Mad, Bad & Dangerous to Know

by Sir Ranulph Fiennes

  We postponed our main expedition until the autumn of 1991, because of ongoing troubles caused by Saddam Hussein. On the day we set out I discovered that in my rush I had collected the wrong travel bag from our London gear store. Instead of tropical shirts, sun-cream and malaria tablets, I had a duffle bag with snow goggles, balaclava and mitts. I decided not to mention this to the larger party we had now assembled in case it alarmed them as to my administrative efficiency.

  Southern Oman

  We based ourselves at Shis’r, where Ginny set up our HF radio base, because it seemed a good place to branch out from. I linked up with desert bedu and mountain folk I had known from the late 1960s who were useful as scouts or advisers, and there were many long and inconclusive debates as to Ubar’s likely location between the film director, the explorer, the archaeologist and the Imam of Fasad, through whose home terrain we were hesitantly creeping and who agreed to take us out into the Sands. At least we felt confident that wherever we ended up, he would know the most direct way back.

  Terry Lloyd and his ITN cameraman Rob Bowles joined and recorded many of our desert wanderings. I savoured the beauty of the stars at night and read the Qur’an to Ginny: ‘It is Allah who makes men laugh and weep, it is He who kills and makes alive . . . He is the Lord of the Dog Star, He who destroyed Ad of yore, and Thamud, and left none of them, and the people of Noah before them. Their cities, he threw them down and there covered them what did cover them.’ The Dog Star, I mused, could tell me every secret of the Sands and where to find Ubar, which the Qur’an called Ad.

  I knew well from my Arab Army days that there were three main aquifers running north into Dhofar’s southern fringe of the Empty Quarter. The existing water sources at Fasad, Shis’r and Mugshin all lay at a latitude through which an incense road hypothesised by Bertram Sidney Thomas might have passed. The water at Fasad is very sulphurous, and at Mugshin highly salty, but Shis’r’s water, that of the Wadi Ghadun aquifer, is famous for its sweetness. Though historians had written Shis’r off as a mere 300 years old, we decided to start digging here, for reasons quite unconnected with archaeology.

  Three days before Christmas 1991 I overheard the two Omani students, who worked with us on loan from the Ministry of National Heritage and Culture, commenting on the fact that we had been in Shis’r for ten days, that our dig-teams were sitting around doing nothing and that all we seemed to do was film each other. This seemed a fair summary, but it would not sound good at all in the wrong quarters. On Christmas Eve I had a quiet but urgent word with Juris and suggested he start digging anywhere so that the Ministry students could see the action. So he took his dig-team some 200 yards from our camp to the rubble around the old Shis’r well. Desultory work began. Two days later Juris looked smug. He had found a piece of red pottery identical to the style of the Jemdet Nassir period in Uruq, Mesopotamia. If carbon dating proved this to be so it would pre-date previous thinking as to the start of trade between Mesopotamia and south Arabia from 4000 to 5000 BC. He was not yet ready to go out on a limb and say we had discovered Ubar, but he was clear that our Shis’r dig was already proving to be a very important Roman-period site and probably went back at least 4,000 years.

  Two months later Juris summed up what we had by then unearthed: ‘So far we have walls and towers that are square and round and horseshoe-shaped. There was clearly a central tower, an inner sanctum and an outer wall which had a minimum height of between ten and fifteen feet and a consistent thickness of eighty centimetres. Some of the original rooms, complete with hearths, did not collapse as others did and these have already yielded rich finds for the key periods between the second millennium BC and around AD 300.’

  When free time was available, I took a shovel and pickaxe to the site and attacked any area that did not require more delicate attention using trowel and handbrush. But the archaeologists in our team, who were allergic to shovels, would scream and chase me away, so Ginny and I spent more time plodding about in the desert searching for subsidiary camps, rich in axe-heads and Fasad points, arrowheads from between the sixth and fourth millennia BC, places where travellers would have camped within sight of the many-towered citadel that Shis’r had clearly once been.

  As we dug down, we found the original building work of our city was excellent, consisting of semi-dressed stone cemented with a white plaster similar to that used in the north of the peninsula by contemporary peoples such as the Nabataeans of Petra. Our archaeologists came across the only ancient chess set ever to be found in south Arabia, six soapstone pieces, each two or three inches high and well polished by the fingers of the players. After a month the diggers were three feet down in places and pottery from Rome, Greece and Syria joined Celadon and Ming pieces from China, glass bracelets of bright clear colours from Aden and Neolithic flint weapons from 5000 BC. But was this Ubar? Was it Irem?

  Each new artifact helped to fill in the puzzle which Juris needed to reconstruct about Shis’r’s unknown past. Between 8000 and 6000 BC the region was too arid for humans. In 5000 BC, with wetter weather, Neolithic folk from Syria and further east arrived and built hearths. Even then, Juris believed, they traded in incense and travelled the then less arid interior, now the Sands, on foot and, after 4000 BC, by donkey. By the seventh century AD, when the Qur’an and later Islamic writers described the fabled city, the site itself was gone, a place only of fanciful legend. The decline would partly have been due to natural catastrophe, the decline of Rome, the spread of Christianity and the dwindling demand for frankincense.

  When I was summoned to report on our finds to Sultan Qaboos in person, and he asked me if our Shis’r excavation was definitely Ubar, I felt able to reply, ‘I believe so, Your Majesty. It is difficult to know what else it could be.’ There is after all only one Dhofar ‘place of trade’ marked on Ptolomy’s map of Arabia.

  The carbon dating tests confirmed Juris’s hunch and the worldwide attention aroused by the expedition brought tourists and television teams aplenty to Shis’r. Sultan Qaboos recognised that oil revenues would diminish in time and tourism could offer a lucrative alternative source of income. I like to think that the eventual success of my long search for Ubar has in a small way repaid the people of Oman, the country that has given me some of the best times of my life.

  10

  The Longest Track

  While Ginny and I had been in Oman, I had done nothing about the Antarctic crossing journey originally mooted by Ollie and Charlie, but back in London I heard that Norwegian plans for an Antarctic record-breaking journey were afoot by Erling Kagge, our earlier rival in the north and an exceptionally fine cross-country skier. Without delay I started to raise sponsorship for Antarctica. With Kagge as a rival, speed and endurance would now be a high priority for our team and I was concerned about our collective stamina. I had recently noticed what looked like a paunch on Charlie.

  In mid-May 1991 I went to a trade fair at Olympia where Oliver had organised a sales stand for his employers. By chance, Charlie Burton was in charge of security there, so I was able to explain my worries to them both, and suggested that I ask Mike Stroud to join our team.

  ‘He is like a bull terrier,’ I stressed, ‘small in stature but incredibly powerful.’

  ‘That’s great,’ Charlie remonstrated, ‘but where does that leave us oldies? Surely a team moves at the pace of its slowest member?’

  It was agreed that some thought would be given to the idea of inviting Mike along and, not long afterwards, Ollie called me to say that he and Charlie had both decided to change their role in the project. ‘We would want to enjoy the experience,’ Charlie told me later, ‘and I know that, once you get competitive, you take any signs of enjoyment on my part as being tantamount to mutiny and a clear sign that we should be travelling faster.’

  The continent of Antarctica

  So he and Ollie took on the role of organisers from London, and I approached Mike Stroud by telephone.

  Usually, the only position that I can tolerate on an expedition is
that of team leader. Ollie, Charlie and Mike were totally aware of my peculiarity in this respect, but all three were strong personalities and not yes-men. My policy with everyone on any journey is to follow the democratic route (when there is time), of talking about options rather than pronouncing dictatorial and unilateral decisions. If others, whether or not they form a majority, favour an opinion which I believe to be stupid, dangerous or unlikely to help attain the goal of the expedition, then I overrule them, no matter how disaffected this may make them feel. In fact, because most fellow polar travellers know how to progress over snow and ice, we normally all agree on the best way forward, so contretemps are quite rare.

  I knew very little in depth about Mike. This may seem strange as he had, by 1990, already come on four of my Arctic expeditions and we had been through a great deal together. To take friends on stressful expeditions has always seemed to me to be foolish, since I can think of no easier way of marring a friendship for ever. An expedition’s aim is best achieved by individuals who can look after themselves, need little or no directing or nursing and are tough in body and mind. I look for professional or dogged people and treat any friendship resulting from an expedition as an unexpected bonus.

  Polar expeditions are well known for causing stress and enmity between participants and quite why Ollie, Charlie, Mike and I had never come to blows, literally or even verbally, during our Arctic journeys remains a mystery to me.

  ‘I know you. You like to lead from the front,’ Mike observed. I conceded we would take hourly turns in navigation before he finally agreed to join. He also wrung out of me the agreement that he could conduct an extensive physiological research programme throughout the journey. This was bad news since I hate the sight of blood, especially my own, but it seemed a reasonable penalty in order to secure Mike’s participation.

  Prince Charles was once more our patron and he asked us to use the expedition to raise funds for multiple sclerosis research. We partly based this on members of the public pledging a penny a mile covered. Since Antarctica is over fifty times the size of Great Britain, a lot of pennies were involved.

  Timing, as ever, is crucial when contemplating the Antarctic. Because the Antarctic plateau is so high and so cold, the period when humans can travel over it is severely limited. So is the availability of transport to and from Antarctica. We would be flown in on the Atlantic side and taken off by cruise ship on the Pacific side, which meant walking 1,700 miles between 1 November 1992, the very earliest flight date, and 16 February, the cruise ship’s departure date. We would be pulling sledges at least sixteen miles a day for 108 days with loads likely to exceed 350 pounds, well in excess of any manhauling achievements to date.

  In 1903 Scott, Shackleton and Wilson hauled loads of 175 pounds. Eight years later, on ‘the worst journey in the world’, Wilson, Bowers and Cherry-Garrard started out with 253 pounds. Especially unnerving for us were the much more recent observations of Reinhold Messner, the world’s greatest mountaineer, and Arved Fuchs, Germany’s top polar explorer, during their own crossing attempt. I had serious doubts that Mike and I could outperform such a team. Of his Antarctic journey Messner wrote: ‘With sledge-loads of 264lbs, the longest stretch would be murderously strenuous. Perhaps even impossible . . . 264lbs is a load for a horse not a human being.’

  By early October the projected weight of our sledge-loads had gone up to 400 pounds. We were entering the realms of the theoretically impossible but it was too late to back out now. To mention 400 pounds per load to anyone with the slightest knowledge of manhauling was to invite ridicule . . . so we didn’t. The starting loads finally climbed to 485 pounds each. And that despite paring our gear down to minimal necessities.

  On a gusty morning in late October Ginny drove me to Heathrow. We said goodbye in the carpark for there would be many people in the terminal. I waved as she drove off and thanked God for her. I had told myself after many previous journeys that I would never again leave her at our bleak Exmoor home for the long and lonely winter. As she left I felt wretchedly guilty. It occurred to me that I had never spent a single night alone at our house on the moor.

  As Mike and Morag Howell, again in charge of our communications, chatted on the plane, I idly considered their motives in coming along. I knew Mike’s. He had spent two years of his life, seven years earlier, hoping to walk to the South Pole with Swan and Mear but, to his dismay, another man was eventually selected, leaving him merely first reserve. Now, whether or not we managed to cross the whole continent, he knew that he stood a chance of at least making it to the Pole.

  When I am asked for my own life motives I openly admit that expedition leadership is quite simply my chosen way of making a living: and under ‘occupation’ in my passport the entry has always stated ‘travel writer’. Mike found my financial motivation upsetting and ‘commercial’. His own rationale was more romantic. He talked of stunning landscapes and equated his adventures with a more intense version of the pleasures he had found as a boy from mountaineering, hill-walking and rock-climbing. I am not introspective and find it awkward having to dig within myself to produce replies to journalistic questions about motivation. I liked the response of Jean-Louis Etienne when asked why he went on polar expeditions. He replied: ‘Because I like it. You never ask a basketball player why he plays: it is because he enjoys it. It is like asking someone why he likes chocolate.’

  The KLM Boeing stopped at Sao Paulo, Montevideo, Santiago, Puerto Montt and finally Punta Arenas on the southern tip of Chile. We were met here by Annie Kershaw of Adventure Network (ANI). Annie was the widow of Giles Kershaw, our Transglobe Twin Otter pilot in Antarctica, who had later died in a gyrocopter accident. Annie had taken over running ANI, his polar air charter business on his death. Her first DC6 passenger flight of the year to her tented camp and ice runway at Patriot Hills in Antarctica was scheduled to depart two days after our arrival in Punta Arenas, South America’s most southerly city. Until the Panama Canal replaced the Cape Horn route, Punta Arenas flourished with 138 brothels to cope with visiting sailors. Now it is a strategic Chilean naval base. The 200,000-strong population are mostly descended from nineteenth-century immigrants: Spaniards and Germans just outnumber the descendants of Scottish shepherds and Croatian goldminers. Chilean grannies in fur coats could still be heard speaking English in Scots accents almost as thick as Morag’s. Unfortunately, engine problems delayed take off for six days, the first dent in our tight schedule.

  We flew south over the South Atlantic and then Antarctica for nine hours. At last, in the endless white sheet below we glimpsed a flash of tiny figures, tents and two Twin Otters. The notorious blue ice airstrip of Patriot Hills flashed beneath us. Twice our Canadian pilot rehearsed his landing to test the cross-wind. Then, with a shattering impact that could not have done any part of the DC6 much good, we struck the ice and bounced, rattling over the rippled blue surface. I do not remember any other landing even half as impressive in thirty years of arriving at remote spots in small aircraft.

  Three hours later, Mike and I had transferred to one of the Twin Otters bound for Antarctica’s Atlantic coastline. With us were Terry Lloyd, Rob Bowles and our radio base leader, Morag Howell. The Twin Otter ski-plane roared over the ice-front of the Weddell Sea, a vertical cliff forming the seaward face of the Filchner Ice-shelf. Antarctica is composed of two vast ice-sheets divided by a mountan chain. The sheets contain ten million square kilometres of ice which, in places, is four and a half kilometres thick and moves slowly but surely seawards. This huge wilderness provides scientists with a unique playground of volcanoes, fast-flowing glaciers, mobile ice-sheets, katabatic winds of frightening power and a perfectly pure and sterile interior where temperatures in winter can reach –100°C. After several cautious rehearsals, our pilot found a relatively smooth stretch of snow at the point where Berkner Island meets both the ice-shelf and the sea. We were set down at 78°19.8′ South and 43°47′ West on Antarctica’s Atlantic seaboard.

  Morag helped us unload and wis
hed us well. For the next few months she would attempt to keep radio contact with us from a tent at Patriot Hills and with our UK base which was manned by her husband Flo at their home in Aberdeen. We watched the little aircraft depart until the engine noise was a distant drone and the great silence of Antarctica closed about us.

  Months of unspoken apprehension were coming to a head. The key question was whether or not full loads of 485 pounds each, including the hundred days’ fuel taken on at Patriot Hills, could be moved by the two of us. The main bulk was rations. These were equally important both to our chances of success and to Mike’s physiological research. Each bag was packed to provide two men with twenty-four hours of food at a daily intake of 5,200 calories. This packing system had evolved over a period of sixteen years of polar journeys, beginning with my first North Pole attempt in 1976.

  The average daily intake of both Scott’s and Amundsen’s teams was 4,500 calories per man. This proved enough for the Norwegians who skied unencumbered and with husky power. But to support the hard labour of the British manhaulers, the amount was insufficient and they slowly starved. The first man to weaken and die was Taff Evans, the biggest and heaviest on Scott’s team, the man they ‘least expected to fail’.