Page 154 - The Tigris Expedition

To Dilmuti, the Land of Noah
before. Arabs and Jews both count their pedigrees back to Shem,
the ancestor of Abraham from Ur.
This was 5 December; the sky was clear and the evening stars just
began to sparkle in the firmament when I climbed up on the bridge
platform to relieve the steering watch. Rashad and Asbjorn were up
there and jokingly asked if I had seen how the new moon looked
like our ship. At that very moment it certainly did. As always in
southern latitudes, the new moon hung like a hammock in the sky
instead of standing on end as in northern countries, but just then it
rested with its bottom on the black waters of the horizon, precisely
like a golden, sickle-shaped reed-ship. We were really looking at a
true god-ship sailing parallel to us on the horizon. The similarity to
our own ma-gur was stunning. We went on gazing at it until our
shiny companion lifted itself free of the waters and began sailing
among the sparkling astral plankton of the black sky.
The sight had made on me a deep impression. For years I had
followed this as a basic motif in prehistoric art. I was back in the
days when the great reed-ship builders of Sumer, pre-Inca Peru and
lonely Easter Island shared the tradition that the new moon was a
god-ship, on which the sun-god and the primeval ancestor-kings
travelled across the night sky. The ancient Sumerians and Peruvians
expressed this belief both in words and in art. The Easter Islanders
of our own days had forgotten the original symbolism, but the
traditional badge of sovereignty, hanging at the chest of all their
divine kings, was a sickle-shaped wooden pectoral which was
known by two names: rci-miro, meaning ‘ship-pectoral’, and rei-
tnarama, meaning ‘moon-pectoral’.
Later in the night we saw black clouds with distant flashes of
lightning over Iran. Next day we had rain showers, but the ten­
acious south-east wind kept blowing and Captain Igor refused to let
us loose. Without anchors and with a big hole in the bow we must
either have a fair wind or else reach a safe place for repairs. During
the day the wind again turned due south and increased in violence
until all wave-crests broke and sent the spray over us as we hit them
with our bow. The only station Norman could reach with his
official set was that of Slavsk at the other end of our tow-line, and
Captain Igor advised us to keep steering in their wind-break. But
Slavsk was too far ahead to give any shelter to our battered bow.
In the early afternoon of the fourth day we reached Bahrain. That
is, we came to the buoy marking the entrance to the navigable
channel through the limestone shallows surrounding the island. The
Slavsk received radio orders from Bahrain to stop right there.
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