Page 36 - The Tigris Expedition

In Search of the Beginnings

sections of a city. Old Hagi was right: the marshmen were not
poor people.
The dignity of Hagi was not that of a poor man. With his
manners and appearance he could have been a powerful oil sheikh, a
former statesman, a retired scholar. But in his attire he looked more
like a wise prophet or patriarch out of the Bible, timeless as the
Sumerian reed-house above us.
Hagi did remember reed-boats. There were three types when he
was young. Two were hollow like canoes or receptacles, asphalt-
coated inside and out. These were the beautiful jillabie and guff a I
had personally seen still in use higher up the Euphrates, above
Babylon. The jillabie was like a slender canoe or mashhuf; the guffa
was perfectly circular and looked precisely like a giant rubber tyre,
but with a bottom, so steady that it did not tilt when I sat on the
edge. I had never seen plant stalks worked with greater perfection in
symmetry and detail, except in the reed-boats on Lake Titicaca, and
now in the huge arches of cane that held the lofty ceiling above us.
They too represented perfection. All equally spaced and identical to
a fraction of an inch, beginning as columns thicker than a man at
base on cither side and gradually narrowing towards the apex of the
roof, all of one piece from base to base. Hagi pointed to these stout
and strong arches. The third kind of reed-vessel he had seen was
built like these, except that the bundles got narrower towards either
end instead of thicker. In that way many bundles lashed together
would create a compact watercraft raised and pointed at either end.
Berdi had to be used for the bundles, kassab only for the shelter on
top. Berdi was a reed with a spongy pulp inside, but kassab was a
hollow cane that would crack and fill with water. He had a boy fetch
a stalk of each kind and showed me how the tender lower part of the
berdi could be eaten, just as I had seen with the same part of the
young papyrus. It was crisp and tasty.
To make the berdi-boat float for a long time, Hagi added, each
bundle should be pressed as tight as two men could pull the rope
ring around it; it should be as hard as a log. I felt once more the
arches of his house. I could not press a finger in; it felt like touching a
tree. In reply to my direct question, Hagi answered that he had
never known of asphalt or other impregnation used on this kind of
bundle-boat.
I had seen a single photograph of the kind of reed-boat Hagi now
described to me. It had been published in the Daily Sketch of
3 March 1916, during the First World War, and the faded caption
read: ‘This is the kind of boat our men in Mesopotamia are

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