Ra Expeditions by Heyerdahl Thor

Author:Heyerdahl, Thor [Heyerdahl, Thor]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Ra (Boat), Voyages and travels
ISBN: 9781199468895
Amazon: 1199468894
Goodreads: 211242427
Publisher: New American Library
Published: 1972-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

stomach. Round it was tied a thick piece of twine, and from the twine four small leather pouches hung against the small of his back.

"With these, nothing can happen to me/' he assured me. He had been given the pouches by his father and they had been filled by a medicine man at home in Chad. Judging by others I had seen on sale in the market place in Bol they contained leopard claws, dyed pebbles, seeds and dry scraps of plant. Abdullah pulled the jersey down again conspiratorially and nodded in triumph. Was my mind at rest now? Nothing could happen to Abdullah. But to please me he, too, agreed to rope himself up.

Abdullah's first shock came when early in the morning he rushed to tell me that salt had got into the water. Into all of it. How had it happened? I, too, was seriously alarmed and asked him which jars he had tried.

"Not a jar, there!" said Abdullah, shaken, and pointed out to sea. This was the first time we realized he did not know the ocean was salt. When I explained that it was salt all the way from Africa to America he asked wide-eyed where all that costly salt had come from. After the geological explanation he was in despair. Santiago had said we must be economical with our drinking water on board; we could only have one liter, or slightly more than one quart per man per day. Abdullah said he would need at least five times as much, because as a Moslem he had to wash arms and legs, head and face every single time he prayed. He prayed five times a day.

"You can use sea water for your prayers," I assured him. But Abdullah could not. According to his religion, pure water must be used for the washing ceremony. There was salt in this.

The problem of the salt was still under discussion when Abdullah had another fright. Georges had pulled the sleepy baby monkey, Safi, out of her bed in a perforated cardboard suitcase where she had spent the night, and in her excitement the littie lady had made a tiny pool on Abdullah's mattress. Now Abdullah was really beside himself. Had the monkey done this? If a dog or monkey did his business on a believer's clothes he could not pray to Allah for forty days! Abdullah began to roll his eyes in utter desperation. Forty days without Allah!

Georges settled Abdullah's moral scruples with a white lie. It was not the monkey, it was sea spray. Practical wishful thinking made

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