Page 128 - The Tigris Expedition

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long before carts, forts and temples. On his huge raft-ships man was
mobile and safe from wild beasts and enemies in days when the land
was covered by dangerous forests without roads or walled cities.
Beasts and big ships were all the artists thought of in the millennia
precceding Pharaonic time.
The dried-out wadis lead to the Nile. But the distance from the
ship designs to the Red Sea is negligible today and was possibly
shorter earlier. The wadis might even have been rivers running
from the forests to the Red Sea; land lifting, linked with the Rift
Valley movements, is fully possible here. The sea-going curves of
these pre-dynastic boats were indisputable. With bow and stern
elegantly swung high, as on our Tigris and often much more so,
they bore clear evidence of a maritime background. While they may
very well have been used on an inland waterway like the Nile as
well, they were not primarily designed or developed as barges or
rafts for floating cargo, beasts or people on a smooth river. They
were designed for bouncing over ocean waves in gazelle fashion, as
we ourselves were doing on Tigris, while skidding and jumping
across the frothing wave crests. The most artistic composition I had
seen from the hands of these early artists had been the combination
of sailing ship and gazelle, giving motion to the vessel by letting it
bounce like a horned beast over the ocean waves.
Someone knowing this ingenious composition had bounced
from the Red Sea area to Failaka before us. The three seals incised
with the Egyptian petroglyph motif of a sailing gazelle were indeed
fingerprints left on that island. We would soon be there ourselves.

I had been steering most of the afternoon and proposed that we all
left the table to get some early sleep. We were heading for troubled
water and could expect a lively night. Asbjorn was now in good
shape and he and HP took turns in climbing to the mast-top to
watch for lights. The chart showed a tall lighthouse built to guide
ships to Kuwait around the south-western end of Failaka and its
shallows. The lighthouse was marked as seventy-five feet high and
visible at sixteen miles. A good mile to the north of it a dangerous*
reef was marked, with a pile of rocks, which, according to the chart,
had a light, but according to the pilot book had none.
I had barely turned in at 8 p.m. when Norman’s head appeared in
the cabin door informing me that from the mast they saw the light.
It was where we had expected it. I still had time for a quick nap.
A moment later he was there again, now visibly worried. We
were going fast, and we were heading straight for the lighthouse
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