Page 396 - The Tigris Expedition

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The Tigris Expedition
times since Dr T. Heyerdahl’s expedition is a very remarkable and
praiseworthy one. Yours sincerely . .
There was every reason to celebrate. We could now rest a
few days and then continue through the strait to land in North
Yemen. It was on the opposite side from Massawa, but that meant
nothing.
We jumped ashore among friendly, black Africans, and checked
in at Siesta Hotel. I shall never forget the big juicy pepper steak that
was put in front of my nose just as the telephone rang. Counter-
orders from London! North Yemen had withdrawn permission for
us to sail into their national waters Tor security reasons’. Since we
did not have as much as a pistol on board, nobody could be afraid of
us. The very friendly previous messages indicated that the concern
was perhaps for our security, not their own. With the un flag astern
i and men from east and west on board, a slow-moving Sumerian
ma-gur would be a tempting prey for modern hijackers. This was a
hot corner of our twentieth century planet. Nobody knew it then,
but possibly fear was in the air: for in the following year the
Presidents of both North and South Yemen were assassinated on
two successive days.
There was suddenly nowhere to sail in any direction. Scientifi­
cally it did not matter a bit that we were not allowed to add another
five days to an experiment that had gone on for five months. But
what hurt all of us was that we had come back to our own world,
our own contemporaries, and met again the results of twenty
centuries of progress since the time of Christ, the peace-loving
moralist whose birth marks our own zero year. And here, around us
on all sides, wonderful people were taught to kill each other by our
own experts, and were helped to do so by the most advanced
methods man had invented at the end of five millennia of known
history.
I did not tell my celebrating companions the bad news. I sneaked
away from the party and spent all night on my back on board Tigris,
gazing into the cane roof of the cosy cabin and wondering what we
could do. We had to abandon ship and end the expedition here, that
! was certain. So far we had never given a thought to what to do with
Tigris; in fact we had boldly promised to stay on board as long as it
would float. It so happened that it still floated high, the distance
■
from deck to water was as on Ra I and Ra II when we started. The
outer mats began to tear and were marked by pollution, but the
forty-four inner bundles made by the Marsh Arabs were as good as
ever, and so was the palm-stem repair of the bow. Both Kon~Tiki

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