Quest for Adventure

by Chris Bonington

  To them it was commonplace. There was nothing strange about recognising one’s own camel track made two years before near the middle of this pathless wilderness. To them the price of a loin-cloth was much more interesting. They were obsessed by money, were immensely avaricious and yet incredibly generous. Their ways and values were so totally different from those to which Thesiger had always been exposed, that however much he admired and liked their way of life, the strain of becoming absorbed into it was considerable. He wrote:

  ‘I knew that for me the hardest test would be to live with them in harmony and not to let my impatience master me; neither to withdraw into myself, nor to become critical of standards and ways of life different from my own. I knew from experience that the conditions under which we lived would slowly wear me down, mentally if not physically, and that I should often be provoked and irritated by my companions. I also knew with equal certainty that when this happened the fault would be mine not theirs.’

  And at last, at the end of the day, as the sun dropped below the crest of one of the dunes, they halted for their only drink and meal in twenty-four hours. They mixed a little sour milk with the brackish water in an effort to make it more drinkable, sipped it slowly and carefully, trying to prolong the sensation of moisture, though within minutes their mouths were as dry, their tongues felt as swollen as they had been before. The evening meal was no more satisfying than their drink, just four level mugfuls of flour – around three pounds – to be divided between five men. They mixed the flour with a little water and milk to bake unleavened bread, burnt on the outside, soggy in the middle, over the fire they had built. Wherever they went in the desert they were able to find wood, even if it meant digging up the roots of long-dead shrubs that might have been nurtured by a rainfall some thirty years before. They would finish the meal with a few drops of sharp, bitter coffee. They would not eat or drink again for another twenty-four hours.

  The principal barrier was the Uruq al Shaiba, a range of sand dunes through which there were no defiles or easy ways round. Towards the end of their second day they reached a sand dune that stretched across their route like a huge mountain range:

  ‘Several of the summits seemed at least 700 feet above all the salt flats on which we stood. The face that confronted us, being on the lee side to the prevailing wind, was very steep. Al Auf told us to wait and went forward to reconnoitre. I watched him climb up a ridge like a mountaineer struggling upwards through soft snow, the only moving thing in all that empty landscape. I thought, “God, we will never get the camels over that.” Some of them had lain down, an ominous sign. Bin Kabina sat beside me, cleaning the bolt of his rifle. I asked him, “Will we ever get the camels over those dunes?” He pushed back his hair, looked at them and said, “Al Auf will find a way.” Al Auf came back and said, “Come on,” and led us forward. It was now that he showed his skill, choosing the slopes up which the camels could climb. Very slowly, a foot at a time, we coaxed the unwilling beasts upward. Above us the rising wind was blowing streamers of sand. At last we reached the top. To my relief I saw we were on the edge of rolling dunes. I thought triumphantly, “We have made it, we have crossed the Uruq al Shaiba.”

  ‘We went on, only stopping to feed at sunset. I said cheerfully to Al Auf, “Thank God we are across the Uruq al Shaiba”. He looked at me for a moment and answered, “If we go well tonight we shall reach them tomorrow”. At first I thought he was joking.’

  They kept going through the night, hungry, tired and above all desperately thirsty. The camels had had nothing to drink for three days, were so thirsty that they would no longer eat the dried-up, desiccated foliage in the hollows of the dunes. If the camels collapsed and died, that would be the end. They stopped at midnight and Thesiger dropped into a troubled sleep, dreaming that the Uruq al Shaiba towered above them, as high and steep as the Himalaya.

  Next morning they set out while it was still dark, and soon the line of sand dunes, even higher and more formidable than on the previous day, barred their route. Beyond the first wave ran another and yet another, each one higher and steeper than the last. The camels wallowed and slipped on the fine grains of sand, pulled and pushed, cajoled, but never shouted at or beaten, by the five men as they struggled up the seemingly endless, shifting slopes.

  ‘We went down into the valley, and somehow – I shall never know how the camels did it – we got up the other side. There, utterly exhausted, we collapsed. Al Auf gave us a little water, enough to wet our mouths. He said, “We need this if we are to go on”. The midday sun had drained the colour from the sands. Scattered banks of cumulus clouds threw shadows cross the dunes and salt flats, and added an illusion that we were high among alpine peaks, with frozen lakes of blue and green in the valley, far below. Half asleep I turned over, but the sand burnt through my shirt and woke me from my dreams.’

  This time they really were over the Uruq al Shaiba; the dunes in front of them were just as high, but Al Auf knew the way through them. Winding sinuously through the valleys, they were now travelling with the grain of the country. It was just a question of plodding on, keeping going through the day and late into the night, to reach the nearest well before the camels collapsed. One day they caught a hare; divided between five, there was little more than a morsel each, but it tasted like a feast. Two days later, they were suddenly challenged by an Arab lying hidden behind a bush. Had he been a member of a hostile tribe he could have gunned them down before they could grab their rifles, but he recognised they were Rashid and therefore friends. They all sat down, made coffee and swapped news. He was out looking for a stray camel. He warned them, however, that raiding parties were on the rampage and that King Ibn Saud’s tax collectors were in Dhafara and the Rabadh, collecting tributes from the tribes. If they ventured into any of the settlements around the oases there was a good chance that Thesiger would be arrested, imprisoned at best, but he could well be killed.

  They carried on through the desert towards the Liwa oases, but resolved to turn away just short of them to avoid any contact with other Arabs. The following day, fourteen days after leaving the last waterhole of Khaur bin Atarit, they stopped just short of the oasis of Dhafara; they had completed the first ever crossing by a European of the eastern, and by far the wildest part of the Empty Quarter.

  ‘To others my journey would have little importance. It would produce nothing except a rather inaccurate map which no one was every likely to use. It was a personal experience, and the reward had been a drink of clean, nearly tasteless water. I was content with that.’

  Thesiger still had to get back to Oman – without being identified as an Infidel, arrested or killed. They picked their way surreptitiously through the eastern foothills of the mountains of Oman and then back down the coast of the Arabian Sea to meet up with the rest of the Bait Kathir at Bai. In subsequent years, Thesiger made another crossing, of the western part of the Empty Quarter, a venture in some ways even more dangerous than his first, not so much because of the difficulty of the terrain as the hostility of the tribesmen. But it is his first crossing that he remembers with the greatest affection, for this had all the exciting novelty of the unknown.

  Thesiger travelled through the breadth of southern Arabia, living with the Arabs from 1945 to 1950, when the authorities, both Arabian and British, decided to put a stop to his journeys through this increasingly sensitive, oil-rich wilderness. As he was forced to leave the land and people whom he had come to love. Thesiger felt a deep sense of loss:

  ‘I had gone to Arabia just in time to know the spirit of the land and the greatness of the Arabs. Shortly afterwards the life that I had shared with the Bedu had irrevocably disappeared. There are no riding camels in Arabia today, only cars, lorries, aeroplanes and helicopters … For untold centuries the Bedu lived in the desert; they lived there from choice ... Even today there is no Arab, however sophisticated, who would not proudly claim Bedu lineage. I shall always remember how often I was humbled by my illiterate companions, who possessed in so much
greater measure generosity, courage, endurance, patience, good temper and light-hearted gallantry. Among no other people have I felt the same sense of personal inferiority.

  ‘Bin Kabina and bin Ghabaisha accompanied me to Dubai, and there we parted. “Remain in the safe-keeping of God.” “Go in peace, Umbarak,” they replied. As the plane climbed over the town from the airport at Sharja and swung out to sea, I knew how it felt to go into exile.’

  – Chapter 6 –

  The Blue Nile

  Two very different expeditions, 1968 and 1972

  The Blue Nile starts with a deceptive quietness, flowing low-banked, oily-smooth and brown between the tossing plumes of papyrus reeds as it leaves the wide waters of Lake Tana. A few miles on a rumble from round a bend heralds the first cataract; the river narrows, drops a few feet and suddenly the smooth waters are turned into a boiling chaos of foaming waves. For the next 470 miles to the Sudanese border the river cleaves its way into a deep-set valley that drives in a giant half-circle through the Ethiopian Highlands. Cataracts alternate with long stretches of smooth waters, whose every eddy holds its own family of crocodiles. The two-legged variety are probably the more dangerous, however, for it is a lawless region where almost every man carries a gun or spear and several parties descending the Blue Nile have been attacked by Shifta bands.

  The combination of wild water and cataracts, crocodiles and bandits, make it one of the most exciting river challenges in the world. The story goes back to the early 1900s, when an American millionaire called W.N. McMillan attempted a descent in 1903 with three specially constructed steel boats. He launched them at the Shafartak bridge which carries the main road from Addis Ababa to Debre Markos and crosses the Blue Nile about a third of the way down, between Lake Tana and the Sudanese frontier. It is a convenient division, for some of the most precipitous rapids are above the bridge. McMillan did not get far, as the boats sank in the first cataract.

  The river was then left well alone until after the Second World War, when a series of abortive, at times bizarre, attempts were made to descend it. On one occasion a young Austrian sculptor built himself a raft of petrol drums lashed to wooden planks, but did not get very far. In 1962 a group of Swiss canoeists started down from the Shafartak bridge and very nearly reached the Sudanese frontier, when they were attacked by Shifta bandits. Two of the team were killed but the rest managed to escape. In 1964 Arne Robin, a Swedish economist working for the United Nations, set out on his own from the Shafartak bridge and succeeded in canoeing all the way down to Khartoum in eight days. He was attacked by crocodiles, never lit a fire and only stopped when it was dark. Two years later he attempted the upper part of the river with a companion, Carl Gustav Forsmark, in a two-seater canoe. They managed only fifteen miles before being capsized in a whirlpool and very nearly lost their lives.

  Then, in 1968, came the biggest and most highly organised venture so far. It was led by Captain John Blashford-Snell and was essentially an army expedition. On the stretch of river below the Shafartak road bridge, they used big flat-bottomed army assault boats powered by outboard motors, and on the river above they had four Avon Redshank rubber dinghies powered by paddle alone. I was closely involved, for I went out as the Daily Telegraph correspondent and photographer, accompanying them down most of the river. Four years later a very different party attempted a complete descent of the river, just four men in single-seater kayak canoes, led by Mike Jones, a twenty-year-old medical student. The stories of these two expeditions make an interesting contrast.

  John Blashford-Snell is a big, well-fleshed man with a heavy jaw and close-clipped military moustache. He sports a sola topee, Sam Browne belt with holstered pistol, and always wears his badges of rank. He is perhaps a frustrated Victorian who would have been most happy in command of an expeditionary force venturing into darkest Africa but even today, as a comparatively junior officer, he has been extraordinarily successful in creating a series of ventures under his own autonomous command that bear a close resemblance to their nineteenth-century forbears. On the Blue Nile he had a team of fifty-six, supported by a military single-engined Beaver aircraft, army Land Rovers that had been specially flown out, a radio set up to make contact with headquarters in England, and a flotilla of boats.

  The expedition was in the best tradition of African exploration, having aims that were both adventurous and scientific. During the first part of the trip the four big assault boats were going to ferry a band of zoologists, accompanied by an archaeologist, down the lower part of the river from the Shafartak road bridge. Once this had been achieved, a white water team was to attempt the upper part of the river in rubber dinghies. It was in the latter part of the expedition that the adventure really started. I, certainly, was more frightened and came closer to losing my life in a whole series of different ways than I have ever done in the mountains, before or since.

  The white water team which set out from the source of the river at Lake Tana on 8 September 1968 numbered nine, in three Redshank dinghies named Faith, Hope and Charity. Leader of the group was Roger Chapman, a regular captain in the Green Howards. A quiet, serious and very thoughtful man who had done a certain amount of sea canoeing, he had very limited experience of white water – a lack we all had in common. We had had a few days’ practice on rivers in Wales, but these were mere trickles compared to the Blue Nile.

  The heavily laden rubber dinghies behaved sluggishly in the smooth waters immediately below Lake Tana, but when we hit our first cataract, six miles down the river, they were like pieces of flotsam at the mercy of the waves. Even so, it was quite incredibly exhilarating. As walls of white water lunged above and around us, smashing into us with a solid force, there was no time for fear – just an intense excitement. It was like skiing, surfing and fast driving, all rolled into one – a roller-coaster ride down an avalanche of white water. On that first cataract Roger Chapman’s boat, the first down, capsized, thrown on its back by one of the big standing waves. There was very little skill in getting down the cataracts, our paddle power was so puny against the volume of the waters. It was a matter of luck which waves we hit.

  That night we camped by the bank, just the nine of us, in an open meadow surrounded by low brush. Exhilarated by the day’s run, I felt a profound sense of contentment as we sat under an almost full moon, boiling pre-cooked rice and curried meat bar which we further seasoned with garlic and chillies. Lip to this point the trip had resembled a cross between a military operation and a Boy Scout jamboree, the adventure a carefully fostered illusion, but after that day on the river the adventure now seemed real enough. The following day, it was to become too real. My feelings at this point were very similar to those of Doug Scott when, on our 1975 Everest expedition, he had experienced the frustration of being a pawn in someone else’s game until he found himself fully involved with the core of the adventure – in his case being out in front, near the summit of Everest. On the Blue Nile this came for me from being part of a small group that now formed the spear point of the expedition’s effort to descend the river throughout its upper reaches.

  I could even forget my irritation at Roger Chapman’s firm, almost maternal authority. His leadership was excellent, but it was that of the platoon commander with absolute authority, rather than the much more free and easy style to which I had become accustomed in mountaineering circles since leaving the army. I got on well with the other two crew members. Ian Macleod, a lean, slightly built Scot, was a corporal in the Special Air Service Regiment, Britain’s crack commando and counter-insurgency force. Although one of the most junior ranks on the expedition he had the quiet authority of experience and competence that everyone from John Blashford-Snell downwards respected. My other crew-mate was Chris Edwards, a young second-lieutenant from the Infantry; six foot seven inches tall, he played rugby for the army, was immensely powerful but also had a gentleness and breadth of imagination.

  Next day we started by pushing the boats through an archipelago of tree-covered islands with spiky p
alms overhead and dank undergrowth blocking the streambed. It was midday before we reached the open channel where the current raced wide and shallow over a series of cataracts, each one more dangerous than the last. There was no chance of making a foot reconnaissance, for the banks were covered by dense scrub and tentacles of marsh. We had to press on and hope for the best. In one of the cataracts the crew of Hope were flipped out of their boat by a wave. Jim Masters, at forty the eldest member of the white water team, was dragged under water by the undertow and only got back to the surface by inflating his life jacket. As we paused on the bank to repair the bottoms of the boats, he sat very quiet and tense, slightly away from us. At that stage we could not conceive what he had experienced nor fully understand why he was so badly shaken.

  Worried by Jim Masters’ narrow escape, we roped the boats down the next cataract from the bank, but this was a slow process and everyone became impatient. We could hardly see the next fall – it was just a shimmer of water in the distance, but we decided to take it. Roger Chapman went first and vanished from sight with a frightening suddenness. There was a long pause and then we saw the green mini-flare which was the signal for the next boat to follow. We let Hope go a few yards in front and followed immediately. They managed to get through without tipping up but were carried, barely in control, over several more cataracts before pulling into the bank.

  We were less lucky: we could not see the fall until we were right on top of it. It was a shoot of foaming water, rather like a weir, leading down into the trough of a huge stopper wave – a standing wave caused by the force of water pouring over an obstacle and then rolling back on itself. The boat seemed to teeter for a second on the brink, then shot down. We were all shouting. It hit a rock, slewed round and the next moment I was underwater. I came to the surface, got a glimpse of the boat, bottomside up, and was then pulled under again. Instinctively I pulled the release of the gas cylinder for the life jacket, came to the surface, grabbed a gasp of breath and then went under. It was like being tumbled round in a huge washing machine. I had no sense of fear, just an instinctive determination to breathe when I could, but then came the realisation that I was probably going to drown. A gentle feeling of guilt at having betrayed my wife, Wendy, was replaced by one of curiosity – ‘What will it be like when I’m dead?’