Word: papyruses
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...times are ancient, or older. Golding's method, as in The Inheritors, is simply to ask himself what it could have been like in those dim times and then to imagine an answer. He conjures baking sun, heat, a river, flat, dry beds of papyrus, stillness; then buildings, a mud town, a tiny, isolated river kingdom at the moment when the old god-king dies and the succession must be established. Mating in the royal line is incestuous, and while there is a suit able princess, her brother is a sickly and unpromising ten-year...
Following the design of old Egyptian murals, Heyerdahl built a papyrus-reed boat, or kaday, 50 ft. long, 15 ft. wide, and named it Ra, for the sun-god-cultural coincidence!-of Egypt, Easter Island and Polynesia. The Ra was loaded with over a ton of fresh water in authentic Egyptian jars and almost twice that weight in food. Menu samples: sheep cheese in olive oil and sello (ground almonds, honey, butter, flour and dates). Coops enclosed live chickens and a duck named Sinbad. There was also a pet monkey named Safi. With Heyerdahl sailed an oddly assorted crew...
...golden paper swan, and on another, a floating haystack. Steering oars snapped with annoying regularity, and two days out a squall cracked the yard, carrying the 26-ft.-high wine-colored sail with a rust-red sun painted on it: the symbol of Ra. When the whole structure of papyrus and ropes expanded and contracted, it sounded, Heyerdahl confessed, like 100,000 copies of the Sunday New York Times being torn to shreds...
...seven-man international crew reached the Caribbean island of Barbados, 3,200 miles across the Atlantic from their point of departure on the Moroccan coast. Happy to have demonstrated with Ra II (Ra I was abandoned last year 600 miles from Barbados) that the ancient Egyptians, who sailed such papyrus craft, could have discovered America 40 centuries ago, Heyerdahl proudly noted that his vessel had survived its journey intact. Ra II will eventually be installed in an Oslo museum alongside an earlier ocean-going ship of Heyerdahl design: the balsa raft Kon-Tiki, which made the journey from Peru...
...Norwegian author-explorer Thor Heyerdahl sailed across half the Pacific on a balsawood raft 22 years ago, he recalls, "We on Kon Tiki were thrilled by the beauty and purity of the ocean." During his recent attempt to sail from Africa to Central America in a boat made of papyrus reeds, which he was forced to abandon last month 600 miles from his goal, Heyerdahl's old thrill was replaced by shock. In Manhattan last week, he reported to the Norwegian Mission at the United Nations: "Large surface areas in mid-ocean as well as nearer the continental shores...