Page 102 - The Tigris Expedition

Problems Begin

It was hilarious. It was scaring. Supposing we got no further than
down the river. Supposing the acids of whatever we had absorbed
from the paper mill had damaged our reeds?
The noises faded behind us. We all climbed down on deck except
the helmsmen. It had been fun. But we were hungry. Asbjorn
served hot Danish stew: hakkeboff.
Our pilots had left us in Basra to refuel and we continued on our
own, escorted by a couple of casual small boats southwards through
another truly beautiful area. Here and there, in a fertile terrain of
dense palm forests, lay attractive villas in splendid terrace gardens;
now and then a primitive but most picturesque village of mud-
plastered huts appeared half-hidden under the giant leaves of
banana plants and date palms. But every now and then a new road
reached the river at some newly built mole with industry under
construction on the banks.
At about two in the afternoon we reached the border of Iran, and
from here on Iraq’s territory was restricted to the western half of the
river. From now on all ships at anchor were on the Iranian side.
Nobody reacted as we passed, and when the pilot balam finally
caught up with us the men on board were in a panic that we might
come too close to the midline of the river. When I had visited Iraq a
few years earlier the two countries were enemies on the edge of war,
now they were on friendly terms except that Iraq had just beaten
Iran at football. I did not feel too certain about how we rated with
the Shah after the violent protests from his Imperial Court and
Embassy at our reference to the ‘Arabian’ instead of the ‘Persian*
Gulf. Now we were heading for that gulf, so what were we to call it
so as not to offend anyone? After all, Persia had changed its own
name to Iran, and Mesopotamia had become Iraq, so why the
problem with the gulf? We were travelling the Sumerian way, and
the Sumerians too must have had a name for this gulf, before either
the Arabs or the British Navy. So for our own internal use I
suggested that we called it the Sumerian Gulf. The Sumerians
themselves on their inscribed tablets refer to the ‘Sea of the Rising
Sun’, the ‘Lower Sea’ and the ‘Bitter Sea’, but we cannot know if
these descriptive names do not comprise the sea even beyond the
gulf area.
But we had not yet reached that gulf. The pilots were so afraid of
crossing the midline that they led us all the time as close as possible
to Iraq’s banks. So close that I occasionally suspected that the oars
touched the bottom. I began to realise that our guides in the balam
had never been further down than Basra harbour.
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