F I V E
We parked our camels beneath a 50-metre overhang just where the canyon was giving up and the stream had decided to spread wide for a change. The overhang provided us with some shade, but the camels didn’t seem to mind the sun and just sat munching their straw in the midday heat. Fires were built. Tea was brewed. Our bread had run out so a couple of the guys in our caravan made some more. This they did by collecting some large rounded stones from the canyon floor and heating them in the fire while they added water to a sack of flour and kneaded some dough. When the rocks were hot, they carefully moulded dough round each one and returned them to the fire, watching and turning the big round loaves when they got singed on the underside. Still cool and refreshed after my dip in the stream, the smell of the baking bread was good enough to make me think that God was in his heaven and all was well in the world.
That thought was well and truly consigned to history by the time we hit the Gara ‘fire wind’. Our lay-up had been shorter than on previous days since Osman wanted to make it to the last settlement, on the edge of the salt flats, by nightfall. It was 3 o’clock in the afternoon and the sun was still a fiery orb when we left Assabolo. We had spent the last hour beneath the overhang chewing chat, a mild narcotic leaf with little taste that Mr Bisrat said would fortify us against the Gara. Beléa blessed the sprigs of small green leaves before we ate them, and blessed each one of our party too.
‘Now we must face the Gara,’ Mr Bisrat said.
Hot, dry, often dusty winds are typical of many deserts. The south side of the Sahara has the Harmattan, while the Scirocco blows north over parts of the Mediterranean. In the Arabian Gulf, they have the Shamal; in India’s Thar Desert they have the Loo, in southern California the Santa Ana. And in the Danakil, I now discovered, it’s the Gara. Having never read about it in any geography book didn’t make it any less real.
It tore into my clothing as soon as we reached the top of the ridge, jostling and shoving like a herd of invisible, wild beasts on the rampage. It was hot, and it was loud, and it was desiccating in the extreme. I could feel it sucking the moisture out of me as I struggled forward, frazzling the hairs on my arms. It was like opening the door to the oven on Sunday lunchtime at home to check on the chicken, and finding that the chicken has pulled a fast one and turned the tables. I was in the oven and doing very nicely. Just another 20 minutes and my skin would be crispy and brown.
Trying to hide behind one of the camels, which just continued to stroll along, supremely unconcerned, was impossible. It was as if the Gara knew this trick and had developed the ability to blow from every angle. I’d been right to think of the Danakil as a burning inferno, but its demons weren’t the Afar, they were this fiery gale.
‘It is a battle, Mr Nick,’ Mr Bisrat shouted against the wind, ‘a battle we must win if we are to reach Dallol.’
After two days of tramping along wadi bottoms, where the intermittent thorn bush, pool of water (sometimes alive with tiny frogs), and occasional stretches of flowing stream lent some colour to the pallid mountain backdrop, the stony plateau across which we had to fight against the Gara wind was a foretaste of what was to come. It was an unrelenting wasteland of rocky monotony that continued all the way to Hamad Ela.
Somehow, we had descended 2,000 metres since crossing the limestone plateau above Mekele. Other than on that first day, when the drive to Berahile had taken us plunging down from the Highlands, it had never seemed to me that we were getting any lower. But finally, here at the miners’ camp on the edge of a desiccated salt lake that bottomed out at 100 metres below sea level, I got a sense of being on the edge of the bowels of the Earth.
Hamad Ela was unlike any other Afar settlement I’d yet seen, and not just because it sat in the unremitting tedium of flat rocky plateau one way and horizontal salt lake the other. The place was dirty and dishevelled. It had an unkempt air about it as if no one cared where they threw their rubbish or paused to relieve themselves. On first sight, I thought this might be because it was a miners’ village. It was, after all, just a resting place for hardened salt-cutters who must have been so exhausted from their three-hour walk into the salt lake each day, four hours hacking with hatchets, and another three-hour walk home, that they simply had no energy left to keep the village clean and tidy. But then I saw that they lived not alone, but with their families. The women and kids didn’t appear to be bothered about living in a rubbish tip either.
We were up with the sun the following morning, and all around us camels were being loaded for the final push into the salt lake. A meandering snake of the beasts was already curling away into the distance. I counted them as they disappeared into the saline wilderness, stopped at 100, and tried to extrapolate. There must have been a thousand camels in our caravan now.
The Highlands of Ethiopia and the Red Sea form a natural conclusion to Africa’s mighty Sahara Desert on its eastern margin. Although this is where the Sahara proper terminates, its arid character is continued in a boomerang-shaped strip that outlines the promontory known as the Horn of Africa. This desert, the Danakil-Somali-Chalbi, is unusual climatologically in being on the eastern coast in tropical latitudes. Dallol is on roughly the same latitude as Bangkok, Manila and Guatemala City, all hot and wet places. The extreme aridity of the Danakil Desert is due mainly to the fact that the prevailing winds rarely blow from the ocean and thus there is little moisture in the atmosphere. During most months the winds are north-easterlies blowing from Arabia, source of the terrible Gara, and south-westerlies from central Africa. Clear desert skies mean that the sun’s rays are unobstructed by clouds in warming the air to produce the world’s highest mean annual temperature. All deserts record high temperatures for the same reason, but few others are as close to the equator, where the sun’s angle in the sky is closest to its maximum.
Here, at the dry salt lake, we were fairly close to the Red Sea, and seas tend to have the effect of reducing temperature extremes. But Dallol’s position on the edge of the Danakil depression, 75 metres below sea level in the Rift Valley, counteracts any marine influence. The temperature data recorded at Dallol yield an annual average value of 34.5ºC (94ºF). This makes Dallol the hottest place in the world.
But at 5.30 in the morning, when the sun was still low in the sky, it didn’t seem such a bad place. We left the rocks behind on the outskirts of Hamad Ela and chocolate-coloured dirt led us into sticky mud that clung to my shoes, making the walk heavy going. Within an hour, the surface had become firmer. We trudged across a hard salt crust, cracked by the heat into great polygonal slabs. It was like walking over an endless expanse of dirty scabs on the Earth’s surface.
Shimmering on the horizon, the head of the camel caravan was being absorbed into a mass of tiny figures. ‘The mine, Mr Nick!’ Mr Bisrat started skipping along beside his camel despite the rapidly rising temperature. ‘We have almost reached our destination, source of the white gold. My heart is filled with joy, and for that I sincerely thank you.’
The ‘mine’ was a hive of activity. More than 100 men were hacking away at the white salt crust with hatchets, cutting it into their own polygons that were levered up and set aside, later to be shaped into neat slabs. They were just a bunch of guys in their sarongs and T-shirts and plastic sandals, but it so happened that they were working in the world’s hottest desert. And what immensely hard, physical work it was in the sweltering heat. The time was just 8 o’clock and already the temperature had passed 45ºC (113ºF). Most of the cutters weren’t even wearing hats. Their efforts made the labours of Hercules look like a stroll in the park.
‘The cutters supply the shapers,’ Mr Bisrat told me as we wandered in awe around a scene that must have changed little in a thousand years. ‘Cutters may be Highlanders or Afars, but only Afars are allowed to shape.’ We paused to observe a squatting figure who was carefully shaving a block into a rectangular slab, as Mr Bisrat untied the length of white material from around his waist and proceeded to wrap it round his head as protection agains
t the sun. ‘A cutter will cut perhaps 100 blocks in a day, and the money he receives depends on how many caravans arrive that day. More caravans and the price goes down.’ The miners were approaching a seasonal boom time, because when the rainy season starts in the Highlands, in a week or two’s time, the number of caravans would sharply decline. There were Afar caravans, like Osman’s, and caravans run by Highlanders, but the Highlanders left off during the rainy season to help plant the fields.
All around us, camels were kneeling patiently on the hard salty crust, awaiting their loads. Each caravaneer tends to do business with the same shaper on every visit. Osman was talking to a wiry fellow bent double over his pile of shaped slabs. He was buying the slabs at a birr each, and would sell them for 4.50 birr at Berahile, Mr Bisrat told me. One man with eight camels might make £60 profit from his week in purgatory.
We paused beside a pile of slabs, neatly bound with rope, ready for loading. A man was crouched in the meagre shade thrown by the small tower, drinking tea from a blue plastic mug. The sun was getting to me, its reflection from the white salt starting to hurt my eyes, but something rather more serious was also on my mind.
‘So where is Dallol, Mr Bisrat?’ I asked cautiously. He looked puzzled. ‘Here, all around you. This area is known as Dallol, Mr Nick.’
It was my turn to be perplexed. There had obviously been a bit of geographical confusion. When I’d asked Mr Bisrat if he could take me to Dallol, I’d had a more specific place in mind. I didn’t know what exactly to expect, but it had to be a permanent settlement of some kind to have the record of hottest inhabited place on Earth. It was clear that no one lived here, and Mr Bisrat had already explained that the cutters and shapers walked out from Hamad Ela to work every day. ‘Dallol is a salt mine,’ I said (I knew that much), ‘but also a village or a town, or something. People live there.’
Mr Bisrat looked blank and mystified in equal measure. ‘I have not heard of such a place, but we can ask,’ he suggested.
He enquired after the man crouched beside us drinking his tea, who gave us a vacant look. Nearby, half a dozen other men were squatting in the salt chewing rounded hunks of hard bread that had been made using the hot stones technique. Here we were in luck. One of the men pulled the corner of what looked like a woollen blanket that was wrapped around his head, out from his forehead to shade his eyes, and pointed in a direction.
‘He says it’s about 15 kilometres north of here,’ Mr Bisrat translated.
We set off with three camels carrying water, to cross the hottest desert in the world during the hottest time of the day, leaving the cutters and shapers digging away to eternity, mining a resource that was never going to run out. Geologists estimate that the salt is 5 kilometres thick in some places.
Dallol’s claim to be the world’s hottest inhabited place is based on records of air temperature measured during the 1960s by an American mineral prospecting company. While they were investigating Dallol’s potash reserves, the Ralph M. Parsons Company set up a meteorological station at their base camp on the summit of a salt dome that sat at 79 metres below sea level. Here they recorded maximum and minimum temperatures between 1960 and 1966. With some gaps in the record, temperature readings were taken for about six years in total. The results of their findings were written up in the Meteorological Magazine of 1967. They showed that over the period of six years, the annual mean of the daily maximum temperature recorded at Dallol was 41ºC (106ºF) and the annual mean of the daily minimum was 28ºC (82ºF). Averaging these figures gives a mean daily value of 34.5ºC (94ºF), making Dallol the hottest place on Earth. During the period of observation, at least one day with a temperature above 38ºC (100ºF) was reported every month while some days the thermometer never sank below 30ºC (86ºF).
The record at Dallol is unusual in climatological circles for being so short. For the most part, climatologists require at least 30 years of data to define a climate. But comparing Dallol’s short record with longer runs of data from other hot places suggests that the six-year values for Dallol are unlikely to be different from the long-term average by even as much as 1ºF in any month. So the record stands.
But Dallol doesn’t. It was a dead place and looked as if it had been for some time. We came upon it looming like a forgotten soul out of a quite astonishing landscape. The salt here took on bizarre and extraordinary shapes, one moment rising up in great towers from the plain, the next plunging into chasms so deep they might have been passageways to the very centre of the Earth. The colours, too, were otherworldly, bright lemon yellows and vibrant oranges screaming for attention in the dun-coloured topography. Bubbling springs gently gurgled from the summit of these flamboyant mounds, slowing adding sulphurous deposits to the age-old conical growths. The outrageous colours continued at their bases, splashed like primeval paint across the knobbly terrain where other saline springs burbled at the surface.
Elsewhere, the fusion of salts that had once attracted the Ralph M. Parsons Company was alternately as brittle as a biscuit and as rigid and sharp as shards of toughened glass. The salty crust had begun its job of reclaiming the base camp, because that was all it had ever been, just a couple of disintegrating streets that were too small even to be called a village. Rusty tin drums and salt-rotten wooden beams led the way past the decomposed skeleton of a Land Rover. Iron girders crumbled underfoot as Mr Bisrat and I clambered in silence over the debris of a failed frontier colony. Remnants of breeze-block walls stood solid and defiant, but dwellings made of what looked like local stone were crumbling back into the dust from whence they came.
I didn’t feel elated at finally being in Dallol, just strange. The sense of desolation sat up and hit me hard across the face, and it hurt. This place was weird, seriously weird. It was clear to me that no one was meant conquer an environment like this one, where the Earth’s crust was still in turmoil and primordial elements bubbled from the ground. It was as if Mother Nature allowed visitors but permanent settlement was actively discouraged. It was just too extreme. And somehow I still felt uneasy about even treading this primeval land.
Mineral prospecting companies have known about the salty treasures of Dallol since 1901, and like seven companies before him, Ralph M. Parsons had donned his poncho, buckled his gun belt and set forth with a cheroot between his teeth to see just how tough this Danakil Desert really was. The answer lay before me. Dallol must have been dead before it hit the ground.
And where did all this leave the record for the hottest inhabited place on Earth? I had to hand it to Hamad Ela, the scruffy miners’ town that just clung to the edge of the Danakil depression. As Dallol showed too plainly, the salt flats were not a place to set up home. It was just for the hardiest day-trippers lured by the riches of white gold.
W E T T E S T
M a w s y n r a m
I n d i a
O N E
I became an avid online reader of The Times of India in the weeks leading up to my departure for the subcontinent. The Indian monsoon appeared to be well under way. Heavy rains were lashing the southern state of Kerala, causing widespread floods in the lowlands and traffic chaos in the highlands where landslips had cut off many roads. Power lines and telephone lines were down all over the state. In the northern city of Agra, where they were gearing up for potentially groundbreaking talks between the Indian prime minister and Pakistani president, the threat of disruption from Kashmiri separatists was not the only problem faced by national security guards. The monsoon’s first heavy rains had left almost the entire city waterlogged. The flooding was worse in the state of Orissa on the east coast. Several major rivers had burst their banks and hundreds of thousands of people were fleeing their homes in panic. The army and air force were on standby. The state was gearing up for a full-scale monsoon emergency.
As yet, there had been no mention of rains in the north-east of the country, where I was headed. The monsoon begins in southern India and works its way north, so I assumed that either the rains were yet to reach the north-
east or that this area was so well adjusted to the annual deluge that there was little to report. Mawsynram, the wettest inhabited place on Earth, receives nearly 12 metres of rain in an average year, and most of it arrives courtesy of the monsoon. A couple of months earlier, the India Meteorological Department’s long-range monsoon forecast for 2001 indicated that they were expecting a normal rainfall year. Thirty-nine feet of water would be a staggering amount almost anywhere else in the world, but in Mawsynram it was just normal. Nothing to report there then.
Calcutta didn’t appear to have had much rain at all. The streets were suspiciously dry as my taxi drove into town from Dum Dum Airport, but at least the air was heavy with moisture. Stepping out of the airport terminal had been like walking into a tropical greenhouse and a light sweat had immediately begun to ooze from every pore in my body. As the taxi swerved to avoid a small herd of cows, the only pedestrians on the dual carriageway at three in the morning, I decided that being damp was a state I was going to have to get used to. A month in India during the monsoon is like being locked in a sauna for four weeks.
And being India, you don’t have the sauna to yourself. It is jam-packed full of other people. Arriving in the wee small hours of the morning had given me a totally misleading impression of Calcutta. By the time I emerged from my hotel to survey the streets just before lunch the following day, the city’s full seething mass of humanity was out in force going about its daily business. Or at least, it was trying to. The roads were choked with yellow Ambassador taxis and buses bulging at the seams with human beings, three-wheeled auto-rickshaws and rickshaws pulled by wiry old men. But, for the most part, none of these vehicles was actually going anywhere. Their drivers just sat there and leant on their horns for a while until they realized that this was having absolutely no effect whatsoever, at which point they would turn off their engines and just sit. Streets remained gridlocked for tens of minutes at a time, which, judging by the patience of all concerned, was by no means unusual.
Going to Extremes Page 19
