Page 96 - The Tigris Expedition

Problems Begin

ship between his body and his soul. With his chubby build and
moustache he seemed likely to be most at home in a wide sombrero
under a cactus. But not at all. The motto of his private film
collection is: The World is my Playground. The urge within him
makes him leave his four rubber factories in Mexico City several
times a year to fly around the world. It was he who swam under the
Polar ice and filmed Ramon Bravo when a polar bear bit him in the
leg. A scar around his eye testifies to the day when he fell from a
jungle tree in Borneo while filming orang-outangs. He had been in
trouble with sharks in Polynesia and the Red Sea, and he had filmed
for his own pleasure in every nation on the map, with Red China as
his favourite hunting-ground. Before I knew him he had asked in
vain to join the Ra. But now I knew him. He had trampled with me
in the burning sand of the Nubian desert, filming rock carvings of
pre-dynastic ships, and we had waded together in the pouring
jungle rain of the Mexican Gulf, filming Olmec and Maya pyramids
and pre-Columbian statues of bearded men. Furthermore, he was
two doors away from me when the Hotel Europa in Guatemala
City collapsed and buried us in bricks and dust, while all those in the
room between us and twenty thousand others lost their lives in the
great 1976 earthquake.
I was never more surprised than when Gherman asked me to
come to his offitc to see his museum. He pressed a button behind his
desk, and a huge painting of three fat angels drifting like pink
balloons on blue canvas swung aside and revealed an opening in the
wall like the hatch in a submarine. Inside were four big rooms filled
from floor to ceiling with shelves and glass cases stacked with
properly labelled archaeological objects of Maya, Aztec, Toltec,
Mixtec, and Olmec pottery of all shapes and colours, stone statues,
ceramic images and figurines, reliefs, gold objects, a priceless
fragment of a paper codex, and minute carvings in shell and bone.
At that time this was all Gherman’s property, but Mexican law has
later confiscated all pre-Columbian art in the country for the
nation’s benefit. Four students and a professor spent many months
cataloguing his collection of tens of thousands of items. But Gher­
man was appointed custodian of the collection and the museum
remains where it was behind the angel painting.
And now Gherman sat with us on the boat. Beside him sat a com­
pletely new friend, Toru Suzuki, a Japanese underwater photo­
grapher in his middle forties. I knew very little about him yet,
except that he had spent several years filming marine life at the
Great Barrier Reef and now ran a small Japanese restaurant some-
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