Page 70 - The Tigris Expedition

In the Garden of Eden
coun try was closed to tourists anyhow. But I had not counted on the
tens of thousands of foreigners who were already inside Iraq on
government contracts to develop the industries of the Baghdad area
and down near Basra and the oil fields. When local television had
shown that South American Indians were working in the Garden of
Eden, they all flocked to our fence, and while Russians, Japanese,
Germans and Poles were invading the rcsthouse for cool beer, Ali and
Mohammed turned the water to the toilets and Ramsey turned it
back to our hose in an endless internal battle.
'Maku mail* 'Aku maiV 'Aku maku!’
During this chaos the ship took shape under a burning sun.
Bundle after bundle was carried on the shoulders of thirty men, and,
winding like sixty-foot Chinese dragons between the date palms
and stacks of reed, they were carried up on to the feeble scaffolding
and down into the huge sausage skin.
The air cooled slightly. Three weeks had passed since the
Aymaras arrived at the beginning of October, and the big body of
the vessel was now ready in two parallel halves. Each half was
separated from the other by a wide passage where the backbone of
the peculiar vessel was to go: the invisible third bundle that was the
professional secret of the ingenious building system.
At this stage I began to feel in desperate need of the three Indian
dhow sailors who should have arrived from Bombay long before.
Without them I could not start preparing the special dhow-type sail
for which I had brought extra lengths of spare canvas. The dhows, a
type of sailing vessel peculiar to the local waters since time
immemorial, had a sail that looked like an ancient Egyptian sail set
at a slant. Undoubtedly it was the surviving transition form be­
tween the earliest prehistoric type and the modern lateen sail. Such a
sail would be of great value for our experiment, but the sailmaker in
Hamburg did not know how to make one.
I had been down the banks of the river all the way to the gulf, and
had even visited Kuwait in search of dhow-sailors who could help
us first to rig the vessel and then to guide us through the chaos of
reefs and tankers in the gulf until we reached the open ocean. But
there was not a single Arab left in the area who had not sawn down
the mast of his dhow and installed a motor, for fuel was now as
cheap as the wind in the gulf countries. Everywhere I got the same
reply: today only dhows from Pakistan and India still use sails.
Twenty years ago the Shatt-al-Arab and the Tigris as well were
full of white sails hoisted on open dhows bringing dates from the
plantations to Basra. Today these proud sailing-dhows can only be

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