Page 72 - The Tigris Expedition

In the Garden of Eden
three real, darkly tanned Indian dhow-sailors. I felt I had known
them all my life and introduced them to my friends: Saleman
Taiyab Changda, Ibrahim Harun Sodha and Abdul Alim Vasta. We
hardly gave them time to wash their hands before we dragged them
into the restaurant hall, extended our table and seated them beside
us to enjoy all the delicacies Ali and Mohammed could pile on to
their plates. At first embarrassed and then delighted at our obvi­
ously unexpected comradeship, they grabbed half a fried chicken
each and poured down one beer after the other. Saleman spoke
English. He translated to his friends.
With Indian added to Aymara, Arabic, Japanese, Russian, and all
the West European languages, someone suggested that we should
forget the ship and rebuild the nearby Tower of Babel instead. Once
it was restored we could place an Esperanto school on top. The
multinational spirit was high, and Mohammed kept on carrying
loads of full beer cans in from the kitchen and empty ones out on to
the terrace. Curious, I followed him, and saw that he dumped all the
empties into the river.
‘Mohammed,’ I said, ‘you people dump all your rubbish into the
Tigris. Where do you think all these beer cans will go?’
Mohammed’s face lit up in a happy smile: ‘To America?’
The three newcomers were tired from the journey and it was
already dark, so they had to wait till next morning to see the vessel.
All our rooms and even the lobby and its adjacent soft-drinks bar
were full of beds and mattresses, so the three had to squeeze in on
camp-beds in our storage room between popping bamboo and coils
of rope.
Next morning at sunrise I woke them up. In pyjamas they
followed me up the stairs to the flat roof, where we had a magnifi­
cent view of the river and the garden. Our crescent-shaped vessel
looked marvellous in the half-light; it was as if a golden new moon
had landed on the banks of the river Tigris and was ready to take off
again. In recent days the Aymaras had organised the most difficult
job; they had managed to pull the two big halves together to form
one complete ship. Each half still retained its circular cross-section
with the many big core-bundles now all nicely wrapped inside the
woven reed skin. The open space which until recently separated the
two half-vessels and made them appear like two parallel canoes, had
now been filled in with a slim bundle serving as a sort of common
backbone. This backbone-bundle was tied to each of the huge
side-bundles by a half-inch rope hundreds of yards long, wound in
continuous spiral from bow to stern. First the backbone was bound
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