Page 66 - The Tigris Expedition

In the Garden of Eden
tree was pointed out. Then they turned again to the berdi, which
they tore to bits with their hands and calmly condemned as no good
for boat-building. Gatae and our marshmen stood curiously in a
circle around us and looked at the short Indians as if they were
creatures from the moon. They were amazed that this tribe of South
American reed-boat builders called themselves Aymara, the more
so when I could add that their neighbours on the lake were called
Uru and lived on floating reed islands like the Marsh Arabs. Our
Arab builders were surprised, for the nearby town of Amara and the
ruins of Ur were for them two of the most important names around
the marshes.
Gatae asked me to explain to the sceptical Indians that the reeds
were brittle as paper now, but once they were wet they would be
tough and as flexible as rope. This the Aymara Indians knew well,
for their own totora reeds at Lake Titicaca had that same property.
But still berdi was no good for them. These were not simple stalks
like totora or the papyrus we had provided for building Ra II in
Africa. Papyrus was even bigger and better than totora. But this
plant fanned into thin branches like grass with no real stalk, and
they did not know how to handle it.
The Aymaras hurried back to their own cool room and I was
afraid they wanted to go home.
I had to agree that there was a big difference. For us this would be
a completely new experiment. Only the sweet smell and the fluffy
inside pulp seemed the same. In the totora and the papyrus this airy
pulp was completely surrounded by a thin, watertight skin, and the
straight stalk was like a rod with a rounded triangular cross section
all the way from the root to the bushy flower on top. The berdi,
however, had many separate layers of skin and pulp rolled up inside
each other like an onion, and the oval stem at the base gradually
opened up into long, sharp, separate leaves. The skin was waxy and
surely as watertight as the skin of papyrus, and since water pene­
trated only at the cut ends berdi had at least one advantage: there
was nothing to cut off at the top, so that water could only enter
from the root section, whereas the truncated flower stalks of the
other reeds drew water from either end.
As it became cooler towards evening, the four Aymaras came
down to take a second look. With Senor Zeballos as experienced
mediator, Gatae and I succeeded in convincing them that if they
would just show us how to combine the bundles into a boat, the
Marsh Arabs would make the bundles themselves to any measure
the Aymaras ordered.

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