Page 68 - The Tigris Expedition

In the Garden of Eden
tight sausage skin. These smooth mats were as long as the entire
ship and hand-woven in such a way that all reeds pointed one way
and not a single reed end would jut outwards. This was important
for two reasons: to increase the speed of the ship through the water
and to decrease absorption. When several mats had been made in
strips about 60 feet long by 3 feet wide, they were carefully carried
one by one into the cradle-shaped jig by thirty men. The giant
sausage skins were now ready to be filled with the compact bundles.
I had worked out that thirty-eight bundles two feet in diameter
would be needed to give the ship the desired proportions. Open
spaces between them would be filled with thin bunches of reeds.
The marshmen and Aymaras worked so fast that they averaged
three of these large bundles each day instead of one as estimated.
The bundles had to be much longer than the total length of the ship,
since they must curve upwards, sickle-shape, at each end.
A difficult decision was whether or not to use asphalt. Scientists
argued that the Sumerian boat models from Ur were thickly
covered with asphalt. Clergymen reminded me that Moses started
his life in an asphalt-covered reed basket on the Nile, and that Noah
had saved the lives of his companions by coating his reed-ship in the
same way. But Gatae agreed with what old Hagi had said: the
bundles would float well enough just as they were. We had two
identical twelve-foot test bundles prepared, and one of them was
brought to the boat-building village of Huwair, where a red-haired,
blue-eyed marshman spent his life coating mashhufs in the same
manner and with the same kind of wooden spatula and rolling-pin
as was used in this trade five thousand years ago. His speed and
precision were admirable. The asphalt came from a natural well up
river. He coated our roll in the same manner, and we noted that an
estimated burden of sixty kilos of the black bitumen was added to
the little bundle to cover the reeds well. The two identical test rolls,
one asphalted and one not, were now launched side by side in the
river Tigris and anchored to the bottom with heavy burdens of
bricks and scrap iron. They were to remain submerged for six
weeks or so until our vessel was fully built.
Parallel with this experiment HP began his own. He filled my
room with truncated and transparent plastic bottles holding bits of
berdi set on end, some in fresh water, some in salt water. Some had
their cut base end tightly bound with string. They all floated so well
that even a complete ten-foot reed set vertically in a bottle of water
remained floating upright without touching the bottom. But the
results were confusing: after a few days some of the reeds to our
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