Heat

by Ranulph Fiennes

  Our own fort’s askars, I noted, had no weapon more effective than their bolt-action rifles.

  The Beaver touched down at noon and took away the injured askar. Murad, always mischievous, suggested that the man’s injury was, in fact, a dose of the pox from a Habarut houri.

  The temperature was 115° Fahrenheit without a breeze, but the little plane lurched upwards from the loose stones of the runway with a mere fifty yards to spare and disappeared low over our fort.

  I sent a message to Salalah. Should we now go back to set up our base at Thumrait?

  No! The response was immediate. We were to patrol to the south-east from Habarut and along the border to locate a suspected camel trail thought to be much used by adoo resupply groups. If located, we were to ambush it.

  Even Corporal Salim had never been into the unknown country south of the fort. Nor had any of the askars, and no villager of the oasis was prepared to help the army since they grazed their goats and camels on both sides of the border, and their tribe, the Mahra, acknowledged no barrier to their free movement in any direction so long as they remained neutral.

  So I would have to navigate by magnetic compass and a crumpled East Aden Protectorate chart lent me by John Cooper which gave very few place names in the relevant area, mainly because there were no places, only dry valleys between dry mountains. The border was marked as a straight line through no particular geographical feature but running directly from Habarut to Cape Darbat Ali on the coast.

  From Habarut, after thanking the askars for the baskets of dates they gave us, we drove back east to the site of a batch of hovels named Shafia, then south into a labyrinth of wadis zigzagging between rugged cliffs up to 1,000 feet high.

  We entered the widest of these valleys, one of the few with a name, the Sheetah, which ran deep into the southern gatn, that region of steep canyons between the dry desert and the semi-foliated western Qara Mountains.

  At the entrance to the Sheetah, by a prominent pillar, we cached all but strictly relevant baggage in order to lighten the vehicles. We filled all our jerrycans with fuel and left the lorry hidden up a side nook, having taken six goats and left the rest with the lorry driver to feed and water.

  My mind was full of plans to ambush the adoo, but the men were thinking with varying degrees of enthusiasm or apprehension of the imminent commencement of Ramadan. As a general rule Islam formed the basis of their lives, not just as their faith but socially and mentally as well. Ramadan means ‘to be hot’. It arrives fourteen days later in their calendar each year because the moment of its advent depends on the first appearance of the new moon at that season.

  Ali Nasser once told me with great pride that a few years back he had been the first person in his Jebel Akhdar village to shout ‘Ashoof a qum’r’ (I see the moon). From then on, during daylight hours, total abstinence from drink or food is strictly maintained for a month, ending when the new moon is seen again.

  That day, where the Wadi Habarut split into three wadis, Mohammed of the Beard shot an ibex, and after a feast we all climbed the wadi’s bank to line its cliff and to watch the orient in starlit silence, but for the low incantation of the Quran by the moolah.

  Corporal Salim whispered in my ear, ‘Three men of religion in your village must sight the new moon before Ramadan can begin. In Pakistan they fly three moolahs up in an aeroplane to be sure of spotting the new moon in good time.’

  This struck me as cheating, but I did not say so.

  Hyenas howled from the south, the echoes repeating from the walls of many ravines.

  Someone at length gave a scream of joy. ‘I see her. I see her.’ The men jumped about. Some hugged one another. My section, smiling like Cheshire cats, shook my hand. This gave me great pleasure for, after all, I was no Muslim.

  ‘There will be much festive shooting at home,’ someone said, ‘but maybe we’d better not.’

  At this meeting of three wadis, as at many random spots I had passed in this gatn country, piles of rocks clearly placed by humans along the valley base of cliffs indicated ancient bedu grave sites. Those wandering folk from centuries past must have watched the sickle moons of the seasons but known nothing of Mohammed or Christ.

  For two days we pushed further south deep into Mahra territory, but we met no one. My map announced, ‘RELIEF DATA INCOMPLETE’, ‘NUMEROUS HILLS WITH DEEPLY INCISED VALLEYS’, and ‘MANY SHARPLY DEFINED RIDGES’. An especially unhelpful comment was, ‘SCATTERED SCRUB’ in a valley where not even a weed showed itself.

  Towards dusk on the second day at a side wadi named Etheereel, we suddenly came upon definite marks of a used camel trail heading from the direction of the Yemen and into Dhofar.

  The men were by then exhausted, having drunk nothing all day, despite the frequently repeated effort of pushing our vehicles over veins of soft sand and changing tyres in the blistering heat. I too had refrained from drinking or eating during the daylight hours, a regime I had determined to follow in order to give orders from a state of ‘deprivation’ equal to that of my men.

  So we turned back and camped a mile away, having posted a section with two machine guns and spare water bags to guard the camel trail overnight.

  Next morning, with two sections, I followed the trail into an ever narrowing valley which some six hours later became a cul-de-sac with a low zone of caves and signs of past camping, including old rags and date stones. So we returned to the vehicles weary and baked. The men looked sullen, especially when I mentioned that we must be careful with our water reserves.

  We continued south and, at about Latitude 17°, the Sheetah became impassable to the vehicles without a great deal of heaving and removal of small boulders.

  At one point a confusion of old camel trails did cross our wadi near to where the Sheetah and the Aydim watersheds converged, but Corporal Salim, our most trail-wise expert, announced that they had not been used for many years.

  Since we had no way of knowing whether or not the major infiltration route reported by Tim Landon’s spies crossed our wadi at some point just ahead of us, we had no excuse for not pushing on while we still had sufficient water.

  So, leaving Murad and his drivers in a boulder-strewn ravine, I took two sections who had not suffered the previous foot-slog, with two full water bottles per man and four machine guns on a south-south-east bearing, having estimated a distance of some twenty miles as the buzzard flies to the coastline. We zigzagged continually in order to avoid deeply incised canyons as we tramped along the tabletops, climbing slowly as we mounted the foothills of the coastal mountains.

  At noon, through my telescope, I could clearly see the ridge line of the Qara Mountains stretching across the southern horizon, the last obstacle before the coastline of the Indian Ocean. Certain then that no west–east camel trail existed between Habarut and the Qara, we turned back.

  A helicopter might have done our job far quicker and more thoroughly, although spotting camel athar (trails) on pebble ground in deep wadis is no easy task from the air. But there were no helicopters.

  Back-tracking, we surprised two old bedu emerging from a side canyon with their skinny goat herd. We gave them dates and some of our scarce water. Where, they asked us, were we from? Hauf? At which point we realized that they assumed that we were a unit of an Aden-based force. When Corporal Salim said that we had come from Muscat, the older man flung up his hands.

  ‘But you will be killed,’ he shouted. ‘You are in the Wadi Deefan in the Yemen.’ This was followed by a stream of excited gibberish. Even Corporal Salim failed to comprehend it, but one thing was clear. We were not in the Wadi Sheetah after all. We were well over the Yemeni border and in enemy territory. My map stated clearly in capital letters, ‘DUE TO INSUFFICIENT INFORMATION, THE BOUNDARY BETWEEN THE PROTECTORATE OF SOUTH ARABIA AND MUSCAT AND OMAN HAS BEEN OMITTED WITHIN THE AREA OF THIS GRAPHIC.’

  We returned to the vehicles, too dehydrated even to sweat. While we were away, Murad had, against my orders, taken his own local patrol (of three dri
vers) into a side wadi to hunt rock rabbits (the hyrax of the Bible). He tried to justify his behaviour by saying that he had found a recent camel trail. But he could show no signs of one.

  We drove back to Habarut almost out of water.

  I reflected that, had we run into an adoo unit in the Deefan and been reported as an invasion force of the Sultan’s Army, an international incident could have been sparked.

  My commanding officer in Salalah at the time, Peter Thwaites, when next we met asked what it was like in the Yemen. I asked him how he knew of my embarrassing error, and he laughed. ‘Muscat Regiment is one big family. Your soldiers talk. All the soldiers talk.’

  For years afterwards I had to put up with jokes about my navigating skills.

  Back at Midway, or Thumrait to give it its Arabic name, the orders from Salalah were to build basic makeshift defences there, make friends with the local bedu and then find an alternate ‘secret’ base further to the west from which we could operate without observation by wandering camel and goat herders who, when back in the Qara jebel, would doubtless be quizzed by the adoo as to army activities in Thumrait.

  The easiest of these tasks, once we had fashioned a defensive chain of oil drums filled with sand around key parts of the Thumrait base, was to befriend the locals.

  In the Wadi Dawkah, an hour’s drive north of Thumrait, we were introduced by Sultan bin Nashran to a family of the Bait Shaasha tribe who had camels grazing a wide area. They made us welcome in their camp which consisted of blankets thrown over a short thorn tree. The head of the family milked a hobbled camel into a tin and passed this around. As was often the case, I came last, being clearly not Muslim. I found the milk, which was warm and frothy, too salty to be pleasant.

  We were then, according to Sultan later on, greatly honoured when the bedu boss produced a filthy grey bag made from the nineteen-inch skin of a dhub lizard. Unwrapping it, he revealed some withered strips of pinkish meat like chopped-off thumbs: slated shark guts. The smell from the bag was disgusting. It was passed around the circle. Fighting back revulsion I took the smallest piece and tried to swallow it whole while holding my breath. But it was too tough and needed chewing first. The taste was not as bad as the stench suggested: fishy and a bit rotten. Mohammed of the Beard chuckled as he watched my expression.

  When we left the camp I asked Sultan why the old bedu, even when milking his camel, had used only his left hand while his right arm remained at all times ramrod stiff, never bent at the elbow.

  Sultan chuckled. ‘Yes. That one is a distant cousin of mine. People laugh at him because he must eat with the same hand with which he cleans himself after ablutions.’

  ‘Why so?’

  ‘He was once kicked and trodden on by a rutting bull camel,’ Sultan said. ‘His right arm was broken with bones sticking out. So a “doctor” of the Rashidi was called. The men of his family held him down, pulled the arm straight out and tucked the bones back in. Then they burnt a hole in a long desert melon from end to end into which they forced the arm. After six months they took the melon away. The arm was mended, although it would never bend again.’

  Sultan and Hamed showed me plants, desert fruit and fragile butterflies, pink and blue fritillaries, that hopped about the kfeeter plants, tiny bobbles growing just above the ground with knotty roots curled protectively about their seeds.

  ‘When a baby child is gripped by a djinn spirit,’ Hamed told me, ‘then we put these seeds in a piece of rag, tie it up, and hang it round the baby’s neck. The shaitan [devil] hates the kfeeter so he flees to another baby.’

  He showed me other plants, the gnarled gha’ader that provides stomach medicine for the bedu, and the gai’sh hedgehog bush with its sharp and deadly thorns. Many stretches of sand are littered with strings of tiny Sodom apples which, applied halved and hot to an abscess, will draw out poison as efficiently as a poultice. Heated in boiling water, Hamed had seen bedu use them to cauterize and draw jigger worms out of their toes.

  Sultan once took me to an evergreen tamarisk with a pink flower. In the cool sand beneath this bush were tiny greenish flakes. He gave me one to eat. It was sweet and moist; quite possibly the manna of the children of Israel. Gazelle and the rare oryx can live for months without water, drinking only from the tamarisk and other juicy shrubs.

  Over the next few months Sultan and his Bait Shaasha friends taught me and three of my section all about their camels. I found mounting much easier than I had thought, mainly because Sultan kept a close watch to see that I had a firm grip of the correct part of the hair at the base of the camel’s neck before the animal stood up with a jerky motion, forwards and then backwards, lifting me eight feet into the air and onto its back behind the hump.

  I had ridden horses on and off for years but they are well designed to be ridden bareback by humans with well-cushioned backsides. Camels are not, and their spines behind the hump jar their rider’s coccyx painfully until they get the knack of how to be comfortable, if contorted, whether by side-saddle riding or, like the bedu, literally kneeling on the upturned soles of your feet.

  For my first few rides I felt as though my privates were being tortured, so I switched to the lesser evil of bruised buttocks. I never really mastered the art of camel riding in comfort, but often enough, over the months ahead, wished that we were riding camels through evil terrain rather than pushing our vehicles through various hot hellhole stretches of sand or sabkha where even removing 70 per cent of the air in our tyres did not help.

  Racing camels in Dubai have been timed over short distances at 40 mph, and they can manage 25 mph for nearly an hour, but in soft sands on the flat they normally average 4 mph if unladen but for a rider. Our bedu’s main baggage camel is raced, he told us, at six thousand paces an hour if kept away from the sort of hard ground which is ideal for a Land Rover but often painful to a camel.

  Two of the toes of the broad pad of a camel’s foot are joined so that the pad flattens out to provide excellent traction on soft sand. There are small water-storing sacs in their feet in addition to the main fat storage facility in their hump, but these pads are sensitive both to hot rock and sharp gravel. This means that camels are at their best in areas where vehicles have their worst problems.

  Arabian one-hump dromedaries were extinct in the wild, apart from a few previously domesticated animals let loose. They weigh over 600 kilos and can digest the most leathery of desert leaves as well as brittle spiky thorns. They are highly functional, with nostrils that can flap shut to prevent sand inhalation and with thick rubbery pads on their legs and chests on which they squat.

  Despite their gentle eyes with long lashes and their general air of patience, bull camels have been known to attack and kill their owners during the rut when their tongues swell up into raw pink bubbles and their subsequent copulation appears to involve a Kama Sutra-inspired back-to-back activity caused by their penis facing the ‘wrong way’.

  One of our visits to our Shaasha friends coincided with the arrival of a Mahra who owned an aged bull camel which he was offering as a sperm donor to fertilize the Shaasha’s female camels in return for a modest fee.

  In Muscat I had heard townsfolk gossip that Dhofari camels’ mouths are infected with syphilis, but this is merely the product of an old legend probably sparked by the genuinely foul smell of all camels’ breath.

  Bedu often name their camels and clearly love them, and in desert droughts they have been known to survive without food or water for weeks using only milk from their camels, so long as the latter have available grazing.

  A camel can remain in milk, providing she is kept away from bulls, for as much as four years. She may have up to a dozen calves in a working life of twenty years and can survive a long journey through the hottest, driest of deserts, unlike any other animal. She never sweats until her body heat exceeds 104°F, and although she does not store water, as is often thought, she can conserve it for days and, when thirsty, is capable of imbibing up to 27 gallons at one sitting. She can then use 9
5 per cent of the intake, whereas humans use only 12 per cent and excrete the rest.

  The Shaasha recalled one long march by a cousin of theirs whose camels had run out of milk and, without water, he had resorted to ramming his camel stick down their throats and drinking their vomit.

  A month after arriving in Thumrait we were ordered to patrol the gravel deserts to the north of the Qara Mountains and all the way from Thumrait to the Yemeni border.

  I was, I realized, on a very loose rein, apart from the overall objective which was to block any possible enemy incursion from the Yemen to the north of the coastal mountains. This I could easily do by leaving half the platoon to block the Dehedoba trail while, with two Land Rovers and ten men, I could patrol further north towards or even into the southern rim of the Sands to search for the lost city of Ubar.

  If radio instructions arrived which needed immediate recall to Salalah or elsewhere, I could respond within hours. It did strike me that such a course of action might be construed as dereliction of duty, but I dismissed such thoughts as overly moralistic. After all, I would still be geographically in the area designated to the platoon.

  So, leaving the moolah in charge of the others and with his assurance that he would radio for my return if anything untoward occurred, I left with my section and Corporal Salim’s.

  From our camp near the pools of Ayun we headed west to the well at Tudho where we filled our water cans with enough for men and vehicles for fourteen days. Then we went north through gravel desert along the eastern side of the Wadi Aydim to an abandoned oil exploration site called Qafa. On the way we passed the wreck of one of the Dodge power-wagons which, four years before, had brought the original members of the Dhofar Liberation Force from Saudi Arabia to start the Dhofar rebellion. Salim found a promising camel trail heading north which provided good going for a few miles, but the Wadi Atinah then blocked our way for two days with soft sand and sabkha, a chalky layer of powder-sand just beneath a breakable gravel crust in which both our vehicles often became enmired.