Page 77 - The Tigris Expedition

The Tigris Expedition
disappointed. Gatac had no explanation except that we had forced
the bundles down to the bottom instead of letting them float on the
surface. But, as 1 explained, our ship too would be submerged,
partly by tons of cargo and partly by towering waves. Gatae had no
comment to make and went stooping away with his silent men. I re­
mained alone with the dissected test bundles. The pieces of berdi in the
glasses of drinking water in my room did not behave like this, especi­
ally the samples standing in salt water. Could it be that the polluted
water of the river Tigris had caused the reeds to rot? That, I recalled,
was precisely what happened when the Papyrus Institute in Cairo
had left their test reeds to putrefy in the stagnant water of a bathtub.
We got rid of the waterlogged bundles that left a gloomy
impression on all of us, and had to concentrate on getting our ship
launched before the next rain, which would be more than a passing
shower. After I had first chosen the building site the water in the
river had gone far down. The Tigris runs like a drainage ditch
throughout the length of Iraq, receiving the downpour only in
Turkey, and it therefore shrinks through the summer and autumn
when there is no more snow to melt in the mountains around
Ararat. But this was a minor problem. We could always tilt the
reed-ship down to the water. The real obstacle was a high and solid
concrete wall which the river authorities had built from the rest-
house terrace to well beyond Adam’s tree in the short time I was
away in Europe to organise the expedition. The mayor told me it
was no problem, the wall could be broken through wherever we
needed a gap for our launching.
The estimated weight of our tight-packed bundle-ship was about
thirty-three tons, and the system I had devised for the launching had
to be extended to pass the new wall and reach the river. The vessel
was built inside a wooden jig that would remain ashore when the
reed-ship itself was launched; but it rested upon an iron sledge that
3 would pull the vessel into the river and then sink free when the
vessel began to float. The runners of the sledge consisted of steel
beams with I-shaped cross sections set on edge into rails of the same
kind of beams but laid on their sides to provide channels. They had
to be extended another two ships’ lengths to reach the water’s edge.
First the wall had to go, and this required permission from the
river authorities. I could visualise papers circulating up and down
the river until the rainy season started, so we took a short-cut by
directly approaching the two bulky building contractors who had
put up the wall in such a hurry, offering them a reasonable payment
to knock it down and build it up again.
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