Page 333 - The Tigris Expedition

From Asia to Africa; from Mcluhha to Punt
no greater desire than to sail straight for Kenya; his dream was to
visit the great animal reserves. Carlo favoured steering for the Red
Sea; the waters of the ancient Egyptians ought to be linked with
those of the Indus Valley and Mesopotamia if these people had
really known about each other in early times. We had all seen that
Baghdad Museum had a whole room full of beautiful Egyptian
ivory work, excavated from archaeological sites in Iraq. Gherman
had also impressed everybody with his descriptions of the fabulous
marine life he had seen in the Red Sea. Otherwise nobody voiced
any specific opinion; the first-time reed-ship sailors just seemed to
enjoy life on board and were happy merely steering into the infinite
blue. It was for me to make the decision.
The expedition had taken a somewhat different pattern from what
I had anticipated. At one time I had seen the main purpose of the
experiment was to test the buoyancy of a Sumerian ma-gur built
from berdi cut at the correct time. I had visualised sailing with no
predetermined goal as long as the berdi kept afloat. If it did not sink
we could cross the Indian Ocean with the monsoon at our back, and
if it still kept afloat we might even sail down the coast of Africa and
perhaps again cross the Atlantic to tropic America. That last leg from
South Africa would have been the easiest of all, for we would have
had the winds and currents with us all the way, just as on the drifts
with the two Ra. But instead we had followed the trade routes of
Sumerian merchants. We had spent so much time visiting prehistoric
remains in Bahrain, Oman and Pakistan that my finances had started
to run low. Besides, the buoyancy test of Tigris had more than stood
up to the time requirement for any straight, long-distance voyage.
The ability to navigate to given destinations had become more of a
challenge than conducting long-distance runs that had been demons­
trated possible by previous expeditions. We had so far voyaged
between the legendary Dilmun, Makan and Meluhha of the
Sumerian merchant mariners. Across the Indian Ocean lay the Horn
of Africa, Somalia, considered by all scientists to be the legendary
Punt of the Egyptian voyagers. If we could reach that coast also, then
we would have closed the ring. Then we would have tied all the three
great civilisations of the Old World together with the very kind of
ship all three had in common. We had linked Africa with the New
World before, with the same kind of ship, and the New World had in
turn been shown to have access to the mid-Pacific, where Easter
Island was the nearest speck of land, with its stone statues and
vestiges of an undeciphered script which some scientists claim has a
strong resemblance to the Indus Valley writing.
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