Balder Ex-Libris

Author : Heyerdahl Thor
Title : The Ra expeditions The great new triumph bu the author of kon-Tiki. Complete with 111 full-color photographs from the hardcover edition
Year : 1971

Link download : Heyerdahl_Thor_-_The_Ra_expeditions.zip

Egyptian, an American, an Italian, and myself a Norwegian, with a monkey and a lot of clucking hens. We are off to America. We are in Egypt. It's blowing sand, it's dry and hot, it's the Sahara. Abdullah assures me that the reeds will float. I tell him that America is a long way off. He does not think people like black skins in America, but I assure him he is wrong. He does not know where America is, but we will get there in any case, if the wind is blowing that way. We will be safe on the reeds as long as the ropes hold. As long as the ropes hold, he says. Will the ropes hold ? I felt someone shaking me by the shoulder and woke up. It was Abdullah. "It's three o'clock," he said. "We are starting work again." The sun was baking inside the hot tent canvas. I sat up and peered through a gap in the door opening. The dry heat and blinding sunshine of the Sahara thrust at me from outside. Sun, sun, sun. A sun-soaked expanse of sand met the bluest thing God has created, a cloudless desert sky unfolding in the afternoon sunshine above a world of golden-gray sand. A row of three large and two small pyramids were set like shark's teeth against the arch of sky. They had stood so, motionless and unchanging, since the time when men were part of nature and built in accord with nature. And in front of them, down in the shallow depression, lay something timeless, built yesterday, built ten thousand years ago: a boat in the desert sand, a sort of Noah's ark stranded in the wilderness of the Sahara, far from surf and seaweed. Two camels stood beside it, chewing. What were they chewing? Trimmings from the boat itself, perhaps, "the paper boat." It was built of papyrus. The golden reeds were lashed together in bundles taking the form of a ship with prow and sternpost which stood out against the blue sky like a recumbent crescent moon. ...