Page 27 - The Tigris Expedition

The Tigris Expedition
piles of colourful cushions behind their two guests, who were
expected to lean comfortably against the soft reed wall.
I looked around me and recognised with pleasure this big airy
building, the guest house of the old man now in hospital. I could not
have reached the ceiling even with a fishing rod. Seven stout cane
bundles thicker than a human body arched like parallel ribs holding
up the tight skin of braided reed mats. It gave me the feeling of
sharing the biblical adventure ofjonah in the stomach of the whale.
But this whale had its mouth wide open at both ends, leaving a
double view of a perfectly blue sky, blue water, green reeds, and a
couple of fringe-leafed date palms.
Only a few of the Madan villages can muster date palms. Most of
them are built on entirely artificial islands formed by untold
generations of rotting reeds and buffalo dung. Quite often these
islands are actually afloat and rest on the bottom only in the dry
season. New top layers of reeds have to be added annually as the
bottom layers disintegrate. To prevent the edges from being
washed away by the slowly moving water, they are fenced in with
tight pallisades of canes stuck into the bog-bottom below. While
the islands with the reed-houses rise and sink within their pallisades
according to season, the canals between them permit the passage of
the slender canoes and make up a village complex in the pattern of
Venice.
A Marsh Arab can rarely walk more than a couple of steps before
he has to enter his canoe. Some of the floating islands are so small
that with the traditionally big house or buffalo stable on top they
look like house-boats or some sort of Noah’s Ark with barely
enough foothold to walk around the walls. In the lake areas deep
inside the marshes, the floating Madan families bob up and down
on swaying reed carpets with their ducks, hens, water buffaloes and
canoes, and the big buffaloes have to dive in with the ducks and
swim for the reed fields every morning when their owners unfasten
the mat barriers of their vaulted reed stable.
Our caftan-covered host stirred up the embers of a small fire on a
mud patch in the middle of the floor. Then from an elegant teapot
small silver-framed glasses were filled and we were offered drink,
the perfumed steam strong in our nostrils. More marshmen,
covered but for their ruddy faces in caftans and flowing gowns,

1. In a Marsh Arab reed-housc. The author second from the left,
Detlef and Rashad first and second from the right.
2. Floating reed islands and river banks of southern Iraq.
24