That same evening two terrified Budumas were sitting behind us in the little plane when we took off again from the waves beyond their grass huts. The shore was black with friends and relations, the sultan and the sheriff at their head, gazing up at their two fellow tribesmen, courageous adventurers, who sat gripping their seats and staring down like vultures at the little world they had grown up in. Their expressions gave nothing away, for was there not a row of burn marks on their arms to prove that they could voluntarily bear red-hot iron without complaint? The two long-
distance travelers had come with what they stood up in; tattered tunics and home-made sandals. The suitcase we had brought for them was as empty as before; they had nothing to put in it.
In Fort Lamy they embraced and rejoiced hugely over finding Abdullah a free man again. In the market place Omar was fitted out in light blue from neck to sandals and Mussa entirely in yellow. In the fluttering new robes the blue and yellow figures strode ahead of us to the police station, wide-eyed with wonder at their new passport photographs.
"Names?" asked a helpful police sergeant.
"Omar M'Bulu."
"Mussa Bulumi."
"Age?" asked the minion of the law.
Silence.
"When was Omar born?"
"Four years before Mussa."
"1927? 1928? 1929?"
"I think so/' said Omar diffidently.
"Born ca. 1929," wrote the sergeant. "And Mussa?"
"1929/' said Mussa quickly.
"Impossible," declared the sergeant. "You are four years older."
"Right," agreed Mussa. "But we were both bom in 1929."
"Born ca. 1929," the sergeant wrote for Mussa as well.
The passports had to be signed. Omar regretted that he could only sign in Arabic. He took the pen, sat dovm and made some elegant flourishes in the air over the paper, upon which he decided to hand the pen back to the sergeant who wrote his name for him. Mussa suggested that the sergeant should sign for him at the same time. But their passports could not be issued without labor contracts, so we went off to the Catholic Hospital for a medical certificate. There was a lively scene when a nun told Mussa to undress as far as the waist and he innocently pulled the long robe up to his navel. When Omar was to be X-rayed he was invisible on the screen until the baffled nun turned the light on again and found he had climbed up and was hanging over the top of the X-ray apparatus on his stomach. The Sudan required a smallpox certificate and the men were given the vaccine but no certificate, because the hospital had run out of forms. With Abdullah we rushed to the printers, who
refused to print new forms until the hospital had paid off their old debt. At Sudan Airlines the clerk found three old smallpox forms in a drawer, but just as the hospital was about to fill them in a French doctor appeared with Omar's X-ray photograph, which showed a large growth on the liver. Big Omar was seriously ill and strictly forbidden to travel. Mussa would not travel without his brother, who knew Arabic. The papyrus project was crumbling in ruins.
What could be done for Omar? We all trooped in to the French senior physician, a smiling colonel.
''You, here?"
The meeting was warm and we were both equally surprised. The last time I had met Colonel Lalouel he had been an army doctor in Tahiti. We worked out a solution together. If Omar were forced to return to Bol he would be without medical care. So I guaranteed that he would see a doctor in Cairo and took a prescription for injections and tablets, assuming responsibility for Omar's cure.
Then the Sudan flight left. At the last moment Mussa and Omar were pushed up the steps, finding it difficult to see because they had found yellow and blue glasses to match their clothes. Loud cries from Abdullah when he put his head inside and saw the aircraft fittings, while the other two were lost in admiration of the cabin, which was larger than the sultan's house in Bol. Soon we were above the cloud ceiling and while Abdullah and Omar examined in detail the mechanism of the seat belt and the adjustable seat, Mussa with stoical calm drew out a yellow handkerchief and sat polishing his naked skull and his sandals alternately. When the stewardess passed with the candy tray, each took handfuls and sat holding his booty until he saw other people putting their candy wrappers into the ash trays. Then they pushed all their candies in and spent the rest of the journey trying to coax them up again through the narrow opening. I was concerned for Omar's liver when I saw him begin on the lunch tray, with butter on his fruit salad. Soon we crossed the desolate and arid frontiers of the Sudan and landed in the late afternoon at the capital, Khartoum.
Now there was no holding my companions. No one in Bol had seen a house with two floors, but here in Khartoum the houses lay on top of one another in layers and even Abdullah went into transports when he saw a four-story building. There would be trouble if my companions were let out of sight for one minute in this teeming
Arab city where we had to spend the night, and since my friends would not yet merge inconspicuously into their surroundings if they came with me to a big modern hotel, I decided to go with them to a small fourth-class boarding house in the poorest Arab quarter. Reception and rooms were up on the third floor of an antiquated building, with kitchen and dining area out on the roof. All three were overwhelmed at this fairy-tale house. The two brothers behaved oddly on the stairs. Advancing with great circumspection they lifted their feet as deliberately and warily as if they were climbing a rugged mountainside. I realized that this was the first time they had climbed a staircase. Both in Bol and on their floating islands all their huts were built on the ground, with only earthen floors. The hotel rooms faced inward and were windowless, v^ath bare light bulbs hanging from the ceiling and several iron beds in a row. The two men from Bol had never seen a bed and, when Abdullah explained that it was for sleeping, Mussa and Omar lay down on their stomachs and crawled underneath to try it. There they turned over and lay outstretched vvith their noses in the bedsprings, while Abdullah doubled up with silent laughter and beckoned them out again for the benefit of the astonished proprietress, who peeped beneath the mattress and wanted to know what they were looking for. On the roof we were given a little table with a fork and plate each, already laden with large pieces of meat, tomatoes, potatoes, leeks and beans. The function of the fork was quickly appreciated. I was just about to stick mine into a tasty piece of meat on my plate when another fork forestalled me and quickly popped my morsel in Omar's mouth. I prepared to secure another, but—oops!—Abdullah's fork was there and I had to steer for a potato to avoid a collision. I surveyed the situation and saw the forks dueling to and fro across the table, each man eating from the plate where he had spotted something tempting at that moment. My table fellows were used to eating with their fingers from a common dish in the middle and found the fork an excellent extension of their range at a meal where the food had not been placed in the middle, accessible to everyone.
I went to bed slightly hungry. The only bathroom in the hotel resounded with amazed and admiring exclamations. Abdullah wanted Sudanese currency in case a lady should happen to visit his room. Next morning he woke me before dawn. He had heard that time was
not the same all over the world and now he wanted to be certain that the pilot and I had agreed on a common time for the flight to Egypt to avoid his leaving Sudan before us.
At the airfield there was a catastrophe. No one noticed that my companions from Chad lacked Egyptian visas, but the Health Department, checking all papers, discovered that their fresh vaccination against yellow fever would not be valid for another week. They had slipped into the Sudan through the Health Department's oversight; now at least they would not be allowed to slip out again until the vaccination was valid. My three companions were stopped and all bargaining was quite useless. In the meantime I had passed through to the airfield, where I discovered a wide gap in the fence. The watchful Abdullah saw my beckoning finger. He and the others left the line, where the Health ofiicial formed a barrier. The three of them filed round the building in their white, blue
and yellow robes and the plane left with all four of us on board. The two men from Bol sat down politely and fastened their seat belts like experienced globetrotters, smiling at the pretty black stewardess and each taking a single piece of candy from her tray.
Cairo. Reception committee at the foot of the aircraft steps, with the smiling Norwegian Ambassador, Peter Anker, at its head. The Tourist Ministry's representative waved us through without a word about visas or yellow fever, and the ambassador's chauffeur, in elegant uniform, bowed to Mussa, Omar and Abdullah as they gathered their skirts about their legs and maneuvered themselves into the ambassador's big car. There were shouts of delight and devout murmurs from each of the men in the back seat at the sight of the first bridges, underpasses, and apartment buildings. A mosque, another one, the whole town was full of mosques; it must be Paradise. But when the buildings in the center began to cover whole blocks and rose so high that the three of them could not see the rooftops without rolling down the window, they grew more and more silent. This could not be real. Mussa grew drowsy. Omar sat stiffly and the whites of his eyes showed when he stole a nervous glance to the side. Abdullah, on the other hand, sat with his clean-shaven scalp thrust forward, drinking in with wide-open eyes and mouth every last detail, from trainlines and makes of cars, to neon signs and human t}^pes.
"What's that?" said Abdullah.
We had left the modern city and were crossing the Giza plain. I was prepared for the question, but wanted to watch Abdullah's reaction. The others sat upright, dozing, but Abdullah had been staring ahead for a long time, eyes and mouth growing larger and larger in the dusk.
"That is a pyramid, Abdullah," I explained.
"Is it a mountain or did men make it?"
"Men made it in the old days."
"Those Egyptians! They are further advanced than us. How many people live in there?"
"Just one man, and he is dead."
Abdullah burst into admiring laughter.
"Those Egyptians, those Egyptians!"
Two more pyramids appeared. Now Abdullah, too, was quite silent. The whites of his eyes gleamed. The three men from Chad were guided by flashlight on a long walk from the car through sand dunes to Corio's tent camp, which showed ghostly white in the moonlight, down in the shallow depression behind the pyramids and the Sphinx. Little did the three men walking over the moonlit sand suspect that they were the first papyrus boatbuilders to pass the Sphinx's paws for perhaps thousands of years. Nor that the sand they were treading covered ancient tombs where the Pharaohs' own boat-builders lay, lost and forgotten with a skill that was now returning to the foot of the pyramids again, by a long, a very long and roundabout route.
"Goodnight, Abdullah. You have a tent to yourself. Mussa and Omar will be in the one next to yours."
Dazed with incredible impressions and new knowledge, all three stole a last glance at Pharaohs' skyscraper mountains that towered over us like shadows thrown by our tents against the multitude of stars. "One man in each, and he is dead," Abdullah muttered to Omar in Arabic. Omar did not bother to translate into Buduma, for his brother was already lying on his back and snoring, sated with experience, in his camp bed.
As the morning sun shot its first red arrows of light over the tent roofs from its cover behind the sand dunes on the horizon, the tips of the three pyramids glowed like hot lava on a chain of volcanos.
It was still dark and cold when the three men in their long garments crawled out and squatted to watch the glow of the pyramid tops. They were waiting for the sun to reach down to ordinary human beings shivering on the cold sand, waiting for sunrise before prostrating themselves in prayer to Allah. When the sun rose the tiiree black men knelt in a row and bowed, their foreheads to the sand. Their shaven skulls gleaming like polished shoes and pointed directly at the waking sun-god Ra, because Abdullah had figured out that Mecca must lie approximately in that direction. The sun rose and lit up the dunes. Then we all caught sight of something unusual, something from the living world amid all that dead sand and stone. The papyrus! There it lay waiting for us in huge stacks, some yellow-green and some golden as the sun itself. Abdullah took a long knife and we all gathered in tense expectation to hear the expert's verdict. This was the first critical encounter between boatbuilders from Central Africa and raw materials from the source of the Nile. Abdullah sliced off a reed with a simple stroke and the other two squeezed the severed end and felt down the long stalk.
"Kirta," murmured Mussa.
"Ganagin" Omar translated to Abdullah in Chad Arabic and his teeth flashed delightedly.
"Papyrus, they say this is real papyrus," explained Abdullah in French, and everyone felt relieved and happy. The papyrus was of the finest quality.
Together we chose a flat stretch of desert beside the tents and here we measured out a boat fifty feet long and fifteen broad, outlining the contours with a stick in the sand.
"The kaday must be this big."
"But where is the water?"
It was Mussa who asked, and Omar nodded.
"Water?" said the rest of us. I said: "Didn't you find a barrel of drinking water outside the cookhouse tent?"
"Where is the lake? We can't build a boat without leaving the papyrus to soak," said Mussa, gazing suspiciously around him at the endless sand dunes.
"But you told us that we must dry the papyrus in the sun for three weeks before it could be used," I exclaimed.
"Yes, of course. Fresh papyrus is no good, it has to be dried to
Strengthen it. Afterward it has to be soaked before we bend it, otherwise it snaps hke kindhng," said the three black men.
There we were. In the desert sand. The camels had water in their humps, we had some in a barrel with a tap. Far down in the valley ran the Nile. Far away. All the sewers emptied out there. Modern Nile water would certainly rot the papyrus twice as fast as the river water of the Pharaoh's days. The two men from Bol had not warned us. In the lake-side world they knew there was water everywhere, nothing but water and floating islands; their concept of our planet was a huge lake with a desert along one horizon.
"Where is the lake?"
Mussa looked distrustfully at us and Omar became uneasy. We had to find a solution on the spot
"We will fetch it!"
There was no choice. It was too late to move the camp and the huge stack of papyrus. The Nile was filthy anyhow and we dared not soak the papyrus in the sea before it was really necessary, since experts claimed that sea water dissolved the cell tissues in the reed. We had chosen this particular buildingsite because of the surroundings: the pyramids, which symbolized ancient civilization, and the tombs, which would give us the opportunity to check up on individual details in the old paintings as work proceeded on our own craft. And in this desert climate we were certain of keeping the papyrus dry, as the boatbuilders had said it must be, both in Chad and in Ethiopia.
"Abdullah, explain that we are going to fetch the water."
In the Jeep, Corio and I bounced over the sand ridge and down into the nearest Arab quarter. Here we bought bricks and cement, found a mason to build a reservoir, and a truck driver who undertook to drive twelve old gasoline drums full of tap water out to us in the desert every other day. Our friends from Chad were taken shopping for clothes in Cairo; as far north as Egypt it was cold for them, with nothing under their robes. And Omar began his medical treatment. Next day the first bundles of papyrus reed were put to soak in a rectangular brick basin built in the sand in front of the tents. Now we could really see how well papyrus floated. Three men had to jump and dance about to submerge a single bundle, and we had had five hundred bundles shipped from Ethiopia. If we thrust a single papyrus
stem, thick end down, into a barrel of water, it would shoot up into air by itself like an arrow as soon as we let go of it.
Two learned men with friendly faces and full, flowing beards, watched closely as we began on the papyrus boat. Both shook their heads, uncertain what to believe. One was Egypt's chief curator of antiquities
, who paid us frequent visits from his nearby worksite. He was piecing together the huge cedar boat of Pharaoh Cheops, which had recently been discovered beneath the sand at the foot of the largest pyramid. The other was the Swedish historian, Bjorn Landstrom, the world's leading authority on ancient Egyptian boat design. He had come on one of his frequent visits to the country to catalogue and draw every single vessel depicted in the numerous tombs of the Nile Valley. The week before, Landstrom had informed the press of his lack of faith in the seaworthiness of any kind of papyrus boat. But his first meeting with our real papyrus reeds and the confidence of our experienced boatbuilders from Chad undermined his skepticism and he offered to stay in Egypt and place all his theoretical knowledge at our disposal.
So the teamwork began. Landstrom knew nothing of papyrus reeds, nor of the technique involved in the chains of ropes which were to lash the bundles together into a boat, but he knew what the final shape of the ship was to be, and many details that were outside the Buduma Negroes' experience. He knew how the stern of a Pharaonic vessel should curve gracefully into the sky as high as the bow, and also the shape and placement of bipod mast with rigging, sail, cabin and steering mechanism. He sat down on a bundle of reeds and sketched a complete papyrus ship for us, and his drawing was to serve as our construction plan, showing the shape and all the proportions.
Mussa and Omar shook with laughter, because at Chad they had never seen what they termed a boat with a prow fore and aft. But they started building straight away. With four stalks bound together with twine at one end they began to build the boat we proposed to test at sea. Into these they pushed in more papyrus reeds and the bundle and rope grew thicker and thicker, just as they had in Chad. When the cone-shaped bundle was about two feet thick and the ropes as thick as a man's little finger, the bundle was lengthened into a cylinder, with rope rings of constant thickness placed two to
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