Back in Wadi Halfa, they had little to say of their nightmare experience, wanting only to sleep well away from the great heat of the Sumna Bowl and the stinging, blinding sand.
Through sheer good luck, a train was due to call at Wadi Halfa the following day with some open rolling stock bound for Khartoum, and this train would get us to Khartoum just in time for our date with the President. To celebrate our brief stay in his district, Ibrahim organized for the local football team to come to our Nile-side camp that night with their Nubian drums and best dancers.
Anthony set up his tripod and Peter unearthed a bottle of Glenfiddich. Mike was busy preparing a makeshift source of light by which, after the dancing started, he could take atmospheric photos. This involved pouring petrol into a ten-gallon drum which he had half-filled with sand. As he was pouring neat petrol from a full jerrycan into this sand container, the resulting fumes ignited. The dull thud of exploding fumes was followed instantly by screams from Mike who, wearing nothing but shorts like the rest of us, was a ball of flames. He dropped the jerrycan which, by sheer good luck, he had almost emptied. Leaving whatever we were doing, three of us rushed towards him. He ran blindly from side to side, screaming and wildly clawing at his head. He appeared to be alight from knees to hair, and due to spillage the sand around him was also on fire. We rolled him over beyond these flames and, scooping up handfuls of sand, applied them to his back and his arms.
His hands, being soaked in fuel, were the worst affected part of his body, and fresh spurts of flame flared from them even when they appeared to have been dealt with.
He eventually stopped screaming and sat up moaning, probably in shock. Great flaps of blistered skin hung in shrouds from his arms, lower thighs and stomach. Raw and bleeding patches on his back showed where our sand-rubbing had been too violent.
I wrote to Peter Loyd in 2015 to check his memories of that sorry event, and received this reply:
Maybe I have blanked that terrible episode out of my mind. I do remember Mike starting to top up the half jerrycan cooker filled with sand that had burned itself out some time previously. Its latent heat combined with the fearsome midday sun must have caused it to reignite. The thump from the mini explosion was so unexpected that he dropped the jerrycan of petrol which splashed back onto him causing an immense fireball. Never have I run so fast to catch up with him as he fled the scene and you and I reached him together, tackling him to the ground and smothered the flames with our bodies and quantities of sand.
I thought then that perhaps we should have warned him in advance of the possibility of reignition, but the original fire had been out for such a long time and I’m sure that none of us would have thought twice about topping up.
I gave him a morphine jab and applied Gentian Violet cream with paraffin gauze dressings over the larger patches of raw flesh, for the sand, in the area where we were, had for at least a year been used as a latrine, there being no plumbing in the walkabout village. As a result, the danger of infection from the sand and the immediately attentive swarms of flies was high.
Ibrahim showed us a hut that his people used as a hospital, and a local man with a basic medical kit was summoned. Mike was laid under a mosquito net to keep the flies out, but the heat was pretty unbearable and salty sweat exacerbated his open wounds. The medic told us, ‘Twenty-five per cent burns. He will be okay. Train tomorrow.’
The Nubian football team danced by the light of Mike’s fuel container and the throbbing beat of their goatskin drums shook the moonlit night. Some sat on the hovercraft and drummed their bare feet against the fibreglass hulls. Others danced a slowed-down version of the foxtrot in the sand, with hands clapping to the rhythm of the drums.
The train turned up on time at the desert terminus a couple of miles from the village. We loaded the vehicles and hovercraft onto two flatbed units by way of our portable ramps. Then we laid Mike out on a bench in an almost empty passenger compartment and took it in turns to mop his sweat and keep the flies away.
Ibrahim, his local helpers, Tawfiq (but not Ali) and the entire football team turned up to wave us goodbye.
The engine and carriages, according to the Sudan Rail steward who sold us tickets, came from Britain long before he was born. But, and he sounded proud, they never break down.
The compartments were like ovens if you closed the windows. If you kept them open, choking clouds of dust mixed with soot set us off coughing and wiping our eyes. Better to sweat and simmer. Mike groaned much of the time whenever the morphine effects dissipated. I fed him bananas, aiming carefully at his mouth as the train jerked from side to side.
I thought back to my SAS training about burns, but remembered little so checked in my Expedition Medical Guide to see if Mike did indeed have only 25 per cent burns and of what severity grading. The booklet suggested that:
First-degree burns involve the uppermost layer of skin. They are characterized by erythema and pain, and often heal spontaneously within a week (think sunburn). Second-degree burns may be subdivided into superficial partial thickness and deep partial thickness burns. The former extends into tissues containing glands and hair follicles. This type of burn is painful, may form blisters and weep fluid. These burns do not heal well and often result in infection and severe scarring unless skin is grafted. Third-degree burns are full-thickness and appear white or tan because there is no blood flow to the surface. They may also appear dry or charred, and are frequently painless because the nerve endings are damaged (like a cooked chicken breast). Fourth-degree burns extend into muscle and bone, and as with third-degree burns, usually require skin grafting.
Burn size is judged using the Wallace Rule of Nines. In this rule-of-thumb method, the victim’s palm is equal to 1 per cent of the total burn surface area (TBSA), arms are individually worth 9 per cent, each leg is worth 18 per cent, and the front and back of the torso are also given a value of 18 per cent. It is not uncommon, even in larger hospitals to transfer a patient with burns larger than 20 per cent TBSA to a dedicated burns centre. Burns involving the feet, genitals, joints and face are equally tricky and are frequently transferred to specialists as well.
The booklet gave an example of how very bad burns can be survived far beyond normal expectations. A fighter pilot in the Battle of Britain, Tom Gleave, took over 253 Squadron the day after his predecessor was killed. His fighter was hit and one wing fuel tank caught fire. The flames grew fierce, wrapping round his feet and climbing to reach his shoulders. Plywood and fabric burst rapidly into flames around him, accelerated by fuel from the breached tanks. In a few short seconds the centre of his cockpit had become the head of a blowtorch. The aluminium sheet in which the dials of his control panel were set began to melt. But he was far too high to ditch the aircraft; there was nothing left that he could do but attempt to bail out.
Gleave was tethered to his plane by the oxygen mask attached to his helmet. He reached down to rip this from its attachment, but the searing heat beat him back. With his arms outstretched he could see that the skin of his leg was in much the same state. His arms and elbows were also burnt and the skin hung in charred folds from his hands and wrists. His head and neck too had been exposed to the inferno and his eyes were little more than slits. His nose had been all but destroyed.
Somehow, after a lucky landing, he staggered across the field towards a gate on its far side, shouting for help.
You can just about bear to hang on to a mug of hot tea at 42°C. That’s just five degrees higher than your normal core body temperature; pretty unimpressive really, but that is where the limits of human endurance lie. Everything from your digestive tract to your DNA start to fall apart at 45°C. And that’s where the physiology of thermal injury starts. As temperatures climb, cells lose their capacity to self-repair, vessels begin to coagulate and tissues become irreversibly altered and later begin to die. This all happens around 60°C. Aircraft fuel can burn at over 1,000°C.
Thanks to the McIndoe Burns Unit, Gleave made a full recovery. Looking at Mike
I reckoned that he would be fine so long as his wounds could be cleaned up as soon as possible.
Charles and Peter planned details for our hover demonstration in two days’ time, while I read a relatively informative travel manual about the Sudan. It is a country of over 900,000 square miles, which is equivalent to Italy, Belgium, Spain, France, Portugal, Scandinavia and Britain lumped together, but with less roads and rail than any one of these countries. Their most obvious line of communication, the Nile, is the longest river in the world but its waters spend seven months each year rendering nearly all tracks within 100 miles of it unusable because of flooding.
Sudan seems well placed for trade with neighbours for it shares more common borders than any other country in the world. But jungles, swamps and deserts often vie with wars and ignorance to obstruct trade altogether.
A recent British Army expedition was described in the Khartoum press as having arranged a major press conference in the city to celebrate a unique vehicle crossing of the Libyan and Nubian deserts from Kufra. The article ended by saying that they had never arrived. Perhaps they were still out there (as we might have been, but for Tawfiq).
The ticket collector, on checking my travel permits, commented, ‘You plan to drive on south from Khartoum? You will be the first foreigners to go down there for a very long time. Indeed, I am surprised that you have received such permits at all. God’s blessing be with you in those bad places.’
We stopped at Atbara and, for some reason, at Station Number Six where there was nothing but a signpost in the sand announcing STATION NUMBER SIX. Then at Berber we bought crushed dates from a platform vendor, a mile from the site of a great victory parade of General Kitchener’s Anglo-Egyptian troops. Our railway line was, in my grandfather’s day, pioneered by Kitchener engineers, and after Berber it heads through arid desert in a straight line, cutting out the great Nile loop with its ancient capital cities of Dongola and Meroe. River and rail rejoin at Abu Hamed and then run together all the way to Khartoum. At Atbara, once a large slave market, I checked our Land Rovers and switched the Egyptian flags attached to their mirrors for Sudanese ones. We had considered doing this at Aswan, but had forgotten in the rush.
At Khartoum’s main terminal we unloaded the convoy and I called the British embassy, who sent a cab to lead us through teeming market streets to their walled compound.
The military attaché, doing a sensitive job in a country riven by civil war, took personal responsibility for our expedition and made it clear that our route would take us smack through the middle of the most active war zone. If he had had his way, we would never have received permission to head south of Khartoum, especially since two of us were serving officers. He made it clear at once that the only good ‘brownie point’ of our existence in the Sudan would be if all went well with the hover demonstration in front of the President the following day.
He had Mike taken by ambulance to a private clinic and then telegrammed Ginny, who arranged flight tickets for Mike and treatment by a London burns specialist. Before his departure, Mike lent me his cameras and gave me a lecture on how to use them.
The attaché had put all arrangements for the demonstration in the highly capable hands of Ali Karrar, a retired military governor of the Blue Nile Province, who had, during the recent military regime, been one of three chief ministers advising the President.
He interviewed me with much finger-wagging. I responded with much head-nodding. He understood that I was a military man and knew that I would agree to ‘our’ demo being run with precision. He had checked out the best place for the demo, and the weather forecast was, surprisingly, good. This was because any time now the Khartoum haboob season would arrive when dust clouds invade the city from the surrounding deserts. It could then become impossible, Ali stressed, to see your own hand stretched out, even on an otherwise cloudless day. No door or window can keep the fine dust out of a house, and this would be no good for our demo! ‘But,’ he laughed, ‘tomorrow I have personally forbidden the haboob.’
Our machines, he said, must do exactly what he was about to explain from the moment the President and the ministers arrived. A number of those who would be in the President’s entourage could directly affect our movements once we left Khartoum to travel south. The rebels down there, he frowned, had of late been receiving much external aid from ‘Christian’ sources with a resulting flare-up of violence in the very regions that we must pass through on the only north–south track to Uganda.
And, he added, even with full Khartoum permissions in place, we still might be stopped or arrested by local authorities who tended to be laws unto themselves. Telegraphed orders from Khartoum often received long-delayed replies due to phone wires being cut by the rebels.
Charles and Peter, armed with binoculars, accompanied Ali and me in the official car to the Nile-side site he had chosen. The Blue Nile from Ethiopia meets the White Nile from Kenya between Khartoum and its northerly suburb of Omdurman. Close to this junction and just off the Blue Nile’s residential bank is Tuti Island situated in mid-river. Opposite the island Ali showed us the exact spot where the Rolls-Royce cavalcade of the President would park in order to watch their first hovercraft in action. The local media would also be out in force . . . so no breakdowns!
Standing on a headland not far away along a riverside path, we could see the confluence of the two great rivers, the Blue Nile from the east and the White Nile from the south. Beyond this junction the town of Omdurman, with its mass of mud buildings, shimmered in the heat haze. The colour of the two rivers was a dirty brown. I gazed up the corridor of the Blue Nile as far as the overall glare allowed and I thought of the Scots explorer James Bruce who, in the 1770s, managed to locate the source of that river.
Born to a family who upheld a claim to the throne of Britain, Bruce was briefly a Consul in Algiers, but he became intrigued by the ancient tales of Herodotus. He decided to find the Blue Nile’s source by way of Ethiopia’s Red Sea coast. After numerous hardships he located the source, Lake Tana, 900 miles upstream of Khartoum, and the spectacular Tissisat Falls, which he placed accurately on his map. After twelve years of travel in many remote and lethal regions, he returned to Britain where King George III and various geographers of the day disbelieved his account of his travels. Only after his death in 1794, caused by a tumble downstairs and being grossly overweight, did later travellers authenticate his stories. Dr Livingstone finally set the record straight and described Bruce as ‘a greater traveller than any of us’.
Turning to my left, the wider White Nile powered into the Blue, having already flowed for 2,000 miles from the heartlands of Africa and about to speed north for another 2,000 miles to the sea.
The central building on the bank, set amid gorgeous flowering gardens, was Gordon’s Palace, alongside Kitchener Avenue and a number of ministry buildings. Ali showed us a recent Daily Telegraph article which stated that our ‘expedition was doing much to improve the friendship and goodwill between Britain and the peoples of Egypt and the Sudan’. This seemed a touch premature, but Ali looked pleased with it. He took me then to meet the key minister, the boss of the Sudan Security Police, who was clearly hostile to any foreigners heading south, with or without hovercraft. He and Ali conducted a heated conversation which my Omani Arabic failed to comprehend, but as we left the building, Ali showed me his crossed fingers as a sign that things could go either way.
The great day duly arrived and Charles stationed Burton, the more reliable craft, on a shelving beach in Omdurman, a few minutes’ hover from the demonstration site on Tuti Island. Meanwhile Peter unloaded Baker on the bank where the President would be parked so that he could explain to His Nibs and other interested parties the finer points of the Hoverhawk, especially its unique ability to spray in places where no land machine or aircraft could reach.
Ali, in buoyant mood, assured us that the public turnout already at the demo site promised that the event would be Khartoum’s largest ever commercial demonstration.
Charle
s sprayed Damp Start over every working part of Burton. At exactly the right time, and on walkie-talkie confirmation from Peter that the President was watching, Charles revved all three engines and Burton slid away down the beach in a sudden cloud of camel dung spray which scattered a crowd of onlookers, and then surged into the Blue Nile with a powerful wind astern and headed for Tuti Island.
The presidential convoy had arrived dead on schedule and a military band in front of Gordon’s Palace struck up as the three purple Rolls-Royces drew to a regal halt, Sudan flags flying from their bonnets. Everybody saluted (whether or not they wore hats).
The President was a little man with thick spectacles. I shook his proffered hand and then those of the three chief ministers who stood immediately behind him. They were also small.
I introduced Peter to the massed crowds by way of a loudspeaker system and by liaising with the President’s interpreter.
Charles arrived on time and a murmur of anticipation rippled through the crowds. At maximum speed, Charles executed a series of 60-degree skid turns directly below the President and a line of army generals with medal-spattered uniforms.
The Hoverhawk then danced about with Peter using the radio and telling Charles what to do in response to the rapturous cheers of the onlookers.
Charles suddenly turned Burton towards Tuti Island and headed at 30 knots straight for its beach. The President grunted in alarm and then released an audible sigh when the machine simply left the water and roared up the island’s beach, went over a couple of low sand dunes and returned to the river. A murmur of wonder, as at some magician’s mysterious illusion, followed this amphibious display. So Peter told Charles to repeat it.
Half an hour of island-hopping later, Charles advised Peter that Burton’s drive engine was beginning to overheat and he was himself sweating like a caged pig as Burton’s windows were jammed shut.
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