Page 55 - The Tigris Expedition

The Tigris Expedition
quickly into the shade of the resthouse before it was spoiled by the
baking sun.
At the steps of the resthouse we met to my surprise a young
European with his face red from blisters, carrying an armful of huge
German smoked sausages, just like those I had bought in Hamburg,
which he dumped into the river Tigris. His eyes blinded by
perspiration, he hardly noticed us as I introduced myself and asked
what he was doing.
‘Disaster!’ he said. ‘All the food is spoiled. The truck has returned
to Hamburg without me and I am alone to dump it all into the
river!’
In one jump HP was over the terrace rail and came out of the
water with a giant sausage in his arms like a baby. The last one. All
the others were gone with the current and there was none left in the
storage room, where the young perspiring German was already
back to dig out a smoked ham and a carton of cans of Norwegian
mackerel to throw in after the German salami.
I realised we had come at the eleventh hour. Like a robot, the
stranger went on with his dumping until we made him sit down
with us on some of his unladen rope coils to explain the great idea of
) bringing food from Hamburg to throw into the river Tigris.
‘The customs,’ he said. ‘The customs.’
Ali, the friendly boy of the resthouse, had to run for a cool can of
beer before we could get any sense out of his wild story. He was a
special envoy of the excellent Montan Transport in Hamburg, sent
along with the two truck drivers to see that they had no customs
problems and to ensure a speedy unloading directly into our shaded
store room in the resthouse. It was hot even in Europe, and the
truck had no cooler, so he made the drivers race to cut down on the
two weeks estimated driving time. In this he had had more success
i than expected. In southern Turkey, Kurds had ambushed them and
started to shoot. They had accelerated. There were bullet-holes in
i the trailer when they caught up with a whole convoy of transport
trucks driving desperately to reach Iraq. In the confusion they had
not got clearance from the Iraqi border customs, who were await­
ing them with special orders from Baghdad to break the seals.
Instead, they had rushed on southwards into ever hotter conditions
down the whole river country, past Baghdad, past the Garden of
Eden, ending up beside the ships in the over-crowded port of Basra,
where nobody had orders to help them. A policeman showed them
the road until they suddenly found themselves locked up in the big
customs yard of the harbour. There was no place to park in the
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