The Ra Expeditions

by Thor Heyerdahl

  A papyrus boat sailing along in the grip of the elements could be a micro-world, a practical attempt to prove that men can work together in peace regardless of country, religion, color or political background, if only they will see as a matter of self-interest the necessity of fighting for a common cause.

  I took up my pen and wrote to Abdullah. I confirmed that I needed Omar and Mussa and that he himself must come as interpreter. Was it necessary for me to come and fetch them, or could Abdullah make his way alone to Bol and bring the others as far as Fort Lamy, if I sent air tickets from there to Cairo and met them when the plane landed?

  To my amazement a succinct reply arrived promptly from Abdullah via the scribe in Fort Lamy: Abdullah needed a certificate of employment to enable the three to leave the country; he needed three air tickets to Egypt; and he needed 150,000 Chad francs. If he had these he could arrange everything and I would be saved the journey to Chad.

  It was a sizable sum, even if the National Bank of Italy itself did not know the exact rate of exchange for Chad francs, and there were endless problems before the funds were safely in Abdullah's hands. Safely? I had put my trust in an alert and reliable expression, without knowing the first thing about Abdullah Djibrine, except that he was a man in a white tunic who had appeared from nowhere in Bol and disappeared again after acting as a voluntary interpreter. By his own account he was a carpenter. But if Abdullah was not de-

  no THE RA EXPEDITIONS

  ceiving me he would save me both time and money. If I did not have to pick up the Budumas in Bol, I would have time for an important last visit to the Indians in Peru, since I had to go to Mexico and the United States in any case to find companions for the experiment itself.

  Two important collaborators had now been set in motion. Buschi in Ethiopia was to produce the reeds, Abdullah in Chad the builders. Reeds and boatbuilders should reach Egypt at the same time and by then the desert camp must be ready near Cairo. This was entrusted to the hands of a reliable friend, the Italian high school teacher Angelo Corio, to whom the Department of Education in Rome had granted six months' leave for language studies with our international team in Egypt. Corio arrived at the pyramids tourist-fashion, with suitcase and camera, and foundered under a ring of struggling dragomans who wanted to show him the Sphinx and teach him to ride a camel. To survive in this peculiar oriental environment he obviously needed a local contact man who knew the laws and customs of the land and could find the right doors to knock on. Ex-Colonel Attia Ossama was just such a man. Because of the war, his real activities, which were connected with the Sinai Peninsula occupied by Israel, were shrouded in mystery. But being courteous and blessed with a winning manner he had an entree everywhere and he undertook to act as middleman with the authorities and obtain permission to unload the papyrus in the Suez war zone.

  The wheels were really turning now. Soon they were spinning in one country after the other. Telegrams and telephonic arrangements in foreign tongues, express letters with exotic stamps, and the whole project to be kept secret if work was to be completed undisturbed before the deadline set by the hurricane season. Participants from seven countries. I had found an Italian, had a possible Egyptian candidate and intended to choose the man from Chad from among the three boatbuilders, once they arrived. From Russia I was expecting a reply. I had to go to America. December had passed, January followed—three months were left. In Cairo, Corio was waiting for the papyrus load, which was now drying in the sun on the shores of Lake Tana, while Abdullah was out of reach, on his way to pick up the two others in Bol. In New York I met my American contact man,

  Frank Taplin. Taplin was a hyper-energetic American businessman, campaigner for peace and active cog in the World Association of World Federalists, an organization working for increased co-operation between countries and expanded powers for the UN. The well-known New York editor Norman Cousins was president of the organization and a close personal friend of Secretary-General U Thant, who received all three of us on the top floor of the United Nations' imposing glass building.

  Seven nationalities, black and white, from East and West, on a papyrus bundle, drifting across the Atlantic? We would be allowed to fly the United Nations flag as long as we kept to the rules: all flags on board must be of the same size and hang at the same height. We could have seven national flags in a row, with a UN flag at each side. U Thant's good wishes came from the heart. Where would we start?

  "I had thought of Morocco."

  "Then you must go and see my friend Ahmed Benhima, Moroccan Ambassador to the UN, fifteen floors down, on the twenty-third floor."

  His Excellency on the twenty-third floor was a tall, distinguished diplomat, the last scion of one of Morocco's oldest and most active families. He received us with routine amiability and we sank into deep armchairs. He listened with complete composure.

  "So you are going to set sail from my homeland on a papyrus boat," was all he said as he offered us cigarettes.

  "Thank you, I don't smoke."

  "What port will you leave from?"

  "Safi."

  "Safi! That's my own home town! Why Safi, in particular?"

  Now his interest was suddenly aroused and he rose with an expression of great surprise and curiosity.

  "Why Safi?" he repeated.

  "Because Safi is one of the oldest African ports beyond Gibraltar. Casablanca is a modern port, but Safi has been known from ancient times. Safi lies just where a coastal sailor coming from the Mediterranean would be most likely to be swept out to sea by the elements. Just beyond Safi the ocean current and the trade wind seize anything that floats and send it to America."

  "My parents live in Safi. The Pasha of Safi is a good friend of mine. I will write to him and I will write to my brother, who is Foreign Minister in Morocco."

  This was an unbelievable bit of luck. We parted on the best of terms.

  In New York I had a possible candidate for the trip and everything seemed to be going well until his better half was initiated into the secret plans. Then we all three hastily agreed that someone else must be found. There was barely time to have lunch v^dth a new candidate before the plane took off for Lima in Peru.

  A few days later I was- sitting with a group of Uru Indians, frying fish on a floating island in Lake Titicaca. The whole island was a network of floating reeds, reeds piled on top of one another in thick stacks. As the bottom layers rotted and sank deeper, fresh totora reed was cut and stacked on top. All this part of the lake consisted of artificial reed islands lying side by side with narrow channels between them and living reed growing round them in all directions as far as the eye could see. Looking across this flat marshland where the Uru Indians passed their whole existence between fish and reed, one could see nothing but distant white peaks against the blue sky. House and bed were of reed. The boats were of reed, with a square sail of reed stems matted together. Dry reed was the only fuel for their cooking fires. Rotten reeds mixed with earth from the mainland were laid out in small beds on the floating islands and there the Indians grew their traditional sweet potatoes. There was no fixed point in their existence; the ground rocked under the Uru Indians' feet whether they were walking on the floor inside the hut or around the little potato field outside. I had come to have a supposition confirmed. The Uru Indians, like the Quechua and Aymara Indians on the shores of the same lake, and like the Buduma Negroes in Chad, did not drag up their boats to dry every day after use. Yet the boats did not sink in a fortnight. The reeds certainly did submerge gradually. One could see that by observing these floating reed islands, on which the Indians had to keep on building up the surface. But the elegant boats lay beside the islands and floated without fresh additions, just as on Lake Chad. The explanation for this was obvious. The reed boats here in South America, like those in Central Africa, were lashed together

  with strong hand-made rope, knotted so tightly that as many as possible of the cellular channels inside the reeds were closed. The small boats in Ethiopia, on the other hand,
were simply held loosely together with strips of bark of papyrus fiber and the porous reed was not sufficiently compressed to prevent the absorption of water.

  There were still twelve days left before Abdullah and the boat-builders were due to arrive in Cairo. He had been sent air tickets for February 20, calculated to coincide approximately with the arrival of the papyrus in Suez. Quite a lot could be done in the twelve days I had left. And with my friend Thorlief Schjelderup, a noted Norwegian philosopher, athlete and cameraman, I left the bobbing islands of the Uru Indians to visit the desert area on the north coast of Peru. Here we were to see South America's most beautiful pyramid, an enormous symmetrical construction of adobe bricks. The colossus lay hidden and forgotten behind weathered sandstone mountains on the desert plain in the Chicama Valley, so far unexplored by science but thoroughly plundered by grave-robbers, who had opened a crater right to the bottom and transformed the stepped pyramid into a sort of square volcano. This gigantic edifice towers so high above the desert that the people of the valley simply call the ancient monument Cerro ColoradOy "Red Mountain." But for the symmetrical stepped sides, and the walled enclosure in front of the pyramid, one would, in fact, have to look closely to see that this was not a mountain but a man-made composition of millions of sun-baked bricks. For someone who had been in Egypt the week before, there was an almost baffling similarity in architectural form, astronomical orientation, dimensions and building materials to the oldest of the pyramids on the Nile. Cerro Colorado had been erected by an unknown priest-king of antiquity when mighty civilizations began to flourish in Peru, long before the Inca culture succeeded the Chimu culture, itself a successor to those first unknown preceptors whom science, for want of a name, has called the "Mochica" people. It was they who built these very first and very largest of pyramids on the coast. Who were the Mochica people? Science has become more and more aware that some form of contact existed between the culture-bringers on the north coast of Peru and the pyramid-builders in old Mexico. Beyond this little or nothing is known of their origins. Among their realistic self-portraits in ceramic

  are bearded men and individuals with strongly Mediterranean features; some could have been portraits of typical Berber types in Morocco today.

  There was even time for a flying visit to Mexico, where my companion on the visit to the Seris Indians, Olympic swimmer Ramon Bravo, could think of nothing he would rather do than embark on a reed boat. He had been having some stomach trouble, but was sure he would be in top form before it was time to set out from Morocco in two and a half months.

  A small plane, a short drive, a few steps on foot, and we were standing in the Mexican jungle, observing a pyramid in the rain. A pyramid in the rain. This was just what we had been hoping for, and down it came. Thorleif was soaked to the skin, standing in his shirt, wind jacket tucked round camera and film, while the tropical rain poured down, dripping and streaming from block to block down the mighty Palenque pyramid. The clouds hung low over the treetops in the dense jungle that rolled in from the ridge behind us, its gigantic trees thrusting forward on all sides to the very foot of the pyramid. In clearings around the pyramid lay moss-grovm ruins of stately buildings, tumbled and derelict, with something for every taste. Having come to the site for no other reason than to sense in one's blood-stream a little of what had passed in America before Columbus, one had to overcome the first sentimental wave of enthusiasm and admiration, and then sit down and try to understand what lay behind this impressive complex of ruins. There was a curious aura of mystery here, something unwritten and unsaid that compelled attention, conjecture. This was not the time to be content with preconceived ideas. This was not the time to get absorbed by one fascinating detail, or fall into ecstasies over dimensions, beauty or ingenious technique. This was simply the time to absorb the fact that rain was pouring on the pyramid, and that the enormous complex ruin, with its pyramids, temples and palaces, was the relic of human beings like ourselves, neither superior nor inferior. They had arrived here as pioneers a thousand years before Columbus and cleared a space for themselves in the jungle for house and home, farms and religious buildings. The spectacular pyramids and temples had been designed and calculated by skilled architects—remarkably skilled, if one thinks of most Indians who were living and still live

  in the same jungle, building huts of branches and leaves with no thought of making a single rectangular block out of what nature has given them in the form of boulders or solid rock. I had once tried to square off a round stone. I had not succeeded, although I had steel to carve with and the Indians had only stone tools. Only an expert would be able to cut smoothly polished blocks from the hard rock—not I, not one of my friends, be he town or country-dweller, and no Indian that I had ever met. It can be done, but not by just anyone. What was the truth about the jungle ruins of Palenque?

  A mad idea occuned to me that archaeologists, in reconstructing the unknown, might benefit from consultation with police detectives, those specialists who need not know archaeological terminology or excavation technique, but who are endowed with a basic all-round suspiciousness, practical insight and flair, and some experience in the calculation of probabilities. For what is criminal detection if not the logical reconstruction of unwitnessed events of the past? Here was a large pyramid in the deep forest. Had ordinary Indians put it there? Or had people other than primitive hunters from Siberia mixed with the aboriginal population in Mexico's primeval forests?

  It was natural, said those who believed that only barefooted savages and no civilized peoples were able to travel before Columbus' day: it was natural that human beings in similar environmental circumstances should create things that looked alike. It was natural that people in both Egypt and Mexico should have laid stones on stones until they became a pyramid.

  It began raining immoderately now, and we tried to find shelter under some outsize leaves.

  Similar environmental circumstances! Was there a greater contrast than Egyptian desert and Mexican jungle? Moist plant life made the hot air we were breathing as humid as in a greenhouse. Nothing but dripping foliage, hanas, trunks, rich humus. Not a stone to be seen, except for the big chiseled blocks once brought by man and now lying heaped in overgrown ruins. Was it natural to lay stone on stone in the Mexican jungle? Then why not in the African jungle, in the North American prairies or in the meadows and pine forests of Europe?

  Where had the architects of the Palenque pyramid found their

  materials? Perhaps they had dug deep into the mold beneath the roots of the jungle giants; perhaps they had gone to some faroff ridge and hacked away at a solid mountain wall. Here in Palenque, in any case, the idea had come first and the right building materials had been found subsequently, after an expert search.

  And in Peru? Was it natural to lay stone on stone until pyramids arose in Peru? Along the thousand miles of desert coast where Peru's pyramids lie scattered in the sands there is no usable stone at all! One must go far up into the Andes to find the closest stone quarries. In the Mochica Valley where we had just been, stone was of such poor quality that the pyramid-builders had been obliged to manufacture some six million large, brick-shaped adobe blocks before they had sufficient materials to build their pyramid, which covered an area of some four thousand square yards and was one hundred feet high. And there were other adobe pyramids in Peru larger than Cerro Colorado.

  It was thought-provoking to sit, cold and wet, under the big leaves and look at the streaming pyramid, with memories of Peru and Egypt fresh in one's mind. In Egypt it was natural to build with stone, to take tools to the rock itself, because naked cliffs rising from the desert sand were the only natural building material apart from reeds. But where in Mexico was pyramid-building natural? It was known that the Aztecs on Mexico's open plateaus and the Mayas in the dense jungles of Yucatan had learned pyramid-building from their predecessors. Archaeology had disclosed that the earliest civilization in Mexico, the one which had given the impulse to all the rest, had begun on the tropical
coast of the Mexican Gulf, where the ocean current reaches land after its passage of the Atlantic. Was it more natural to build pyramids there? On the contrary. There the unknovm originators of Mexico's earliest culture had made their way beyond the far horizon to find an accessible stone quarry. In some cases gigantic blocks of twenty and thirty tons had been transported from quarries as far as fifty miles from the buildingsite. Today no one knows the identity of those dynamic masons and architects, who built in the lush jungle and yet knew more about selecting stone than wood. For convenience they have been given a name, "Olmecs." If the many extremely lifelike sculptures on their abandoned stone monuments are self-portraits, then some of the Olmecs

  IN THE WORLD OF THE PYRAMID-BUILDERS Hy

  had round faces with flat, broad noses and thick hps and looked completely Negroid, while others had sharp features, hooked noses, mustaches and flowing beards and looked remarkably Semitic. The Olmecs were the clue to the whole riddle. What was their real name, who were they, why did the Olmecs suddenly begin to quarry stones and build pyramids? The Olmecs also manufactured artificial building bricks in the jungle. Why? One of their hundred-foot-high pyramids was built of sun-baked adobe bricks, like those in the deserts of Peru, like those of ancient Mesopotamia, and like some of the oldest pyramids in the Nile Valley. Adobe is not a natural building material in the jungle.

  The dripping edifice we were looking at confused the whole issue. A few years ago, in 1952, a discovery in this jungle pyramid had shaken the scientific world and immediately upset rigidly held dogma. Quite unexpectedly, a secret entrance had been found to a narrow passage with a stone stairway winding down through the center of the pyramid. It led to a heavy stone door. This opened into a magnificent tomb with a colossal stone coffin where the body of a mighty priest-king lay buried—just as in ancient Egypt. There should not be burial chambers in Mexican pyramids. This was one of the two most cogent reasons for rejecting the idea of transoceanic contact. The similarity between the pyramids was superficial, they said. The pyramids on the two sides of the Atlantic not only had different functions but were also built in different shapes. In Mexico and Peru the pyramids had stepped sides, in Egypt the sides sloped smoothly.