Page 60 - The Tigris Expedition

In the Garden of Eden

me, ignoring with good conscience all the orders I gave in various
:
European languages that were all Greek to them. When the evening 1
came I was exhausted from waving and pointing and stumbling
among the reeds. At sunset I finally found myself alone with the
silent river, beside Adam’s tree, both gate-posts having been
broken by the trucks and the whole garden a dense chaos of reed
piles, leaving no place to build a ship or even place a foot.
No sooner was all the sun-dried berdi there before Gatae and his
chosen men showed up next morning as if by magic. Gatae was a
bright personality, and language problems were no obstacle. With
Mohammed as a sort of interpreter, I had the marshmen make me
the first tightly-bound reed bundle sixty feet long, which they did
with astonishing dexterity and speed. But to my surprise the result,
very much thicker than a man could embrace, was so heavy that
Gatae estimated that possibly eighty men would be needed to lift it
and carry it to the intended scaffold. We clearly needed many more
but much thinner bundles to make up the final ship.
When Shaker came back from his successful mission we set all
men to work for two days assembling the berdi within convenient
reach of the building site, piling it into parallel stacks as high as a
man could reach and with ample space to walk between. All the
broken stalks were thrown on the banks and those that were not
carried away by old women for kitchen fires were in no time turned
into a flotilla of reed rafts filling the river with jubilant boys and
girls.
Material to build a wooden jig, a temporary cradle for the ship,
was not easily located in Iraq. Through the earliest works of art and
inscribed tablets we know that Sumerian territory was originally
covered with forest, but that these were gradually destroyed by
man in antiquity so that timber became a major import, judging by
the cuneiform records listing ships’ cargoes. The price of imported
timber is today so high that we were delighted to find a modest
lumber yard near the Basra docks where long natural poles and rods
from forests in the northern mountain regions were available. We
needed them in hundreds and selected those with least bends and
t-st, HP, as expert army bridge builder, succeeded in raising the
arklcss poles and sticks into a sturdy crisscross framework, meas-
^ ^signed to give size and shape to the reed-ship when the
undies were assembled inside it. A serious problem was the lack of
gang-planks for the high scaffold. The main body of the final ship

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