HEAT
Also by Ranulph Fiennes
A Talent For Trouble
Ice Fall In Norway
The Headless Valley
Where Soldiers Fear To Tread
Hell On Ice
To The Ends Of The Earth
Bothie The Polar Dog (With Virginia Fiennes)
Living Dangerously
The Feather Men
Atlantis Of The Sands
Mind Over Matter
The Sett
Fit For Life
Beyond The Limits
The Secret Hunters
Captain Scott: The Biography
Mad, Bad And Dangerous To Know
Mad Dogs And Englishmen
Killer Elite
My Heroes
Cold
First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2015
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Copyright © 2015 by Westward Ho Adventure Holidays Ltd
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
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The right of Ranulph Fiennes to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
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For Mark, the bravest man Louise and I have ever known
Mark Reeves RIP
Contents
Preface
Chapter 1. A Warm Upbringing
Chapter 2. A Talent for Trouble
Chapter 3. ‘Never come here by yourself without a gun’
Chapter 4. The Sewage Ambush
Chapter 5. Up North
Chapter 6. Midway
Chapter 7. The White Aeroplane
Chapter 8. To Please the President
Chapter 9. The Sudd
Chapter 10. The Explorers
Chapter 11. Fiend Force
Chapter 12. The Hottest Place on Earth
Chapter 13. Operation Snatch
Chapter 14. The Heat before the Cold
Chapter 15. The Long Hunt
Chapter 16. As the Sun Goes Down
Appendix I. Heat and the Human Body: The Mechanics
Appendix II. Some Key Hot Country Explorers
Appendix III. The Paths of the Nile
Appendix IV. The Suez Canal: A Nutshell History
Appendix V. Hot Deserts of the World
Appendix VI. Climate Change: Some Comments
Acknowledgements
Index
List of Illustrations
Preface
All my life I have read tales of desert exploration. Over forty years I have travelled in many hot places, whether fighting in an Arab army, searching for a lost desert city, or merely seeing for myself those lands where the Sun God rules and where man must be tough to survive.
My experiences have often depended on those of my predecessors, so I have mingled their observations with mine. The common denominator is the all-powerful effect of great heat. So, fetch a cool drink, switch up the air-conditioning and read on.
Exmoor,
May 2015
CHAPTER 1
A Warm Upbringing
Hot deserts and humid jungles, the exotic but menacing backdrops to the tales of Rudyard Kipling and Arabian Nights, have always appealed to me. Maybe this attraction is in my DNA and can be blamed on my grandad Eustace. He was born in the family castle near Banbury where Fienneses have lived for six hundred years. The firstborn male of each generation spent his life looking after the castle, its land and its locals, but any other children were expected to choose careers in the army, the church or the colonies.
Grandad, who was the second son, heard about the Gold Rush and took a ship to North America. He failed to strike gold and was a failure as a fur trapper, so he joined the Mounties and was given medals for his part in quelling the Louis Riel rebellion in Alberta. He was promoted to corporal but, restless and hearing about the maverick pioneer Cecil Rhodes in South Africa, spent his Mountie wages on a berth to Cape Town, where he joined the South African Police. As a result of numerous adventures fighting Zulus, Boers and others, he received a record collection of medals which is currently housed in a military museum in Edinburgh Castle. He retired with Florrie, his Cape Town-born wife, to England where they brought up their two sons. The eldest, Uncle John, was killed on the Somme in 1917 and the other, my father, died commanding his regiment in Italy in November 1943, four months before I was born.
Grandad had also died in 1943, so Granny, by then in her eighties, decided to end her days back in her Cape Town home among her blood relatives. Strong willed, she persuaded my widowed mother to accompany her, along with my three older sisters and me.
So, from cool Windsor aged two, I was shunted to warm Constantia, a paradise of vineyards beneath the majestic ramparts of Table Mountain.
Florrie was welcomed back into the bosom of her Rathfelder family, who owned much of Constantia and its vineyards, and she set about building a house there which she named Broughton after the family castle back in England. The house cost £17,000 to build.
A stream trickled through our valley which had a marshy stretch known as the Vlei, and this separated us from the Cape Coloured folk who lived in a cluster of shacks under the shade of a pine tree grove. The strict apartheid rules of that time did not apply to children, at least not in Constantia, and, as a child, I joined the local gang which, in school holidays, roamed the forested Tokai foothills of Table Mountain and threw donnerball firecombs at each other, at baboons and at packs of skulking wild dogs.
My three sisters aged ten, eight and five years older than me, did well at school and Gill, the youngest of the three, won rosettes at local gymkhanas. I was encouraged to ride a Zulu pony named Zimba, but I preferred to run barefoot with the gang.
My mother hated the apartheid regime and joined the Black Sash movement in Cape Town, helping to collect 90,000 signatures on behalf of coloured people’s rights. She also gave her personal wealth, all of it, to help build Cafda Village to house the poor and the homeless.
One morning, when waking up my mother by drawing the curtains in her bedroom, a sizeable black spider dropped down the neck of my pyjama top. I screamed and squashed it as it bit my shoulder. For years afterwards I was terrified of spiders, even little English ones.
Many children at the four Cape Town schools that I went to suffered from verrucas, and I well remember the sharp pain of the red-hot needle used in those days by doctors to burn out the roots of the offending warts. Equally vicious were the antiquated drills of our Cape Town dentist.
Summers were hot when the infamous berg winds roasted Constantia. The grapes loved it, but I w
ilted and the Vlei gang patrolled our forest fiefdom without me. At night I would keep my curtains drawn so that I couldn’t see the great fires that roared through the foothills and the tinder-dry undergrowth below the moonlit outlines of Devil’s Peak and Lion’s Head. Air-conditioning did not exist, even in the homes of the super-rich. When the fires eventually died down, thousands of acres of brush were left black and seemingly dead until the following spring, and our vines were left scattered with ash.
I found my father’s service pistol loaded under my mother’s pillow one day when she was away, and I threatened Christine, the cook, with it in order to obtain chocolate cake from the locked larder. She screamed and later told my mother who, quite rightly, beat my backside with a cane.
There was crime in the Cape and we were lucky, since we had no adult male in the family, not to experience any bad incidents, other than the sudden appearance one afternoon of a copiously bleeding Zulu who was dragged to our garden gate by two very large locals from the Vlei who said that he was a thief and could we call the police. When he tried to speak to my mother, they hit his head against the gate.
During holidays, my mother drove us to other parts of South Africa, and in 1954 she took my sisters to the Kruger National Park. On that occasion my mother and sisters went without me, but I did get to the park on a later trip. It is a huge tract of wild land, the eastern boundary of which marks the frontier with Mozambique, and its demarcation fence helps reduce the killing of park animals by cross-border poaching gangs.
Many diseases thrive in the Kruger heat, including sleeping sickness caused by the tsetse fly, malaria and water-borne bilharzia. In the 1890s a Portuguese settler tried to found a colony there, but the area was formally designated as a national park in 1898 by the South African government.
During the Second World War the unmarked border was rife with rumours of Nazi spies and armed units up to no good in the park.
Later still, during the Mozambique civil war, anti-government forces and units of the South African Defence Force would rendezvous along the border fence. The fence was eventually electrified in key parts of the border in order to prevent large numbers of unemployed refugees entering South Africa. This has proved only partially successful, since hundreds cross in the non-electrified zones by climbing over the fence after dark and avoiding the night patrols. They often do this for any job which offers a mere pittance of pay. Some local farmers take them on as tomato crop pickers at rock-bottom wages, and they have been known to call the border police to arrest and deport them just before pay day.
On both sides of the Limpopo River, which splits the park, there are prides of lions who have learnt that many immigrants follow the line of the electricity pylons which runs from Mozambique into South Africa. So they lie in wait once they have developed a taste for human flesh and then eat their fill of would-be refugees just short of the border.
Sometimes the Limpopo dries up, except for the deeper pools where crocodiles congregate. Grandfather Eustace had a close encounter with crocodiles in this area. In 1879 some 5,000 British troops crossed into Zululand intent on forcing the Zulu king to accept the status of a British protectorate. While the troops were camped at Isandlwana they were attacked by 10,000 Zulus with spears. The British fixed bayonets but were soon massacred. The Zulus swept on to the isolated garrison of Rorke’s Drift, held by 120 mostly Welsh soldiers who somehow repulsed the attacking horde.
My great uncle Geoffrey Fiennes was part of Disraeli’s response to the massacre, a second army of 23,000 men sent out to avenge the dead of Isandlwana. Grandad Eustace was his younger brother and he, no doubt inspired by Geoffrey, joined the British South Africa Police to do his bit ‘in the colonies’.
When my mother and sisters went to the Kruger without me because I was considered too young, I was sent to stay with Aunt ‘Utcha’, the daughter of Granny Florrie’s first marriage. Utcha lived with her thirty-year-old son Michael on their chicken farm near Kommetjie Sands. The woods there were wild and tangled and alive with all manner of insects, snakes and lizards. The puff adder and boomslang or tree snake were to be avoided, my cousin warned me, but he had lived there all his life and had never been bitten.
Resting during searingly hot afternoons in the shade of the farmstead’s ‘stoep’ veranda, I could hear the non-stop boom of the Cape breakers on the other side of the nearby dunes. Not far away two great oceans – the Atlantic and the Indian – came together at Cape Agulhas. The Agulhas Bank, the richest fishing zone in the Southern Hemisphere, stretched away for 180 miles.
The Portuguese named the Cape ‘the Cape of the Needles’ because their compass needles showed nil magnetic variation once there. Now a fine lighthouse warns sailors of the lethal conditions offshore, but prior to its installation a great many ships had foundered there and thousands of bodies washed up on the fine white sandy beaches, where they provided food for vultures and crabs after locals had removed their clothes and valuables.
Aunt Utcha’s farm was colourful with proteas, the national flower, ericas and wild rosemary. Ticks and biting flies were in constant attendance. Along the coast road a touch towards Sea Point was a notice: ‘STOPPING AND FEEDING OF BABOONS PROHIBITED’.
At school I learnt Afrikaans and Latin (both of little value later in life) and about the country’s history, which was summarized as: ‘Two thousand years ago Bantu tribes moved south and their descendants include Zulus, Tswana, Xhosa and Sotho. Jan van Riebeeck claimed the land for the Dutch in 1652, but the British formed a Cape Colony early in the nineteenth century. There are 40 million South Africans, of whom 70 per cent are Christian and one per cent Muslim. The North West of the country is arid and includes the Namib Desert and the few surviving Bushmen of the Kalahari.’
We were taught our history starting in 1601 when British ships first entered Table Bay and twenty years later claimed the Cape for King James I. The Dutch, arriving thirty years on, ignored this British claim and set up a commercial base. At that time the land all the way south to Cape Agulhas was rich in game, which Dutch nomadic ‘trekkers’ began to decimate. They also killed off great numbers of the desert-dwelling Kalahari San or Bushmen. One group of Dutch ‘Boers’ proclaimed their own free state in which ‘Every Bushman shall for life be the lawful property of such burghers as may possess them and serve in bondage from generation to generation.’
This happy Dutch settlement was upset when in 1806 the British, at war with Napoleonic France as well as Holland, sent six thousand troops and sixty ships to occupy the Cape.
Thereafter Britain ruled the same area of South Africa as had the Dutch, determinedly forbidding any extension of the Cape Colony to the north of the Orange River, beyond which fierce African tribes held sway. Likewise, they left Mozambique to their long-time allies, the Portuguese.
But, unlike today, communications between individuals in far-flung colonies and Westminster were not instantaneous. As a result, the strictly limited size of the South African colony, as desired and ordered by the Colonial Office, was often expanded by rogue Britons without their government’s immediate knowledge or consent.
My grandad was one of those guilty parties in this private empire-grabbing activity, despite having been a teenage best friend, neighbour and fellow Territorial Army officer of Winston Churchill, and later his personal assistant during the Gallipoli Campaign.
Another eastern part of South Africa, which I visited later in life and with my wife, was Swaziland. I gave lectures alongside Dr Richard Leakey, the famous Zimbabwean conservationist, in the Swazi capital of Mbabane. In 1968 Swaziland became an independent kingdom, and in neighbouring Zululand my sister Celia became a doctor at the Missionary Hospital in Nqutu. A Swazi friend, Sibusiso Vilane, with whom I later climbed, became the first black man to reach the summit of Everest.
The hottest area of South Africa, halfway between the two oceans and spreading west into the Namib Desert to the Skeleton Coast, is the Kalahari Desert, the second biggest continuous stretch of sand in t
he world which reaches as far north as the rain forests of the Congo. As a general rule, the western half of South Africa becomes drier and less populated the further you travel towards the Atlantic.
In the Nama tongue, Namib means ‘a place where there is nothing’, and the Namib desert itself reaches south 1,000 kilometres from the Namib border to the Oliphants River in the Cape Province. The sands of the Namib date back some 55 million years, making it the oldest desert in the world, and some of its dunes reach to over 900 feet in height. There are few drier deserts anywhere and its shoreline is spattered with the skeletons of many hundreds of ships and, some several miles inland, the skeletons of crew members who survived shipwreck only to die of thirst.
The only place, apart from Omani and Yemeni deserts, where I have seen oryx is the Kalahari where they are known as gemsbok. In their Arabian home they have only human hunters to fear. In South West Africa they are prey also to the big cats that lie in wait by pools in largely dry riverbeds.
In the most northern tip of South Africa, in the Kgalagadi Transfrontier, there appears to be no possible reason for humans to fight each other, since nothingness is all that exists there. Yet I was told by a ranger that, when the region was a German colony, local Khoikhoi Namibians rebelled and attacked a German outpost at dawn. Victorious, they stripped the Germans naked and shot them all in the back.
Where South Africa meets Namibia and Botswana, an electrified fence delineates the 20th degree of longitude through hundreds of miles of sand in a dead straight line.
Because my wife and I travelled the Kalahari in the month of July, night temperatures were near freezing, which made it difficult to accept that the Kalahari is one of the hottest of all deserts and is hostile to human settlement. Sadly, the earliest known tribe who did manage to survive and even to thrive there has now been all but killed off by fellow humans, rather than by the rigours of the desert. They were of the San tribe, referred to by early European explorers as Bushmen.
Today the Kalahari extends from South Africa into Botswana and Namibia, all now separate and independent nations.
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