AMONG BLACK MONKS AT THE SOURCE OF THE NILE -75
When we reached the source of the river, night was approaching. Tliere was Lake Tana, serene in silver and black, reflecting late evening clouds and silhouettes of hills and treetops. And there was a movement out in the bay, long shadows as of swimming creatures with curly tails glided silently to and fro over the strip of silver. In the shadow of the woods they were invisible, but they stood out sharply in silhouette when they slid into the silvery light. Six of them—six papyrus boats gliding aimlessly about where Lake Tana ran between two jungle spurs and slowly began to move in the form of the Nile on its first noiseless passage toward Tissisat Falls. In each boat sat one, two or three figures, each holding his thin pole by the middle and dipping the ends alternately on either side of the narrow craft, as one paddles a slender kayak. Perhaps they were fishing in the river inlet, perhaps they were relaxing at the end of the day by playing in the peaceful eddies that marked the source of the Nile. A little further on, a single papyrus boat was racing down white rapids, perilously near to the great falls, but the black figure on board deftly maneuvered his small craft out of the white ruffles of foam and returned toward the lake, man and boat hidden in the shadow of a calm shore.
The Mountains of the Moon. Mountains towering toward the moon. This was how the landscape must have looked to the medieval explorers climbing up from the Red Sea far below, or from the plains of Egypt. Lake Tana itself lies about six thousand feet above sea level and the mountains encircling it reach to a height of twelve thousand to fourteen thousand feet. Yet the area of water was so great that you could not see the far shore. The lake itself was the home of the black monks. They lived on luxuriant, jungle islands a long way out, and for centuries the papyrus boats had been their only link with the outside world. Even at a distance at the late hour one interesting observation could be made. While the papyrus boats on Lake Chad were sliced straight across behind and only rose in front into an elegantly curved prow, this type, which had survived at the Nile's own source, had kept the ancient Egyptian form. Both prow and stern curved up above the waterline and the stem was bent in the peculiar ancient Egyptian curl over the boat itself. This sight in the still twilight at the source of the Nile was like a vision down the river, down through the ages, into the peaceful dawn of history.
The last of the tropical sun sank behind distant treetops and the light dimmed slowly as in a theater. With the passing of the light the dark mountains and the lake were left timeless. The mild night breeze carried pleasant whiffs of spice and a soft breath of mystery, a breath from those islands where the calendar stood still and the Middle Ages survived, protected and cherished by monks who for countless generations had perpetuated the traditional way of Hfe, the robes, the ritual and the faith that their pious predecessors had brought to the islands when the Middle Ages were everybody's property. Although huge jungle trees grew on their islands, the monks had never taken to building canoes or plank boats. Their predecessors had paddled the papyrus boat from antiquity into the Middle Ages and now they were calmly paddling it on into the nuclear age. We had come to learn from the monks, we wanted to profit by their experience of papyrus boats, and no one knew better how to find papyrus in sufficient quantities to meet our needs.
Who had been the monks' teachers? Not only papyrus boats and pharaohs were shared long ago by Egypt and Ethiopia at the two extremities of the Nile. The dawning Christianity had also found its way from Egypt to Ethiopia a thousand years before the long hibernation of the Middle Ages interrupted man's contact between the lowlands at the mouth of the Nile and the highlands at its source. As early as the year 330, several centuries before Christianity traveled north to Europe, the Coptic Christian faith had spread from Egypt to Ethiopia. The early Christians settled then in the old kingdom of Axum, far up on the high mountains of Ethiopia north of Lake Tana. Later many of them fled southward and out to the hidden islands on the great lakes Tana and Zwai to escape persecution for their faith. The black monks who hid on Lake Tana have now been there for seven hundred years and have recruited new generations by paddling youths from the mainland out to the islands in their papyrus boats.
To meet the monks and investigate the papyrus supply at the lake we had hired a rugged old iron boat with motor and with a papyrus boat in tow. Two large iron boats had been brought up to Lake Tana by an enterprising Italian, who used them to compete with all the papyrus boats that ferried corn from small wharfs on the shore to the two big market places north and south of the lake.
AMONG BLACK MONKS AT THE SOURCE OF THE NILE yy
On the first island we came to, huge jungle trees grew right down to the water's edge and their roots formed palisades and networks far out into the water. We wound our way through these stems in the light papyrus boat and jumped ashore under the foliage. Behind the first tree trunks was a small path and there two motionless monks waited for us, as if we had come at their command. They were wrapped in ankle-length cloaks with open cowls; ther feet were bare, their faces dark brown, with black beards. They fingered the diamond-shaped Coptic crosses that hung on their chests and bowed silently, indicating with a graceful gesture the way up the hill to the shrine at the top. Here small papyrus boats were propped against the sunny wall and loose reeds lay gathered in dry bundles. The church itself stood at the highest point, looking like a larger edition of the monks' simple dwellings which were dotted about the slopes. All were circular, with walls of upright stakes and thick, conical straw roofs. Someone beat on a flat stone slab suspended as a gong, which emitted a deep, melodious sound. Several monks came slowly strolling. Many were proud and handsome, like most Ethiopians, with dark skin, sharp features, hooked noses and black pointed beards, but quite a few looked undernourished and listless. There were very young boys, men in their prime, and bowed ancients with flowing white beards. All were poverty-stricken, shrouded in simple cloaks, with bare feet or open sandals. They ate what their small plots of earth produced, and fish from the lake. They prayed, sang and meditated.
We felt welcome. Here we would surely obtain valuable information. Two old men wearing turbans pulled out their barrel-shaped skin drums, beat on them with their palms and sang, in low, cracked voices completely alien, ancient church music, which must have been passed down from the oldest Christian community of Ethiopia. So must their ecclesiastical forebears have sung when they came paddling over the lake on their first exodus from the kingdom of Axum.
The island was called Covran Gabriel and the angel Gabriel with drawn sword was the first to meet us when the monks took us into their straw-roofed church. He was painted giant-size, surrounded by a colorful array of biblical subjects that decorated every fagade of a central shrine, a sort of altar that filled the nucleus of the church from floor to ceiling, leaving room only for a circular
yS THE RA EXPEDITIONS
passage round it. Doors led out in all directions. All the Coptic churches on Lake Tana were similar. Here one could see the whole history of the Bible transformed into a color cartoon, and the monks confirmed what the charming, naive style suggested: that the paintings were two or three hundred years old, some perhaps older still. We saw Pharaoh in the process of drowning with his Egyptian army in the Red Sea, only bright steel helmets and the Pharaonic army's rifle barrels protruding above the surface of the water!
We were courteously invited to enter in our stockinged feet, and came out again with several hundred hungry fleas that had been fasting on the old church carpets. I got off lightly, but the photographer's violent antics showed that the vanguard had already advanced from his socks to his armpits and into his hair. He was in full retreat for the boat, where to the monks' horror he performed a not entirely discreet striptease, under the insect spray. By then I had alread pumped the monks of the little they had to say about the floating quality of papyrus. Despite the fact that a papyrus boat was to these islanders what a horse or camel was to the Bedouin, none of them had tested its floating capacity for longer than
one day at a time. They had always pulled the boat ashore after use, and raised it on end to dry; otherv^ise it would have gone on absorbing water. Water-logged papyrus did not sink, said the monks, but it lost all its carr}ing capacity. The bigger the boat, the longer it would float, but it was not worth building big boats, because they were difficult to haul up to dry. So we were not much the wiser.
The next island we came to was called Narga. It was flat and papyrus grew in its shallow coves, but this was needed by the monks to renew their own boats at intervals. "Papyrus rots," they said. "We must build new boats at least once a year, even if we dry them after each trip." In an open archway on top of a moss-grown stone tower sat a solitary monk who said nothing at all. Nor did he move. The tower had been built by the Empress Mentuab 250 years ago. The monk had sat himself down forever a few years ago. He had vowed to serve God by sitting motionless up there for the rest of his life. His brother monks fed him and regarded him as a living saint, silhouetted against the drifting clouds.
We hurried over to the neighboring island, which rose high above the water with its wooded hills. This is the holiest of all the
AMONG BLACK MONKS AT THE SOURCE OF THE NILE yo
islands on Lake Tana, Daga Stefano. The island is so holy that no woman, not even an empress, may set foot on it. The last to try was Ethiopia's mighty Empress Mentuab, who was courteously turned away when she arrived with her court in a large papyrus boat and tried to land, two and a half centuries ago. She was obliged to move on to Narga, where she built the temple and the towers.
From the lake, this sacred island was lushly beautiful. We glimpsed a grass roof v^th a cross between the treetops on the ridge. A ragged monk with severe elephantiasis of the scrotum stood guard at the island's one landing place, and a line of small papyrus boats, set on end, leaned against the trees behind him. Full of curiosity and anticipation we jumped onto the rocks and stepped ashore on the holy island. The monk allowed us to study the boats and did not stop us when we started up the broad mud track to the ridge. Giant jungle trees, straw huts, monks. Silent bows, muttered prayers, fingering of small crosses. Papyrus? They all pointed in the same direction across the great inland sea. There. There it grew in unlimited quantities. That was where they gathered it themselves. Floating capacity? Eight days. A fortnight. If it did not sink under the load it would rot and break up in the waves in less than two weeks. Papyrus must be kept dry. Hauled ashore. They, too, knew no more.
We were not allowed into the temple itself. It looked ramshackle, with oval walls of stone, bamboo and straw. But beside it stood a cavelike cabin, full of sacred relics. Two smiling monks invited us into darkness, to a sort of chamber of horrors. Piles of white human skulls, old crosses and the holy personal effects of dead prelates. The largest treasures were long cofl&ns of glass covered with cloth. When the cloth was folded to one side the half light revealed the shrunken, emaciated mummies of four old Ethiopian emperors. They lay with wrinkled arms and hands folded on their breasts, to spend eternity on the holy island. Their funeral corteges had crossed stormy Lake Tana with these royal mummies on papyrus boats, just as the Pharaoh's mummies had been ferried in silent procession down the calm Nile for interment.
Back in the sunshine we startled all the monks by playing their own voices back to them on a little tape recorder. Now everyone wanted to speak. Everyone wanted to sing. Soon they were all ar-
rayed on some wide stone steps, peacefully singing ancient Coptic hymns in chorus. I squatted in front of them, recording. Behind me stood the tall cameraman doubled over his film equipment. He suddenly let go a roar and an oath so mighty that the needle on the tape recorder flipped right over before it fell back and stopped at zero. The monks sat petrified, their mouths shut and eyes wide. Behind me I saw my tall friend performing a wild war dance. He had kicked over his tripod and was frantically hauling his shirt over his head. Off it went, then he grabbed for his trouser belt.
"Stop," I hissed, appalled—and I was really furious—"have you gone crazy?"
No use. The trouseirs fell to the ground in a frenzy while the gesticulating photographer clutched his bare rump with both hands.
"Wasp," he yelled. "Wasp in my trousers!"
It was not altogether easy to forgive the cameraman for our embarrassing retreat from Daga Stefano, even if he was suffering tortures and could not sit down when we were back in the boat. Nor were there many monks left to say good-by to when I turned toward the singers on the steps, but those who had stayed thanked us kindly for a little contribution offered, in gratitude for their information on papyrus and in propitiation for the scandal on their beach.
The visits to the monks had given us the uneasy impression that the most important point about building a papyrus boat was to make it so small that it could easily be pulled up to dry after a day's use. That was hardly an appropriate plan for an Atlantic crossing. We never saw the monks leaving a reed boat in the water for a minute unless it was in actual use. To make them easier to pull ashore, all the larger reed boats on Lake Tana were built in two parts, which could be carried to dry land separately: a thin, boat-shaped basket with curved prow and stern, and inside this sort of hull a thick flat, papyrus mattress, shaped to fill the hollow space. The reed boats of the Bu-duma Negroes on Lake Chad were generally bigger and far more robust. There was in fact one noteworthy difference: the monks on Lake Tana laid great emphasis on making the papyrus vessels light without altering their age-old external lines, while the Buduma on Lake Chad concentrated far more on carrying capacity and strength.
On the way to the opposite shore of Lake Tana we passed
some low, scrubby islets where half a dozen hippos lumbered out, ducked and reappeared all round us. The boat crew assured us that these animals hated papyrus boats and would overturn them if they had the chance, because it was from such boats that hippos had been harpooned since time immemorial. We pushed our papyrus boat out empty, but the swimming hippos simply popped their heads up inquisitively all round it, snorted, blew and stared curiously.
To the far southwest the shore line of Lake Tana scarcely rose above the level of the water, and here we finally found the big papyrus marshes. The boat's crew told us that this area was unsafe because of bandits. "Some call them freedom fighters," said Ali, the skipper of the motorboat. "Actually they are just common robbers and they leave you in peace as long as you take care to pay tribute." One of the worst had just been shot by the authorities, the men told us. He had held sway along the lake for twenty-three years and killed forty-nine men. They had no problems themselves, because Ali paid the tribute.
We reached a spot in the endless marshes where a muddy current oozed its way between the papyrus stems and moved out over tlie lake like a broad stroke of red-brown paint. This could only be the outlet of some stream. In fact it was a little tributary, its mouth well hidden by the thick reeds. Because it drains into Lake Tana, source of the Blue Nile, it has been called the Little Nile. Many varieties of wading birds sat peacefully in or between the tall reeds. Only shallow papyrus boats can enter the Little Nile, which is so shallow that it is normally not navigable for more than a few hundred yards by motorboat. But now the water level was abnormally high and we ran over five miles up the narrow red river, to a village of round straw-roofed huts. This was the home of the Abaydar tribe, and men and women stood close-packed along the bank to stare at the metal boat. Ali explained that only two iron boats existed on Lake Tana. Both belonged to his Italian boss and neither had made the trip up the river before.
Several small papyrus boats were tilted down from the hut walls and part paddled, part punted out to us. The smallest were simply supports for swimmers, in the familiar elephant tusk shape, and we learned that they were called koba. They were made and used in exactly the same way as in Central Africa, in South America
Captions for the following four pages
15. World expert on ancient Egyptian boat illustrations, Bjom Land-strom of Sweden, drawing an Egyptian papyrus sh
ip for the boat-builders Omar, Mussa and Abdullah from Chad, while the author explains the principle of the straddled mast to them. (Above)
16. Papyrus reed from the source of the Nile is examined by the papyrus boatbuilders from Chad. (Below)
17. Behind the Giza pyramids the Buduma Africans from Chad begin to build a papyrus boat, with Landstrom and the author looking on. (Above)
18. The ancient Egyptian boatbuilder's art comes home again. The boatbuilders from Chad train Egyptian helpers in an art their forefathers forgot when the papyrus reed died out in Egypt. (Below)
19 and 20. Mussa and Omar boatbuilding with fingers and teeth. (Above)
21. AbduUah helped us to persuade his compatriots to give the boat a curved stern in the Egyptian style. This added section was to prove the boat's weak point. (Below)
22. A thick rope cable was fixed in the ancient Egyptian manner right around the gunwale of the finished papyrus boat for fastening the mast stays.
/
.&
'• 4
/
iM^irk^
Captions for the preceding four pages
23. Reluctant inland Africans add more papyrus to the stem they did not want, while the author holds the fateful bowstring, which was later removed. (Above)
24. The "paper boat" on the desert sand was guarded night and day; one cigarette end could have sent the papyrus up in flames. (Below)
25 and 26. Five hundred Egyptians from the Cairo Institute of Gymnastics drag the papyrus ship from the buildingsite. {Photo: UPI, London) The building team, inset. Standing, from left to right, Muhamed, Mussa, the author, Abdullah, Omar, Corio; seated, second from left, Yuri; lying. Carlo.
The Ra Expeditions Page 10