Page 24 - The Tigris Expedition

In Search of the Beginnings
Rcsthousc wc could walk through the town of Qurna, where the
main asphalt road from Baghdad passed full of thundering traffic.
No camels on this road. Not even bicycles. Huge transporters,
articulated tankers and army trucks rolled by to the gulf ports.
Immediately on the other side of the highway the marshes began,
and for mile after mile they led ever deeper into a world of their
own, unlike anything I had imagined. These marshes arc about six
thousand square miles in extent.
As wc reached the first water channel, two tall marshmen in
flowing Arab gowns were waiting for us, each with a long punt-
pole of cane. One held back a long black canoe with his big bare foot
as they welcomed us and signed to us to step on board. This was
their usual mashhuf the slender, flat-bottomed long-boat built to
standard lines by all Marsh Arabs today. While formerly built of
their own reeds, they are now pegged together from imported
wood and covered, like their reed prototypes, with a smooth
coating of black asphalt. Prow and stem soar in a high curve like the
Viking ships, following the five-thousand-year lines of their
Sumerian forerunners.
I stepped on board the unsteady vessel and sat down on a pillow
at the bottom, the two slim marshmen standing erect at either end,
punting with expert strokes, long and slow, against the shallow
bottom. The water was crystal clear; plants grew on the bottom; I
saw fishes and there were long garlands of water-crowfoot floating
on the surface. We slid silently away from the green turf and slipped
in between two high walls of canes and bulrushes. As these tall
water plants closed in about us and shut the green door behind us
we left the bustling, rumbling modern world and felt as if trans­
ported with the speed of spacecraft into the past. With each calm
punt-stroke by the two silent marshmen I sensed that I was
travelling back through time, not into savagery and insecurity, but
into a culture as remote from barbarism as ours and yet incredibly
simple and uncomplicated. My interpreter from the Ministry of
Information had not been with me on my earlier visit, and as we
reached the first floating villages he was as fascinated as I was.
On that first visit five years earlier I had the feeling that the
authorities in Baghdad had been a bit reluctant to let me into the
marshes. Not that the people living there were dangerous. They
were just not yet in step with modem Iraq. The surrounding desert
Arabs in a slightly humiliating way referred to them as Madans, the
keepers of buffaloes instead of camels. Or, rather, instead of cars,
for even camels are now out of fashion.

21