert lake, to be sure. But no arteries led out from the heart of Africa to the surrounding world
, no rivers, roads or railways. I needed more reeds than I could get out with a caravan of camels. Boat-builders could be brought out by plane, of course, but not enough papyrus to build a ship. It was useless even to think of transport through the desert from the reed swamps at Bol to the airfield near the capital.

  In Egypt? Indeed. Pharaoh lies in his tomb with reed boats painted on the stone walls. Stone and reeds. Stone in the desert and reeds in the Nile. Stone and papyrus reed were nature's gift to the ancient peoples of the Nile. And mud, which spilled over the riverbanks in its flight from the Ethiopian mountains. The peasant based his livelihood on the mud, the fisherman made his boat of the reeds, and Pharaoh cut up the rock itself while preparing for his next life. Of papyrus reeds Egyptian scholars made paper on which they wrote mankind's earliest history. Stone was transported on papyrus and papyrus boats were immortalized in stone. The papyrus flower appears again and again in the art of ancient Egypt. It was the national symbol of Upper Egypt, and in mythology the birdman

  AMONG BLACK MONKS AT THE SOURCE OF THE NILE yi

  Horus, son of the sun-god Ra, tied it to the lotus flower of Lower Egypt when both countries became one kingdom.

  To build a balsa raft one must do as the Incas did, penetrate the rain forests of Ecuador in search of fresh jungle trees full of sap to prevent water absorption. To build a papyrus boat one must do as Pharaoh did, send his men out into the great papyrus swamps along the shores of the Nile and cut fresh reeds. When a pharaoh wanted to build a boat he had no special problem. His skilled builders knew everything about papyrus and papyrus boats, after generations of experience. His labor force was unlimited and the building materials grew in boundless numbers just outside the palace gates. The papyrus swamps, on both banks of the Nile, stretched from the Mediterranean coast all the way in through his empire in the Egyptian desert.

  But that was in former days.

  "No papyrus grows in Egypt now," Georges Sourial assured me. Georges was an Egyptian frogman and knew the Nile like his own back yard. "There is plenty of stone, if you want to build a pyramid, but not enough papyrus for a toy dinghy," he added and steered the motorboat we were sitting in closer to the bank to give me a better view.

  On the Nile was an endless trafEc of sails and masts, gliding up and down between palm trees, sandbanks and cultivated fields, but not a single golden-haired papyrus reed bowed its bushy head over the bank. The papyrus had died out in Egypt some time in the previous century. No one knew why. The gods had taken back one of their oldest gifts, as if they had simply pulled it up by the roots. The stone was left, in mountains and in pyramids, but even the mud had almost gone, checked in its course by the country's new rulers, behind the huge concrete walls of the Aswan Dam. And when the papyrus disappeared from the banks of the Nile, so did the last Egyptian master of the art of building papyrus boats.

  On camel and horseback, by car, train and boat, we traveled up and down the picturesque course of the Nile. We were guests on small weather-beaten fishing boats and freighters. We sat on gray, sunbaked decks, eating Arab bread and swallowing sour milk cheese scraped with our fingers from a lump on the deck, all in the hope of extracting information from the ragged river boatmen. They had

  "72 THE RA EXPEDITIONS

  never worn shoes and seldom, if ever, spent a day on land, because their wives, children, domestic animals and all their worldly goods were on board. They had been born on board. The patched wooden boat with a tent on top was the Nile fisherman's home, his village, his world. We learned how people could be packed together and manage all the usual activities of life on a deck area that scarcely afforded elbow room; how to cook on an open fire in a clay oven on an inflammable deck; how to keep provisions under a burning sun on an open boat. We learned a lot. But if anyone learned anything about papyrus it was the fishermen who learned it from us. They had never seen a papyrus flower, not even the little bouquet which is planted in honor of tourists in the fountain before the Cairo Museum. They had never seen the inside of a Pharaonic tomb. Never the painting of a reed boat. Never heard from their forefathers that any type of boat had even been used on the Nile other than plank-built vessels like their own.

  But the Nile was long. It stretched right across Egypt, across the whole of the Sudan and on to its distant sources in Uganda and Ethiopia. There, in the lakes at the source of the Nile, the papyrus plant had survived and was said to thrive as well as on distant Lake Chad.

  Civilized peoples must have traveled far and wide during antiquity, because several of the old Pharaohs who ruled Egypt were born in distant Ethiopia, where the Blue Nile has its source. But in the dark Middle Ages the long course of the Nile had been completely forgotten. Its legendary sources were now assigned to the mysterious and hidden "Mountains of the Moon." It was not until about the days of Columbus that the people of Europe woke from an enduring lethargy, and thus the upper reaches of the Nile were rediscovered by Italian and Portuguese voyagers. Then, for the first time, modern men learned that the Blue Nile flowed out of Lake Tana, which lay high above sea level in Ethiopia's central massif.

  By comparison with the Pharaohs we were handicapped. We would have to travel right up to the source of the Nile for papyrus, and the Nile is the world's second longest river. Papyrus grows in Morocco and Sicily too, but not in sufficient quantities for boatbuilding. The Sudan was suffering from internal unrest and the authorities were too suspicious of tourists to give a visa to someone

  who claimed he had come simply to build a boat of papyrus. Ethiopia, on the other hand, was throwing open its gates to tourism. So we landed on a scheduled flight in the capital, Addis Ababa, ten thousand feet above sea level, in the heart of the proud old empire, on a green mountain plateau speckled with yellow wild flowers.

  My companion on the trip, Tosi, was a freshly trained Italian cameraman, skinny, but head-and-shoulders taller than most people, so we had difficulty in folding him up in the little taxi-plane that was to carry us on to Lake Tana. His luggage consisted mainly of numerous bottles of anti-insect spray. Soon we were swooping like a swing-boat in the gusts of wind over Ethiopia's grass-covered hills. Below us lay the round grass huts of the country, scattered like beehives in picturesque groups on ridges and hilltops. The landscape itself was like an undulating golf course in every shade of green. Light green, dark green, reddish green. Green. Then it changed to mountain crags and deep, savage canyons with white torrents raging down them. Soon afterward we were swerving across the upper reaches of the Nile, reddish brown flood water forced between precipitous rock faces, describing wild loops in the depths of a winding gorge. The loops below us were nature's mighty hieroglyphs, recording the fact that since the morning of history this ancient river had been gouging its way down through the very mountain rocks, gnawing with the inexorable teeth of time, and spewing millions of tons of Ethiopia's mountain landscape, in the form of masticated mud and sludge, downhill onto the desert plains of the Sudan and Egypt. Since Pharaonic times the Nile had been feeding ceaselessly on Ethiopia's mountains and carrying their substance down to nourish the cornfields of Egypt. The deep scrolls of the Nile wrote history, from them came the fertile soil that gave rise to one of the most important shoots in early human culture.

  Our meditations came to an abrupt end. Suddenly the plane plunged straight down for the cliffs, as the pilot pulled hard on the stick and a wing tip brushed the treetops on a ridge filling a loop of the gorge. The Nile disappeared; we could see only rocks and treetops. At the same moment we heard a deafening roar, thundering at us from every side and completely drowning the sound of the little engine. My stomach glued itself to my backbone and I gripped the seat and held my breath while the Nile gorge suddenly opened

  before us in an infernal chaos. The whole huge river was torn straight across and hung foaming like a mighty vertical wall before our windshield. Turbulent masses of water surged over the cliffs in front, to the sides, above, below; rushing vertically, horizontally, seething white, thundering, smoking. The
sun vanished behind precipices. Then the pilot pulled on his stick once again and we clutched our seats while the elevators, helped by a powerful current of air, thrust us upward and we flew into a glorious rainbow painted against blue sky. We skimmed elegantly over the edge of the frothing witch's caldron where smooth masses of water streamed toward us, collapsed and fell vertically into the. depths behind. As if at the touch of a wand the Nile was horizontal under our wings again, but one floor higher, and in a completely new version, sluggish, muddy and silent, high up on an open plateau without a sign of a canyon or rock walls. We were on the roof of the world, among rolling hills covered with tropical evergreens, and between the greenery the sun twinkled in calm water.

  "Would you like another look?" asked the pilot and, without waiting for an answer, he tipped the plane on its side and made another circle back low over the same ridge, with the same exciting sensation as we dived into the steaming gorge behind.

  'Tissisat Falls," observed the pilot when our ears were functioning again. "The full breadth of the Nile drops off the high plateau here. Local tribes call the Nile Abbay and the waterfalls Tis Abbay: 'The Smoking Nile.'"

  Turning our heads, we could see the reason for the name. Where the broad river suddenly ceased to exist a fine spray rose from the nether regions, borne on an air current high into the cloudless sky like the smoke from a giant campfire.

  Shortly afterward we landed at Bahar Dar, and soon we were filming the same roaring chasm from the ground. This was the dividing line between two worlds, or a world on two levels. We knew that up here people were still paddling about in papyrus boats as in the Pharaoh's days. It was here that we hoped to find sufficient supplies of papyrus, because it was only a day's march from the Tissisat Falls to the source of the Blue Nile, where it flowed out of great Lake Tana. We had landed in the legendary Moon Mountains of the Middle Ages.