Page 62 - The Tigris Expedition

In the Garden of I :den

Adam’s tree, so as to leave a clearing in the middle. 1 v/o old * j .a/<
workmen then came with pick and shovel and began to dig < v.g
circular hole in the ground, knee deep and the size of * . -
swimming pool. Nothing further happened to it as long as //' //* "
in the Garden of Eden, but our own poor workmen v/ho so
bring loads of berdi on their heads from the stacks near Adam s *' v
kept stumbling into the new hole and had to climb up sga;:. *.o y; •
across to the building site with their burdens.
The calendar now showed that the day was very near v/he.o
Aymara Indians from South America would come and v;.v. ^ i
bundles made by the Arabs into a boat. Without them v/e wo
never be able to obtain a sickle-shaped ship that would r.e;:.oer
capsize nor lose its shape in the ocean waves. The marsh mer. wtrt
still masters in reed-work of all kinds, but ship-building fror ■f—s-
bundles was to them a lost art, just as it was forgotten in rr. v
Egypt and the many other areas of early civilisation w:
formerly existed. There was one marked exception: the ir.
construction system still survived in perfection in the region arc—:
the ruins of South America’s most spectacular prehistoric civilis­
ation, Tiahuanaco. There, on Lake Titicaca, high in the Andes, civ
Aymara, Quechua and Uru Indians still build watercraft :ie:.r:i
with those of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. When the Spaniard:
reached this area after the discovery of America, the Indians arc—:
the lake told them that their ancestors had first seen such boars bud
by strangers who had come to their land and erected the colossi
stepped temple-pyramid and the giant stone statues at Tiahua: ..,
before they were driven away by hostile tribes and moved on: V
coast to sail away into the Pacific.
The Indians told the Spaniards that the leader of these foreign
visitors was a divine priest-king known to them as Ron-Tike \\ ub
the Quechua suffix Viracocha, which means sea-foam. 11c chvuruv.
descent from the sun and had his divine ancestors depicted ro.
pottery and stone reliefs as human beings with birds' heads a v
wings. Kon-Tiki and his men, however, were human beings: dv\
were tall, white and bearded like the Spaniards, but dittovor;',\
dressed, for they wore long loose robes to the ankles, with a bok ae.c
sandals.
When the Spaniards found the old stone statues and ge'doo,
figurines depicting Kon-Tiki-Viracocha just as the hnu.nvN
described him, they suspected that some apostle (torn the Hoa
Land had crossed the Atlantic before them, as they had hcaw
precisely the same story as soon as they landed in Moves'
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