The Ra Expeditions

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The Ra Expeditions Page 15

by Thor Heyerdahl


  This question of shape had always been a truth v^th modifications. Anyone who had traveled in the Nile Valley knew that there were stepped pyramids in Egypt too and that they were the oldest, the original form, not only in Egypt but in Mesopotamia. Egypt's civilized neighbors in the Old World, the Babylonians, built their pyramids in step form and placed a temple on top, just as in ancient Mexico. And now, in addition, suddenly here was a priest-king, laid out in a coffin at the heart of a Mexican pyramid. His family also claimed descent from the sun and placed a gun-god of jade in the tomb, while his architect arranged the ground plan of the pyramid with astronomical accuracy according to the passage of the sun, as in Eg}^pt. He, too, had been placed in a huge stone

  sarcophagus. He, too, had been given a splendid mummy mask over his face, as was customary in Peru and in Egypt. The mask was not of gold but of jade mosaic, with eyes of shell and pupils of obsidian. He had also believed in a life after death and was therefore equipped with jars and dishes for food and drink and adorned with crown, earplugs, neck chain, bracelets and rings of mother-of-pearl and jade. The cofEn was painted inside with red cinnabar, and remnants of red cloth still adhered to bones and jewels. In the Egyptian manner the sarcophagus was closed with a lid made from a single carved slab that weighed many tons, wider than a kingsize bed and twice as long. The lid and the walls of the tomb were decorated with reliefs of priests or priest-kings, all in profile, some wearing false beards as a badge of rank, just as was the custom among the hierarcy in ancient Egypt. When everything was ready, half a score of young men were killed and laid outside the door of the tomb to serve as slaves in the next world. Then the opening to the sun-king's burial chamber was sealed with a gigantic stone door and from it a secret staircase was built up through the interior of the pyramid, which was finally filled in with stone and rubble and sealed. Inside and outside the sun-king in Palenque had followed the ancient Egyptian formula for pyramid burial. The only innovation was the erection of a little stone temple on top of the pyramid, in the true Mexican style—that is, in the Mesopotamian manner.

  We went down the winding staircase and looked at the grave. It was built before the rest of the pyramid as part of the master architect's original plan, with gigantic slabs in walls and roof, cut, fitted together with hair's-breadth accuracy, and polished to a high sheen. The rest of the pyramid was constructed above when the tomb was complete. White stalactites hung like rows of calcified icicles from cornices on the walls and gave the carved priests in their luxurious ceremonial garb an air of deep-frozen antiquity. The air was fresh and cool. As in Egypt, the architect of this pyramid had provided the necessary air-conditioning. A narrow air duct curved from the coffin all the way up the side of the stairway and two large ventilation channels ran right through the walls of the huge pyramid into the fresh air on either side.

  When we climbed the long stone staircase between narrow walls I had another look at the construction. The shaft of the staircase

  had a hexagonal cross section with angular walls, so that the flat ceiling was narrower than the width of the stair. Only in one place in the world had I groped my way up steps with precisely the same extraordinary design: in the pyramids of Egypt.

  Was all this so completely natural? It was indeed impossible to explain as the result of someone merely stacking stones in a heap. We emerged between the big carved stone blocks and found ourselves engulfed once more in green jungle which would have overwhelmed the whole complex of ruins had the Mexican Institute of Archaeology not fought continuously to keep these national treasures out of the clutches of the vegetation. The jungle strives hard to reconquer the fertile terrain once wrought from it by the stonemasons who settled among the trees.

  Beside this royal tomb was still another burial pyramid, built above a natural cave, with stone stairs and a long shaft leading up through the interior of the structure, and containing a confusion of human bones. If this pyramid, like its neighbor, had been built for a single priest-king, it was certainly plundered before historic times, the bones of less prominent individuals being tossed down into the empty vault.

  Here was more food for thought under the trees in the pouring rain. Skeptics insisted that the tradition of building tomb pyramids was utterly different from that of building temple pyramids—and, on this basis, they rejected the possibility of trans-Atlantic contact. But if their claims are valid, it means that two entirely separate civilizations flourished side-by-side in the jungles of Mexico—a ridiculous conclusion that no one would draw. It would make the problem more involved than ever.

  Back in Mexico City we called upon Dr. Ignacio Bernal, head of the institute in charge of all these Mexican antiquities as well as the National Museum of Archaeology, one of the largest and most modern in the world. Mexican archaeologists had gained a reputation for being in the forefront of the isolationists; the older generation in particular maintained rigidly that all the ideas underlying the Mexican ruins had been born inside the borders of the country by barbarians moving down from the north. Now we were about to challenge this opinion by sailing westward in an African reed boat. How would the Mexican specialists take that? I decided

  to call upon their foremost representative, Dr. Bernal, who obligingly told the museum custodians to let us in with cameras and tape-recorders. As I dragged him into position in front of a large stone stele bearing a realistic relief of an Olmec with a long beard, he looked a bit skeptically over his shoulder at this symbol of the enigma behind Mexico's earliest exponents of culture. Bearded Olmecs introduced pyramid-building to beardless Indians.

  "Dr. Bernal," I said, "do you think that the ancient cultures of Mexico developed without outside influence, or do you think that some ideas may have been brought across the sea in primitive vessels?"

  "That's the most difficult question you could ask anybody," replied the man.

  Surprised, I pushed the microphone closer to Dr. Bemal. "Why?"

  "Because I see certain things that tend to prove contact, others that tend to disprove it. So at this stage I really don't see how I can say yes or no in any way."

  "Then perhaps we can agree that the problem is still unsolved?"

  He hesitated barely a second.

  "Yes," he said with conviction. "That's exactly what I think.'*

  We recorded the same interview twice, to ensure against technical failure.

  Just at that time the expedition's secret plans had leaked out in the daily press via Cairo. The news had reached Mexico too.

  "You want to try out a reed boat at sea, do you?" asked Dr. Santiago Genoves, smiling. He had come to see his colleague, Dr. Bemal, just as we were about to leave the museum.

  "Right," I said. "Would you like to come too?"

  "Yes, and I mean it."

  I looked at Dr. Bernal's Mexican colleague in astonishment. Dr. Genoves was a well-known expert on the aboriginal population of America. I had met him at international anthropologists' congresses in Latin America, Russia and Spain. Small, but incredibly resilient and robust, he gazed calmly back at me.

  "Sorry, but the place has already been taken by another Mexican. It will have to be next time," I joked.

  "Put me on the waiting list, then. If necessary I can come at a week's notice!"

  "Agreed!"

  Little did I suspect that these words were to prove prophetic, when the Httle scientist smihngly took my hand in a firm clasp and said good-by.

  New York next morning. A hotel room crowded with journalists. The expedition was no longer a secret here either. The papyrus had reached Cairo. The building was about to begin. The three men from Chad would be sitting in the plane at that moment, Corio was waiting with camp and labor force ready, and tomorrow we would all assemble and begin. My own plane would leave that night, so I had one day left for the last hectic preparations in New York. Then a telegram arrived. I had to sit down as I read it:

  ABDULLAH ARRESTED. BOATBUDLDERS STILL IN BOL. TELEPHONE IMMEDIATELY.

  The telegram was si
gned by my wife.

  A hasty call to our home in Italy confirmed that this was no joke. The post had brought an envelope from Chad with a little note from Abdullah. It said simply that he could not go and collect Omar and Mussa because he had been arrested. He would write again in a month. Greetings, Abdullah.

  Abdullah in prison. What had he done? Where was he? No one knew any more than Abdullah's note told us. Mussa and Omar were still living on their floating islands south of the Sahara, east of the sun and west of the moon. Without them, no boat. In eleven weeks we must put to sea from Morocco if we were to avoid the hurricane season. Behind the pyramids in Egypt a whole staff was waiting in a camp for the visitors from Chad, with beds made and table laid. Someone would have to go to Chad on the spot and bring the papyrus people to the buildingsite. It would have to be me. There was a plane to Chad from France every Wednesday morning. So I would have to be in Paris on Tuesday, with a visa for the Chad Republic. Today was Friday, George Washington's Birthday, and everything in the United States was closed. Tomorrow Saturday, no public offices open. Then Sunday. I had one day, Monday, to arrange the visa and new traveling plans, as well as the financing of another trip to Central Africa, which had not been included in the project.

  Three days wandering among the New York skyscrapers followed without taking one practical step. Everything was closed. On

  Monday morning the New Yorkers poured back to their offices. Telephones were answered. People from every nation in the world met in the UN building. But no one from the Republic of Chad. The Chad representative was in Washington for the day, a friendly voice explained, and I would have to go there to get my visa for Chad. My wallet was flat My publisher, a possible source of a loan, was in Chicago. The tickets to Paris that evening were in order, but the long extension, the flight to Chad, called for both visa and money. The telephone at the Chad Embassy in Washington was silent. The Norwegian Embassy, on the other hand, promised to seek out the ambassador for Chad if I would wait patiently at my hotel. From Chicago, however, came a request to rush immediately to a bank at the other end of New York. Abdullah's obscure fate in distant Chad complicated the situation further. U Thant's office stated that the Secretary-General was prepared to write a helpful letter of introduction if I could come to his office at once. Before I was out of the door a man came rushing in—Mr. Pipal, chief of an international press agency, offering an advance against contract for news of the voyage. The telephone interrupted us. The visa was promised that day if I could get on the next shuttle plane to Washington. The press agency director helped to fling v^anter clothes into one suitcase and summer clothes into another, attended to the bill and would take the baggage to the Paris plane that evening. Thorleif in the next room dropped his rolls of film and made for U Thant's office. I rushed to the airport. Traffic jams in New York, in Washington, in the air, but brilliant co-operation between Norway and Chad in the capital. Two men welcomed me back at Kennedy Airport in New York that evening as I came rushing out of one plane and into another with the Chad visa in my passport. One had the envelope from U Thant, the other, two packed suitcases.

  "Thank you. Good-by. Good-night America. Good-morning Paris." A glimpse of my wife at a stopover in Nice on the way due south in the next plane. Dictation pad, telegram forms: Hold everything till we arrive with the boatbuilders from Bol.

  The Sahara was under our vdngs. The heat surged in when the door opened. We were in Chad. The low buildings of Fort Lamy seemed to stretch out endlessly now that I was searching for Abdullah. Abdullah's only address was a post office box. The key to

  the box belonged to a missionary. He had no idea where Abdullah was, because he had finished his stint as a carpenter. But friendly Pastor Eyer clambered into his car to drive round the Arab quarter and search.

  The receptionist at my little hotel in the center told me that the next outgoing plane left for the Sudan in a week, but my tickets for Egypt were invalid because no one in Chad could provide an Egyptian visa. Israel had an Embassy here, but not Egypt. Nor did Norway, Italy or England either.

  The room contained a bed, two pegs on the wall and a fan that sounded like a prop plane starting up. I sat on the edge of the bed for a long time, trying to solve the tangle with a pocket atlas. Someone knocked. There stood a tall man in an ankle-length white tunic and with a minute rainbow-colored cap on the crown of his head. He flung out his arms and laughed aloud, teeth and eves flashing in competition on his happy face.

  "Oh boss, oh boss, Abdullah has had a hard time, but now everything is all right!"

  Abdullah! He was literally dancing with joy at the reunion.

  "Abdullah, what happened?"

  "Abdullah went to Bol; four days I paddled on the lake in kaday looking for Omar and Mussa, who were fishing a long way out. I found them. I paid their debts. I was going to take them to Fort Lamy. Then the sheriff came. He said I was a bad man, who would do anything for money. He said today I sold two men to Egypt. Tomorrow perhaps to France or Russia. I was arrested. I was sent under guard to prison in Fort Lamy. I was alone. I used the rest of the money to get out."

  What a story. Abdullah anested in Bol on suspicion of slave-trading. The old slave route passed Chad, and the memories ob-dously lived on. Now Abdullah could not return to Bol. In fact, Mussa and Omar could not leave Bol unless I collected them myself with a formal labor contract stamped by the authorities in Fort Lamy.

  For five days Abdullah and I toured all the imposing government buildings in the capital and tried to get a legal labor contract drawn up for the two men I was to fetch from Bol. Intelligent, alert faces everywhere. Friendliness ready to burst out from behind

  the official masks. Ultramodern offices. Particularly elegant was the towering colossus of the Foreign Ministry ornamented by fourteen empty fountain pools lined up in front of the steps. But when Sunday came I sat down hopelessly on the edge of my bed and turned off the deafening propeller. Let flies and heat have their way. I was fed up. Five days and not one stamp, not one signature on one single document. We had succeeded in tracking down a missionary with a single-engined plane who could land on the lake v^th pontoons, but if I tried to carry off the two Buduma without stamped papers I would suffer the same fate as Abdullah.

  We had begun by going to the Director-General for Home Affairs, who knew about Abdullah's problems, but he could only see a foreigner via the Foreign Minister, who could only be seen through the Chef de Cabinet, who could only be reached through the Head of Protocol. Three days had passed before we got to the Foreign Minister, because everyone had to hear all the details and study U Thant's letter. The Foreign Minister, sitting behind padded doors, was a veritable giant, friendly and informal, with a v^dsp of black beard on his chin, bushy hair and parallel scars over forehead and cheeks. Before passing us on to the Home Office he took the matter up personally in two meetings with the President of the Repubhc, Tombalbaye. President Tombalbaye thought the whole case was so unusual that his Council of Minister would first have to decide whether a citizen of Chad could be allowed to travel the high seas in a papyrus kaday.

  To gain time I assured him that the only urgent problem was to get permission to take three Chad citizens to the calm shores of the Nile in order to build a kaday on land. We were then sent on to the Ministry for Home Affairs, which sent us to the Ministry of Labor, which sent us to the printers as they were short of forms. Twelve double-page contract forms were completed for the three men; then we had to go to the head of the Ministry of Works for stamps and signature. As fate would have it, he discovered two paragraphs in the printed contract forms that put a final stop to all further progress.

  The contracts could not be stamped until they were signed by the two men waiting in Bol. Still worse, it was stated in print on the form itself that it was invalid without a medical certificate. How

  were we to get one? There was no doctor in Bol and the sheriff refused to let them leave there without a stamped labor contract. The head of the Ministry of Works summo
ned a representative of the Ministry of Labor, who stared gloomily at our fine contracts. The position was clear. Both were kindness personified, but they pointed at the words; I could see for myself. Labor contract invalid without medical certificate, medical certificate impossible without departure, and departure illegal without labor contract. Ergo impossible.

  Dog-tired, I slammed the hotel door behind me and switched on the fan at full blast. Tomorrow was Sunday. I was seething with fury and sat on the edge of the bed, writing in my diary: "Hopeless lunacy. But this parody of a system is not the fault of the people of Chad, who are basically friendly, intelligent and wonderfully uncomplicated people; it is a distorted image of us. African culture was not like this, it is we who have taught them this new way of hfe."

  One thought was buzzing round in my head: black shadows from white clouds. I turned off the fan and slept to the sound of distant military trumpets from President Tombalbaye's palace. Sunday. I went to see the flying missionary. He had petrol. Early on Monday morning he started the propeller on his plane and then he and I were skimming over the roofs of the government offices, over savannah, desert and floating islands. We landed outside Bol, sending up sheets of spray. We had twenty-four pages of printed contracts and an empty suitcase on the plane, so we would sink or swim by the fact that the documents bore no stamps or signatures but our own. The masses of printed words impressed both sheriff and sultan, who let Omar and Mussa step forward from the crowd.

 

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