Page 75 - The Tigris Expedition

The Tigris Expedition

was also of Egyptian cotton canvas, but much thinner, and meas-
ured some ninety-five square yards.
We succeeded in locating a couple of old sailmakers among the
boat-builders in Huwair, and Norman split our best sail along the
central scams to add the extra canvas in the middle and thus leave
the fine edges with their reinforcements and cringles intact. Once
the good sail was spread in separate bits all over the dining-room
floor, the sailmakers went to work for half a day and then declared
themselves unable to add the new pieces to the old because they no
longer had the proper tools. Too bad, I said, then you have to put
the sail back as it was.
But in spite of all their attempts, the Arab sailmakers, Norman,
and HP, who returned from Norway with sailmakers’ needles and
gloves, were unable to put the severed sail together again in its
;
original shape. The rain had started, there was no time to send the
pieces back to Hamburg, and we had to start our voyage with
nothing but a thin down-wind sail. Fortunately for us, in the winter
season there would be a north wind, blowing from Iraq down the
gulf. We would therefore have a steady following wind all the way
to the island of Bahrain, and everybody assured us that there we
could find any number of sailmakers to fix our sail and even
dhow-sailors to take the place of the three departed Indians.
Norman had more luck when he wanted to enlarge the blades of
the rudder oars: we got unexpected help from a truly professional
carpenter. But this time we worked like the inmates of a zoo. Every
day hundreds of workers from the industrial areas came in bus­
loads to gaze through the iron fence at the peculiar vessel on the
river bank; Russians, East and West Germans, Poles, Japanese,
Americans and Scandinavians mostly, apart from local Arabs. A
never-failing spectator was Josef Czillich, foreman carpenter of
Polensky & Zollncr, the West German contractors building a huge
mill upstream near Amara, intended for making paper from marsh
canes. Before anybody knew it, we found Czillich busy working
inside with us every Friday. With a master’s hand he helped
Norman to peg and glue lateral boards to the blades of the rudder
oars until they were so huge that thicker shafts were needed. By
fitting extra wood in a superb fashion even the shafts became
colossal, though oval in cross-section instead of round. The masters
behind these spectacular wooden monsters vigorously defended
their highly unorthodox products: that the shafts were oval did not
matter so long as they were to rotate in an open fork and not in a
circular hole. In any case, there was no way to slim down the shafts

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