Page 179 - The Tigris Expedition

The Tigris Expedition
been seen, and passed through a shady palm forest with evidence of
former intensive irrigation and cultivation, till we stood in the
baking sun on a long and beautiful sandy beach. Outside were
anchored a few small dhows without masts. Drawn up on the white
sand lay a small raft-boat of the type I knew so well. It had just been
pulled up from the water’s edge and was still wet. We caught sight
of an old man with white turban and mustard-coloured cloak about
to escape in between the palm trunks with a bundle of shiny fish.
We called him back and he came willingly. Willing also to answer
all our questions, for this was his fishing-boat and he had built it
himself. It was his farteh, and only four men on the island still
I
knew how to make one.
This was a professional job. Beautiful symmetry and exact in
every detail. The material was not reed, but the slender mid-stem of
date-palm leaves, just as on Failaka, where reeds were equally
lacking, at least today. Apart from the usual lashing, each stalk had
been sewn neatly to its neighbour with a result strikingly similar to
the cane-boats I had seen in use among the Seris Indians of Mexico.
Apparently canes and palm-stalks were too hard, not spongy
enough, to be lashed together with outside loops only. Nor would
they probably maintain their buoyancy as long as reeds. I asked the
old man. He did not know. They used to sail these fartch to Saudi
Arabia in two days in former times, but after use they were always
dried ashore. He doubted they would float more than a week.
Probably the palm stems would not even survive more than a week
in sea water. He now propelled his farteh with oars, but drew the
shape of the former sail in the sand. He referred to it as a sherd. It was
precisely like the trapezoidal sail of the former Iraqi dhows, now
surviving only as a symbol on the date boxes. In all essentials it was
nothing but an ancient Egyptian sail set at a slant. In theory, nothing
more should be needed than to tilt a square sail to make a bundle-
boat tack to windward.
We walked along the beach and found two more boats of
precisely the same kind pulled up among the palms. One was quite
new and a masterpiece of workmanship. These raft-boats obvi­
ously had the one advantage that they could come right in across the
limestone shallows and be pulled ashore while other boats were
anchored far out.
I found a single palm-leaf stem tossed up by the waves on the
beach, which I first picked up for its beauty. It looked like a splendid
white flower, as the thin end was densely overgrown with a colony
of chalk-coloured, conical molluscs. I was showing it to Bibby as a
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