Page 326 - The Tigris Expedition

The Tigris Expedition
this was the thirteenth-century tomb at Shawan of Shabaz Qulanda,
who had brought Islam to the area. A man with remarkably long
arms was standing high up, collecting paper flowers from a crowd
who could not get close enough to the coffin. My curiosity was
aroused when he began to walk through the crowd as on stilts, and I
forced myself into the vacuum behind him to see how he did it; but
to my surprise his trousers reached almost to the floor. A strange
joke in a tomb, I thought, a man riding on someone’s shoulder, both
covered up by a cloak. But then I saw the largest human feet I had
seen in my life and the largest hands; indeed even the head was
abnormally big, with huge eyes and lips. In the sombre atmosphere
of the old tomb it was as if a legendary giant was slowly staggering
about with us, and I followed him around three times before I took
courage and invited him outside into the sunlight. When he offered
me his hand it was like grabbing a ham. He stooped to get out
through the temple gate, and when we gathered around him to get
his measurement he stood a good 7 ft. 10 in. barefoot. We saw many
remarkably tall people in the Indus Valley, but never anyone like
him.
For such a flying visit I thought we had done quite well in
Pakistan, until we got back to the National Museum in Karachi,
when the Museum Director, Taswir Hamidi, asked me if we had
been to Hassan Wahan. We had not even heard of the place.
Hassan Wahan was a village on a lake connected with the Indus
river not far from Mohcnjo-Daro, where people still made pottery
of Mohenjo-Daro type and led a life very much as in that city. But
there was also a large number of wooden ships on the lake, where
the descendants of an ancient people lived. The fishermen who
owned these boats adhered to a very peculiar custom: they lived on
board with their families and all their possessions and never left
their floating homes. The Museum Director had himself spoken
to a man more than a hundred years old who had never been
ashore.
I was itching to go inland again and visit Hassan Wahan, but
Tigris was waiting for us in an incredibly polluted harbour; the
ocean was our challenge, not a lake, and we had to get back on
board, hoist sail and leave Asia. But the friendly Pakistani
archaeologist had more to tell me that made me forget the surviving
river dwellers. He fully agreed that the early Indus people had
contact with Mesopotamia; and showed me objects in his museum
that left us in no doubt. Among them he pointed out what he called
a ‘Gilgamesh’ motif on an Indus Valley seal, where the familiar
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