Page 100 - The Tigris Expedition

Problems Begin
sighted long, empty cement docks on the same right banks, and our
pilot balam helped us by laying to between us and the cement as a
wooden fender. Norman was again struck suddenly with a very
high fever for a couple of days. Even Yuri now confided to me that
he had severe pains in the chest.
At sunrise we began to see clearly the vast industrial complex to
which the mole belonged. West German engineers came and with
their crane helped us to lift the two gigantic rudder oars ashore. We
cut off one third of each blade, and with his Russian adze Dimitri
chopped down the sides of the oval shafts so that they became much
lighter and fairly round. Friendly German and Swiss engineers
invited all of us to lunch and to dinner. They were building a
modern paper mill beside the large section already in operation.
With the other mill under construction far up the river, these plants
would suffice to make deforested Iraq self-supporting in paper
manufactured from canes and reeds from the marshes. The kassab
was especially suitable and was rafted to the mill as large gare. An
enormous field next to the plant was stocked with thousands of tons
of cane, ready to be converted into paper pulp.
This was to be our next nightmare, never experienced by the
Sumerians. We had observed that the Shatt-al-Arab was very
polluted in this area, but not until we came to the pier in high spirits
after a late party did we notice sheets of some white substance
floating down the black water. With our flashlights we saw no
water at all around our golden reed-ship; everything looked like
whipped cream with streaks of yellow butter. In the chilly night
wind we felt as if we had come to the Arctic. Large floes and flakes
of ice, some capped with snow, appeared to come slowly drifting
out of the night to build up like pack ice around Tigris.
Some of the men ran upstream and found the white foam coming
in a solid flow down a canal from the big factory buildings. An
engineer confirmed that the old mill was washed out at night. The
modern one would not pollute the water in the same way when it
was ready for operation. Meanwhile, here was our Tigris, afloat in
the thick chemical spillage of a plant that converted cane into paper!
With the blades of our rowing oars we tried to scoop away the
deep layers of white and golden foam, but it built up again against
the reed bundles as fast as we got a moment’s glimpse of black
water. We wanted to escape but could not. Our heavy rudder oars
were ashore in the dark, and the reshaped blades were so far only
partly covered with new asphalt.
Next morning all the men swore that Tigris lay considerably
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