Heat

by Ranulph Fiennes

  At Khanem in great rolling dunes, Ollie set many skink traps which he baited with chunks of corned beef. The following dawn, clearly excited, he led us on a tour of his trapline. The sun rose huge, orange and early. All the traps were empty, not just of skinks but of corned beef.

  Clouds of fat flies which caused constant itching and little flies that bit maddened us all day as the sweat dribbled down our necks. We wore next to nothing and Ollie recorded 122° Fahrenheit in mid-afternoon. We could not decide whether it was more unbearable inside or outside our tents.

  When I suggested that we end the fruitless hunt for skinks, Simon murmured, ‘We are suffering for science.’

  ‘It is quite likely,’ Ollie interjected, ‘that I . . . we . . . might make skink history at the Museum as no skinks of a particularly rare sub-species have ever been found this far north.’

  ‘That,’ Ginny pointed out, ‘is probably because they don’t live here.’

  After two skink-less days, Ollie decided that we should extend our trapping zone. So, armed with water bags, compass and sacks full of traps and tinned meat, we trudged deep into dune country searching for skink-tracks, which Ollie said he knew how to identify. But there were none.

  ‘Are you sure they leave tracks?’ I asked Ollie.

  ‘Of course they do. They have legs and a tail. You must have patience. Perseverance is a necessary ingredient of all research work. Skinks don’t grow on trees.’

  Exhausted, we eventually returned to our camp. Everyone was touchy, even before the local mosquitoes set up their evening orchestra.

  Next day, with Ollie’s agreement, Simon and I set off to recruit a local skink-catcher. We had checked on how to describe what we were looking for – in Arabic, in French and even in Latin (dhub poissons-de-sable and scincus scincus cucullatus).

  The villagers of El Golea passed us, frisbee-like, from one reputed ‘skink expert’ to another, until at last we were introduced to a local farmer who dabbled in skinks for no specific reason that we could ascertain. No matter, he really did know all about these elusive lizards which, he said, tasted good when fried.

  In a small, square, mud-made hovel we met Hamou-the-Skink-Catcher. He had a colour TV, a generator and a fridge full of Cokes, which he generously bade us enjoy.

  He agreed to help us out, but said we must understand that it was dangerous, and therefore expensive, work because lethal sand vipers and scorpions often inhabited the same holes into which a skink-hunter must plunge his hands in order to catch the skinks. Sand vipers were deadly, and 128 people from the local town had been treated last year alone for scorpion stings, three of whom had died. And he told us that sand vipers eat skinks. I agreed to pay Hamou according to his results.

  He led us all into dunes less than a mile from the sites of Ollie’s diligent hunts, and within minutes he had identified tiny skink trails. Digging both hands into slightly disturbed sand close to where each trail ended, he had produced two prime skinks in under an hour and, by dusk, a third little beauty. Back at base we all celebrated with him while Ollie ‘humanely’ skewered and packed the five-inch lizards into his formaldehyde bottles which he labelled with the exact grid references and descriptions of their lairs.

  ‘Soon,’ Ginny said, noting the proud smirk on Ollie’s face, ‘we’ll have to call him Professor.’

  All of us lost weight during our week’s dune-trudging in the sweltering sauna of El Golea and we were pleased to head south to where we hoped the water would not taste, as Charlie put it, of skink poo.

  After finally improving our driving skills and spending more time at the wheel instead of heaving bogged vehicles, we camped in the Jebel Moujdier which was fanned by hot winds from the western dunes. Ginny and I stripped naked in our tent, but we still sweltered. Mice scurried about our groundsheet. These, Ollie assured us in the morning, were in fact gerbils, which some doctors blamed for spreading the medieval Black Death that killed millions worldwide. This sparked off a big argument, since the rest of us knew full well that sewer rats were the guilty party. Nonetheless, I never again looked at gerbils or jerboas as cuddly little critters.

  At one point Ginny, driving the lead vehicle, noted after we had climbed gradually to a long open plateau that the flora had altered from non-existent to scrubland with islands of scrub, acacia and even the stubby dwarf palms which are an indicator to bedu of ground water close to the surface. They can also provide sustenance in the form of a sweetish porridge that can be made from their reddish nuts.

  Simon, who was in charge of keeping us in water and local food supplies, identified a ‘fresh spring’ at Ain Salah, which means ‘salty well’, and it certainly lived up to its name. Simon was blamed. One day at a lunch stop in a dry valley, I wandered off to find an object to squat behind and came across Simon inspecting a very dead cow corpse. As I approached, he mused, ‘We are very short of tinned meat, you know, Ran.’

  ‘Don’t even think about it,’ I muttered, not entirely sure whether he was joking.

  High above us over the stark ramparts of the Moujdier range, there circled great lammergeyer falcons with their wild, buzzard-like calls.

  South of Tamanrasset and in a dust storm we drove off the track at the Well of Tahadat or, in hippy-speak, the Jo-Jo Spring, where a water-guard named Spaghetti charged us three dinars for each jerrycan that he filled for us.

  ‘You can camp for free,’ he said, ‘in my valley down there.’ He pointed at a picturesque dry riverbed that meandered below the site of the spring.

  A German hippy who was camped right beside the spring was listening, and he laughed. ‘I was here last week,’ he said, ‘and that wadi was for several hours a raging flood fifty metres across.’

  So we camped beside rather than in it.

  Ollie’s next task, as we headed on south to meet Anton Bowring and the crew at Abidjan, the largest city and chief port of the Ivory Coast, was to collect a very specific type of desert bat which lived in certain places on either side of the Mali border.

  We were told by Spaghetti of a Touareg guide who ‘knows the desert’. Ollie explained where the chauves-souris (bats) were, and the guide spat at his foot (his own, not Ollie’s) which we had learnt meant, ‘Stop there . . . I know the answer.’

  ‘Best for you will be west to Bordj-Mokhtar. But that track has not been used for five years now. Much bad sand. No piste any more.’

  My Michelin map indicated a good piste to Bordj-Mokhtar, but maybe the guide did know better. After all, sand does shift.

  ‘You do better to go to Gao by way of Timeiouine,’ said the guide. ‘Then I take you.’

  This was good, but when I explained that we had run out of money and would pay him with tinned food, he shrugged.

  ‘I take only money. So you go without guide. It is possible. Maybe you will not get lost in the deserts.’

  Ollie asked him if he had seen bats of the sort in Ollie’s photographs, which he showed him.

  ‘The deep wells of Silet . . . I have seen your bats in them.’

  Ginny was a devotee of Charles de Foucauld, the French soldier monk who had founded a hermitage high up in the Hoggar Mountains. So, before the bat-hunt, we left the others and drove fifty miles along a series of rocky tracks, climbing 8,000 feet to the Pass of Assekrem, and then walked up a mountain path with a rucksack of food and a jerrycan of water from the Jo-Jo Spring to give to the elderly French friar who now manned the hermitage alone. He clearly enjoyed the spectacular views of dizzy peaks, thunder clouds and soaring eagles. His lonely chapel was festooned with an array of meteorological instruments with which he kept meticulous daily records. He greeted us with joy.

  I noted from the diaries of de Foucauld that it took him an hour to walk from the hut and trudge down the rocky slopes some 500 yards in height to reach the nearest water source which, if an animal had just drunk from it, took at least an hour to fill up. ‘In the nine and a half years that I have been here, it has rained twice; once, nine years ago, for 36 or 48 hours and once
, five years ago, for 3 or 4 hours.’

  The fact that locusts had destroyed what little grass existed did not help. At one point the priest developed scurvy symptoms. Nonetheless he treasured his lonely existence at Assekrem, of which he wrote, ‘The view is more beautiful than can be imagined. The very sight of it makes one think of God.’

  Ginny wrote of the Hoggar Mountains, ‘Great peaks of black rock rise from the gravel valleys, the result of volcanic action. Lava flows cut through the canyons, a perfect landscape for a movie of the end of the world.’

  Touareg in the Hoggar talk of their parents hunting oryx, leopards and antelope, but we saw only vultures and eagles soaring high above us. Ginny’s guide book showed a photo of a stubby tree with black and white flowers which, she told me, she would love to find to keep me under control. Apparently this Calotropis procera was used by Touareg women down the ages as an ingredient to make borbor, which first breaks a man’s will and then, with a bigger dose, kills him.

  When travelling through the desert in the company of camel-borne méharistes, de Foucauld, who revelled in acts of physical endurance, would often walk behind them even in mid-summer. One French officer, Jean Dinaux, recorded:

  The pace of a detachment of camel troopers is considerably faster than that of a walker. The priest continued to follow us on foot to the point of exhaustion, telling his beads and reciting litanies. He forced his pace when the terrain was difficult. From five o’clock in the morning, the sun beat down mercilessly, and the temperature in the shade varied from 40° to 50°C. Each of us downed from nine to eleven litres of water a day, and what water, bucketed from ponds in which livestock had been splashing. And the father followed along at a rapid pace.

  Sandstorms, which de Foucauld often suffered, are well described by another of his travel companions, Fernand de Foureau:

  We were struck by a tornado bigger than I could possibly have imagined . . . vast, towering clouds of dust, of a sinister copper colour and topped by wild plumes . . . covering a good quarter of the horizon. They advanced with fantastic speed and swept over us with a force that nothing could resist . . . blinding everybody, blowing the baggage from the camels’ backs, knocking over the mules. It was impossible to turn your back to it. Sand and gravel flew from every direction. We could not see farther than a few metres.

  Most people think of a grain of desert sand as starting and ending its life as just that – a grain. The reality of sand grains and their behaviour in sand dunes is more complex.

  The sand from which they are formed is all that remains of the desert rocks after thousands of years of being grilled by the sun during the day and chilled to freezing point during the night. Under such conditions even the most durable granite begins to crack and flake. Slowly it disintegrates into its constituent minerals. Each grain is blown over flat rocky surfaces and is forced against other grains, becoming rounded and coated with a red polish of iron oxide. As the winds eddy across the desert, so they gather the grains sweeping them into great piles. These are the dunes. Some are as much as 200 metres high and a kilometre across. Where the wind usually blows from the same direction, the dunes are far from stationary. They form ridges and slowly advance across the desert. The wind blows the sand up the gentle slope of the dune to its crest. Then, with nothing to bind it, it slips down the steep front face of the dune in a continuous series of tiny avalanches and the dune itself inches forward.

  Our route back to our camp from the hermitage was not as simple as we had assumed and, having no detailed map of the various trails, we stopped at a canyon junction where two trails met. Our conversation was abruptly halted when a series of explosive rumbles shook the air, or so it seemed, and forked lightning flickered above.

  We both knew that many locals are drowned every year in the narrow wadis of the Hoggar. Even on an apparently fine day a distant storm can result in a sudden surge of brown water bearing tumbling rocks that can sweep away men, camels and even vehicles.

  We were lucky, although when we did reach camp the tents had been blown down, everything was soaked and the others were trying to retrieve lost gear.

  I remembered Wilfred Thesiger telling me of one great Dhofar flood a decade before, soon after which he had seen for himself palm tree trunks jammed by the force of water eighteen feet up among the cliffs of the Qara’s Wadi Aydam where that valley was a thousand metres wide. He knew of Arabs who had died as a result of a flash flood which had burst over fifty miles away from a single storm.

  From Assekrem we drove west to a place called Tit where, at a confusion of dusty tracks, a battered sign pointing heavenwards announced Abalessa and, to Ollie’s joy, Silet. Using our compass we selected a track which alternated between scarred black basalt and sand-filled ruts.

  Eight hours later, with all our water bags empty and our bodies grey with dust, we came to an isolated well with a canvas bucket on a rope. Simon, our water maestro, hauled up a bucketful and poured it into a jerrycan via a filter.

  ‘Little bastards,’ he muttered, staring at the filter’s gauze, on which wriggled a dozen hook-tailed tadpoles. ‘That’s just the visible ones,’ he enthused. ‘Hookworms, liver worms, toe worms and God knows what else. Imagine what a drop of this water would look like under a microscope.’

  I gulped down a litre at once although, but for my intense thirst, I wouldn’t have touched the stuff.

  One of the vehicle starters went dead, and for five hours in 105-degree heat Simon struggled to fix it, blistering his fingers on the hot metal.

  Four miles out of Silet village we found a series of gravel pits with shafts sunk some fifty feet down, in the gloom of which Ollie glimpsed bat-like movement. So we lowered him on a rope with his bat net at the ready. He came up batless but covered in pigeon feathers and stinking of dead animals. He photographed a long green water snake lying on the surface slime of one well, and from a lone leper to whom we gave food, came confirmation of a bat colony to the west in the wells of Tim-Missao.

  For three days Simon rationed our worm-infested water as we bumped and jolted our way west and south close to the Niger and Mali borders over featureless wastes. Violent dust storms meant closing all windows and sweating like pigs. Faint tracks disappeared and, completely lost in soft sand, Ginny and I went off on foot with binoculars until we picked up the ancient piste of twin camel trails leading southwest. To our great relief that evening we came across clearly defined vehicle tracks from the north, beside which, exhausted, we camped.

  All night furnace-like winds lashed our tents, and the next day we drove hour after hour through yellow gloom with our headlights on, making many halts to verify that we were still on the tracks.

  Crossing riverbeds, we were often bogged down in soft, loose sand. Our eyes were bloodshot and our skin was raw in places from sand-rub. But we made it to the Mali border markers, having, for the last hundred miles, taken on as a guide a lone goat herder, with no goats, from Timeiouine.

  Trailer springs fractured, tyres punctured and tow bolts snapped, but our spares supply coped and we inched south from the Adrar to the scenic vale of Tilemsi where the world about us began, slowly, to turn green. Now at our camps Ollie began to point out scorpions, spiders bigger than I thought existed, insects of every shape and colour, foxes, lizards and rabbits. By night we were serenaded by owls, nightjars, crickets and frogs. By day we passed the black tented camps of nomads surrounded by herds of grazing camels and haphazard heaps of camel skeletons.

  At Gao we reached the Niger River and followed its westerly curve for 400 miles to Timbuktu. En route Ollie added three very ugly bats (of the wrong species) to his collection of bottled corpses and, always a keen ornithologist, his bird sightings included the shirka, the mouse-bird, the bee-eater, the brubru shrike, the cutthroat weaver, the white-rumped blackchat, and the hoopoe. He was especially proud of noting the blue-backed whydah cuckoo, which was ‘too idle to make nests or feed babies’.

  We camped in the forest of Timbuktu, which was a mistake. The sa
nd was soft and bog-like everywhere, while the dry grass patches concealed a myriad of marble-sized burrs, sticky and itchy.

  The non-stop call of vinaceous doves and hoopoes in the pango-pango trees kept us awake all night lying on our clammy lilos.

  Near the village of Goundam we launched our collapsible canvas row-boat on a tributary of the Niger which led to a great reed-covered lake and some lakeside ruins where, at last, Ollie located a colony of the ‘correct’ bats. In one long-abandoned ruin full of big black spiders with thick webs, all five of us stretched bird-catching nets across all exits and caught six beautiful little bats with fixed smiles, which a deliriously happy Ollie immediately pickled.

  By this point Simon was incubating malaria, but didn’t know it.

  In Timbuktu town Ginny bought a ‘crusader sword’, to use the terminology of the teenager who sold it to her at ‘knockdown price’. It did look like the real thing, but a Westernized Arab at a Coca-Cola stall, on spotting it, said knowingly, ‘Ah, you have hadada sword.’ He shook his head knowingly. ‘Made from Land Cruiser.’

  This was later confirmed at Abidjan by an Ivorian antique dealer who had a number of similar swords. Hadadas are northern Arab craftsmen who moved from using mined iron, often garnered from meteorites found in deserts, to scrap-iron, especially leaf-springs from abandoned cars and lorries, once the latter became an easier source metal.

  Floods in Niafunké blocked our route, and ferries were unwilling to cross the swollen river. So we took a 450-mile detour to Koutiala. My memories of this region between desert and jungle are sketchy, but I do remember great humidity, forests of dead and dying trees where no birds sang and where herds of emaciated cattle churned up the mire into a giant pig-pen.