Page 45 - The Tigris Expedition

CHAPTER 2

In the Garden of Eden

August came, and I was back in the marshes again. August is the
hottest month in southern Iraq. The thermometer wavered be­
tween 40° and 50°C (105°-120°F) in the shade, but there was no
shade anywhere in the open swamp-land where we cut the reeds.
The Marsh Arabs advanced with curved machetes into the reed
thickets with the speed and energy of a band of warriors and the
long green stalks fell like slaughtered troops. The heat was so great
that I soon became exhausted merely watching the battle from the
canoe, and as my marshman interpreter, with a vocabulary of a few
dozen English words, assured me that there were no longer any
bilharzia in the water, I jumped into the canal and joined the
Madans, who were waist deep and fully dressed. From Lake Chad
and the Nile I had learnt to dread the little bilharzia worm that lives
on snails in the reeds and drills its way through the human skin in a
few seconds to multiply inside the body. I enjoyed the slowly
running water until a beautiful snail shell came floating by. I picked
it up and hesitantly showed it to my reed-cutting informant.
‘That?’ he said. ‘That is only the house of the bilharzia.’
I was back in the waterproofed mashhuf in one leap. Better to
sweat than wade in a stream with bilharzia worms.
I lost all count of the number of mashhufs towering with green
berdi which the men and women of A1 Gassar punted through the
channels to leave on the banks of the marshes to dry. It looked as if I
was planning to build a ship every bit as big as Noah’s.
In the meantime I had to return to Europe for a few weeks to
organise the expedition; at the Garden of Eden Resthouse I could
organise nothing. In Baghdad I had managed to grab an ivory-
coloured telephone in my hotel room and speak to Oslo, Tokyo and
Sydney in a few minutes. But the telephone in my Eden was a
!
38

-J