Page 92 - The Tigris Expedition

Problems Begin
the naked banks we had just been ploughing. The motor balam now
followed us from side to side like a drunken companion, trying to
get in between us and the banks to serve as a fender. But it was
always on the wrong side. Suddenly it turned around and disap­
peared upstream. It was gone for two hours before we learned on its
return that they had been away looking for four men they had left
ashore and forgotten up river at the place where they had been
running along the banks to push.
In the meantime we had become masters of the situation. We
began to know our new vessel. We were as alert to the invisible drag
towards the outer bends as to the threatening shallows built up
along the inner. Soon the Shatt-al-Arab began to float straight and
even as an autostrada. Few houses. No traffic. A man with a ragged
piece of canvas on a makeshift reed-raft sailed downstream at half
our speed. Our huge and all too heavy rudder oars now hammered
back and forth like colossal sledge hammers, and with each bang the
bridge shook and squeaked and cracked; we clung to the cabin roof,
which still seemed the firmer part of the structure.
The motor balam guided us past large herds of black water-
buffaloes in the shallows beside Beit Wafl, a large and decorative
reed-house village in marked contrast to the no less picturesque
Arab adobe houses of home-made bricks or sun-baked mud. Brick
kilns, as in the days of Abraham, were still functioning all down this
section of the river and offered a spectacular sight. They rose like
pyramids over the plain, and when operating could be mistaken for
active volcanic cones, sending out vast columns of smoke from
burning reeds and canes.
The influence of the high tide in the gulf could be noted more
than a hundred miles up the river. As the rising sea blocked the
outlet of the Shatt-al-Arab, the river water dammed up and even
began to flow in the reverse direction. In the late afternoon the
surface around us became as motionless as a lake, and before it
began to flow the other way we asked our pilots to show us a safe
anchorage for the night. They recommended the west bank near
Shafi village, where we furled sail and threw out our two small
anchors on their ropes. Our experienced river companions knew
that anchors would come loose when the river began running the
other way, and they thrust punt poles into the muddy bottom to
cep us in one spot like the fenced-in floating islands in the marshes.
It was a great evening. Our first on board. The sun set red behind
t e smo 'ing brick kilns and we felt as if we were in ancient Sumer.
In fact we were. A cold wind began as the sun went down and
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