A Pale Glow in the East 35 



Long before the dawn of history, however, river craft had 

 evolved to a point of considerable complexity and some efficiency, 

 notably in Egypt. Masts and sails, permanently attached paddle- 

 rudders, oars, and decks had been added. Hulls were made of 

 wooden planks either lashed or nailed to ribs and were caulked with 

 various substances. These riverine boats had also increased greatly 

 in size and had already reached the sea. The Egyptians, being river- 

 ine people, were bad sailors and their ships were never more than 

 colossal wooden imitations of their primitive papyrus-reed craft, 

 although they were sometimes over two hundred feet long, were 

 built of planks fastened to beautifully shaped timbers, and had other 

 most advanced and complex features. They carried large, square 

 sails on double masts, and their rigging was extremely complicated. 

 They relied much upon oars and their ships were, in fact, monstrous 

 galleys. The Egyptians never freed themselves from the ancient 

 shasha-like design and they had to employ all kinds of strange de- 

 vices to overcome the lack of timbers of sufficient length for the 

 proper construction of their ships. For these reasons they clung to 

 coastal waters and to inland seas, and it appears that not until the 

 early fifteenth century, in the time of the Eighteenth Dynasty, did 

 they even venture out of the Strait of Bab el Mandeb and creep cau- 

 tiously down the Somali coast to Cape Gardafui. 



The Egyptians thus had little if any tradition of things truly mari- 

 time and we have no evidence that they ever followed the whale, 

 but there is a strange tale contained in an ancient papyrus, kept, at 

 least until recently, in Leningrad, which may indicate that they 

 knew of such activities in other lands. This is a romance known as 

 The Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor which tells how an Egyptian 

 went to sea in a ship a hundred and fifty cubits long and forty 

 cubits wide. He went south and was wrecked on a desert island 

 inhabited only by a vast monster sixty cubits long. The story goes 

 on to say, "Its beard was more than two cubits in length, its limbs 

 were overlaid with gold and its eyebrows were of real lapis-lazuli." 

 The kindly monster loaded the sailor with gifts which he took back 

 to Egypt. Allowing for artistic license and the superstitions and 

 fantastic beliefs of the age when it was written, there is a strong sus- 

 picion that this story concerns the discovery of a dead whale on 

 some uninhabited isle in the Arabian Sea. The measurements by 



