Heat

by Ranulph Fiennes

  When the tugboat tooted its departure, we all lined the deck of our barge and prayed that Baker would not fall off its precarious perch. When we reached the lakeside village of Wadi Halfa (Green Valley) the hovering would begin. Meanwhile, we were thankful to have all but escaped from the uncertainties of the Israeli-Egyptian conflict. We celebrated with great quantities of tea to wash down our sponsored Horlicks rations, for dehydration was rapid following any labour such as the manhandling of the heavy machines.

  The water used by all passengers for the next three days for drinking, cooking and washing was scooped out of the lake in buckets tied to ropes. Green algae and anonymous brown slime floated in this beverage. In the lake and in all the slower moving backwaters of the Nile, there lurked the microscopic death bug, bilharzia (named after Theodor Bilharz, a contemporary of Richard Burton).

  The sickness is highly unpleasant and its later stages often involve an agonizing death. There was at the time an available cure consisting of a six-month series of painful deep stomach injections, but there was no known prevention other than avoiding all skin contact with the water in an ‘infected’ river. In 1932 when records were first kept, 60 per cent of the population of the Egyptian Delta had a water-borne form of hookworm, and the statistics for bilharzia, although not recorded, are thought to have been similar.

  Even spray from a paddle can contain the bilharzia parasites, and if a droplet settles on human skin and sunlight causes the spray to evaporate, the parasite will burrow through the skin’s pores to escape the heat. They then make their way slowly to the liver of their new host where they feed and breed, and a new cycle of worms will leave the body in excreta. Once back in a river, pond or canal, the worms use water snails as their host bodies. At this stage they are most vulnerable to destruction by spray from an aircraft or, as we were keen to demonstrate, a hovercraft.

  On Lake Nasser, or Lake Nubia as most Sudanese called it, we used our water filtration pump bottle to prepare water to drink. Unfortunately an altercation between Nick and Anthony some weeks later ended with one hitting the other with our only filtration bottle, which was broken beyond any hope of repair. So, thereafter, we drank unfiltered Nile water, bugs and all.

  Bilharzia, otherwise known as schistosomiasis, is a waterborne disease occurring in most tropical countries and currently afflicting over 200 million people worldwide. It is caused by any of three species of flukes, called schistosomes, and is acquired by bathing or wading in infested lakes, rivers and irrigation systems. Schistosome eggs are passed from an infected population into water and are particularly prevalent in the waters of the Nile valley in Egypt. The eggs develop into tadpole-like creatures known as cercariae which enter the human body, usually under finger and toe nails. Once in the bloodstream they mature into adult worms. Complications of long-term infestation can cause liver cirrhosis, bladder tumours and kidney failure.

  Since the 1980s, treatment of the disease has been revolutionized by a single dose of a drug known as praziquantel, which kills the flukes and prevents damage to internal organs. However, back in 1969 such remedies were unknown.

  Nick described his treatment in a letter to me some time after the end of the expedition.

  Our water purifying kit involved pouring the water into an open receptacle, waiting up to a quarter of an hour as the liquid filters through gauzes which filtered out the various contaminants, drip by drip, until you have sufficient purified water for a cup of tea. I’m afraid that patience was a virtue that I wasn’t born with, and I noticed that the purified water didn’t look or taste much different from the unpurified water. There is an old Arab saying that he who drinks the water of the Nile will always return. Reasoning that you have to be alive to return and no mention had been made of purifying kits, I decided it must be reasonably safe to drink the water straight from the river.

  After the end of the expedition some six weeks later and on returning to the UK we were all checked out for the early signs of such diseases as Malaria, sleeping sickness, etc., and to my utter amazement I was diagnosed with Bilharzia.

  I was admitted to the Royal Hospital for Tropical Diseases in St Pancras, London. The then cure for Bilharzia was the injection of 10cc of some drug directly into the stomach through the muscles of the abdomen. For someone of my age and fitness, such an exercise was difficult to perform if I was conscious as I would automatically tense and tighten up, so they decided to give me a general anaesthetic and I was admitted to a ward.

  The next door bed was occupied by a poor fellow who had just returned from Africa with a tapeworm. Tapeworms, sometimes called cestodes, are parasitic worms which live in human and animal intestines, are ribbon-shaped and can grow up to 30 feet long. They are usually contracted by eating undercooked meat or fish. The worm has suckers or hooks on its head which attach to the wall of the intestine.

  My poor friend was naturally permanently hungry, and the highlight of every day was the arrival of his breakfast, lunch and dinner. The meals were served by two nurses, and the routine was the same. The meal would arrive, and my friend would attack his with gusto, and then, having finished in record time, his hand would shoot up and he would ask for more. The two nurses would reply in unison, ‘You can’t have any more.’

  As the days went by, my poor friend got thinner and thinner and the tapeworm got longer and longer, until one morning we were all surprised to see him emerge from his bedclothes and slowly shuffle out of the ward. A couple of minutes later we were amazed to see our skeletal friend arrive back in the ward, dancing with glee. ‘I’ve got rid of it,’ he cried, ‘come and see.’ We all trooped out of the ward and headed for the lavatories, and stared in amazement at the worm. It resembled tagliatelle and had completely filled the bowl of the lavatory, and had even spilled out onto the floor. An incredible sight which I will never forget.

  We were both discharged from the hospital that same day and celebrated by having a slap-up dinner at the Ritz.

  As the level of the lake rose annually, various landmark antiquities and tombs were submerged, but a few were saved by expensive relocation to a height that the lake would not reach. The most famous of these were the twin temples and statues of Abu Simbel. From my ‘bed’ on the front seats of the AA Land Rover, I spotted the lights of the archaeologists at work across the moonlit waters of the lake, the third largest man-made lake on Earth.

  On the third day as we neared Wadi Halfa we were surrounded by desert wasteland for hundreds of miles in every direction. Sudan is a vast country with, at the time, only four million scattered inhabitants. We crossed the unmarked border and beached in shallows in the dark. Bullfrogs and chanting from the nearby unseen Customs hut vied with the leaden heat to keep me from sleeping. But it felt good to have left Egypt behind and to have entered Africa’s largest and most mysterious land.

  CHAPTER 8

  To Please the President

  Our fellow passengers, encumbered only with hand luggage, clambered off the barges or the tugboat into a rowing boat that took them from the anchor point and over the shallows to the beach and Wadi Halfa’s Customs shed.

  Leaving the ever-practical Peter with the seemingly intractable problem of unloading, I waded ashore and shook hands with the immaculately dressed Customs officer who had been warned by telegram of our arrival, and to whom Ginny had, a month back, sent a list of our equipment. His office, a prefab shack, was two miles away from the current tugboat ‘terminal’ at the ever-moving site of Wadi Halfa village. We drove there in his ancient Dodge by way of vague dirt tracks and, after stamping my papers and passport, he introduced me to the Commissioner, Sayyid Ibrahim. Like everything else in Wadi Halfa, his shack was only temporary, moving each year away from the ever-rising lake edge. The total rise to date since the dam’s inception was 158 metres, and a further 26 metres was expected before completion. Then a permanent village would be built on the site of an existing station on Kitchener’s old railway line to Khartoum.

  Lovingly painted murals decorated
Ibrahim’s plasterboard walls, depicting the old Wadi Halfa before it was submerged. Less than a decade ago, tourists from all over the world had flocked to see the unique oasis town of verdant gardens where exotic fruits and flowers grew in the shade of palm trees, yet where, around its abrupt oasis perimeter, barren deserts stretched in all directions and long-forgotten bedu trails marked with the sun-bleached skeletons of camels led to nowhere.

  The huge economic benefits of the dam have gone entirely to the Egyptians. They did make a payment to the Sudanese government in faraway Khartoum of £15 million to compensate for their lost land, but a mere pittance of this total had reached the Wadi Halfa inhabitants who lost their homes.

  Sudanese Army units were sent to Wadi Halfa in 1958 to forcibly evict the population and to rehouse them in faraway Kassala Province, where they were to be trained as farmers.

  A handful of determined Wadi Halfans, all Nubians, refused to leave their desert homes and, once their oasis was under water, they lived entirely by fishing, since nothing would grow in the sand. ‘We are a proud people,’ said Ibrahim, his chest rising as he spoke. ‘We are the golden people – Nub means gold.’

  Ibrahim and his tenacious fellow diehards called themselves the Guardians of the Border, for they mistrusted their land-hungry Egyptian neighbours and believed that the correct frontier of the Sudan should be back north at Aswan, as once it was.

  ‘If we had all gone to Kassala,’ Ibrahim commented, ‘what would have stopped the Egyptians moving in here? There are no border markers in the desert.’

  From his briefcase, Ibrahim produced a recent copy of the Daily Telegraph with the headline, ‘Concern for Nile Expedition’. Nothing had been heard of our whereabouts for two weeks and the authorities had become alarmed. No telephones were working at the time, but Ibrahim assured us that as soon as he could he would send off telegrams to inform the Foreign Office and our families of our continued existence.

  His other news was that the President and the entire Supreme Court of Sudan were to attend our proposed hovercraft demonstration in Khartoum on 14 March. This gave us exactly seven days to hover and/or drive the course of the Nile for a thousand miles, so I told Ibrahim that we must leave just as soon as we could unload from the barge.

  Peter had devised a cunning system of winches, pulleys and ramps which, together with a good deal of Nubian muscle power, managed to unload all our machines with minimal damage either to them or to the side of the barge.

  Charles, in long khaki shorts known as ‘empire-builders’ and green wellington boots, fixed propeller units to the steerage systems, filled fuel tanks and checked the edges of the hover-skirts for splits. Then, starting all six engines without trouble, he and Peter purred (not roared) off towards the far bank of the river, which was over a mile away.

  Hover-Air had calculated that a distance of 105 nautical miles could, in theory, be covered by the two Hawks before they would need refuelling by the Land Rover group. They could only carry a load of either two adults or one adult and three jerrycans of fuel.

  It was agreed that we must split up our two amateur mechanics, so Charles would skipper one Hawk while Peter drove a Land Rover.

  Anthony with his cine camera would sit beside Charles in the leading Hawk, and I would follow with a load of three cans strapped in beside me. Nick and Mike would crew the AA Land Rover. All seemed happy with this and, bidding farewell to Ibrahim, our two groups set off, one into the desert and the other up the Nile.

  I kept some distance behind the other Hawk because any ripple on the surface affected the hover-speed. Clusters of black rocks sped past the side windows of the cockpit. The speedometer showed a steady speed of 25 mph. Soon after dawn the great red orb of the sun rose above the desert horizon and another scorching day began. Stiflingly hot in the cabin, I tried sliding a side window open, but instantly regretted doing so due to the bilharzia-laden spray that was sucked inside the cabin and all over me.

  I tried the walkie-talkie linked to Charles, but heard only crackle on all frequencies. Our HF radio which could be used to speak to Peter was packed in a waterproof container and out of reach. The hovercraft could not simply stop in mid-lake, and the river was still a mile wide. It must land because once the hover-skirt sinks down ‘off the hover’, it fills with water and the 200cc lift engine has too little power to clear the water out of the skirt to allow the machine to hover again.

  I found myself scanning the nearest bank at all times to try and spot and record any shelving beach with a gentle slope just in case there was a breakdown and a sudden need for a landing site.

  At some point we passed the village of Sumna, an isolated oasis like Wadi Halfa but not yet fully submerged, where we dodged between the tops of palm trees, minarets and crenellated rooftops. I counted some forty locals waving from the beach beyond the submerged village, but saw no shack or tent.

  One of Baker’s drive motors gave up the ghost at midday, but with enough of a spluttering warning to enable Charles to beach before total breakdown. He told me that he could fix it and, since we did not need to reach our planned rendezvous with Peter at the village of Akasha, 150 miles away, until the next day, we decided to camp where we were, close to the point where the Second Cataract had once rushed by the Temple of Bohein, erstwhile headquarters of a Nubian Empire that ruled all of Egypt and part of Libya in 750 BC. The Great Temple of Bohein had been partially saved from being submerged and was then resurrected in a Khartoum Museum, thanks to a UNESCO grant and the foresight of the Sudan Antiquities Service’s founder, the archaeologist Naj Madun. I met and interviewed him in Khartoum that summer, by which time he confirmed, with well-deserved pride, that his teams had saved over 90 per cent of all the sites of great archaeological value along the Nubian Nile.

  We slept well on our mats without mosquitoes, there being no stagnant water for miles, and we did not use our sleeping bags due to the heat. I heard in the scrub all around us the rustling of rats. Ibrahim had warned us that close to the lake’s edge there lived many lizards, scorpions, rattlesnakes and other vipers, even desert wolves. ‘And crocodiles?’ I asked him. ‘Of course,’ he replied, ‘they are one of the gods of the Nile.’

  After breakfast Charles fixed his faulty engine and fiddled with the knobs of our radio until Peter’s voice came over sounding tired. After watching us depart he had collected a local guide who had made his name in the pre-dam days and in the immediate vicinity of Wadi Halfa. His name was Ali, and Peter did not beat about the bush in summarizing his ability as a guide. ‘Pathetic.’

  Within two or three miles of Wadi Halfa, the sandy track petered out and gave way to a plethora of disconnected tyre marks half-buried by blown sand, through which the Land Rovers roared and slithered in second gear. The low suspension and small wheels of the trailers, unladen though they were, often dragged through the sand like ploughs.

  ‘The hovercraft,’ said Mike, his voice clear in the background, ‘were a mistake. They will cause nothing but trouble with their stupid trailers—’

  ‘I heard that, Mike,’ I cut in, ‘and I’m sure you’re right, but you need to remember that they are also the only reason that we’ve been allowed to get this far.’

  By midday, Peter said, the heat had become unbearable as they pushed and hauled the trailers one by one through each new soft patch. Frequent stopping and starting caused strain on the clutch of the older vehicle, and this began to overheat, so they had tried driving after sundown. This had proved even more difficult since, in the trackless wilderness, the low ground tended to take them away from the Nile due to a west-east barrier of broken hills with cul-de-sacs at every turn.

  By midnight they had completed seventy miles, less than half of which were in the correct direction. Ali had admitted that he had no idea where they were. The clutch on Peter’s vehicle burnt out. He could not be certain that a usable track to Akasha actually existed now that the old riverside route was submerged, for even the AA had been unable to ascertain this when asked. Peter ad
vised that, if we were to make it on time to the Presidential demonstration, we must cut our losses at once, repair his clutch and catch the next available steam train from Wadi Halfa to Khartoum. That way we might still just make it.

  I saw his logic, and agreed, since we probably had just enough fuel to turn around and hover back to Wadi Halfa. If we did the Khartoum demo satisfactorily, we should get Presidential blessing and could then commence our journey up the White Nile on schedule in order to beat the rainy season.

  Anthony, who had successfully filmed our hovering, was ambivalent as to our next step, but being of a naturally provocative nature he commented that our two hovercraft were in a huge lake with a storm brewing and visibility verging on nil. Two-foot-high waves were already lashing our beach and we were not entirely sure that we had enough fuel to make it back to Wadi Halfa, even if we had no further breakdowns hovering over the now choppy surface of the lake. Meanwhile, he added, our Land Rover group was broken down somewhere in the Nubian Desert without a guide and with their outward tracks likely to be covered over quickly by blowing sand. ‘A right balls-up,’ was his crude summary. At that point I mistakenly thought that things could only get better.

  Somehow, over the next two days and nights, we did get both hovercraft back to Wadi Halfa, at one point having to abandon Anthony on a remote rocky headland where he was scared witless by three four-foot-long horny-backed lizards with teeth. He made for high ground and failed to film the monsters, to his subsequent regret.

  Back in Wadi Halfa, Ibrahim said that there was one old Nubian ex-guide named Tawfiq who might be able to locate Peter’s lost convoy without having to call up a military helicopter from Khartoum, should one be available with Presidential blessing.

  Tawfiq proved to be as successful as Ali was useless and, despite having to conduct his search largely in the dark with blowing sand, he managed to find the convoy. The members of the team were highly relieved to see him, for they were firmly convinced that they were way off route.