Heat

by Ranulph Fiennes

  This meant crossing the Midway Road once more from Salalah. We came under heavy fire from the foothills. Corporal Salim and Ali Nasser leapfrogged their sections forward, all jinking fast like rabbits as they ran. We gave them covering fire, then with the moolah’s men and my own we sprinted up the hillside with bullets zipping overhead.

  The mortars of David Bayley’s ‘A’ Company opened up and helped us clear the adoo position. A week later Tim Landon said that six adoo were buried that morning. He also learnt that a heavy Russian Shpagin machine gun was hidden deep in the Arbat Valley east of Ambush Corner. He detached Recce to hide in the valley until Bayley’s company, with our help, could entrap the Shpagin crew.

  Things did not work out that way. At least sixty adoo were using the Shpagin as bait with a well-sited ring of ambushes. ‘A’ Company was forced to withdraw with its dead, and by midday we were alone in the bottom of the Arbat; twenty of us split into four sections.

  All the men understood the perilous nature of our position. We had, after all, survived in adoo territory, heavily outnumbered, easily cut off with no means of rescue or evacuation given a single casualty to carry, over a period of many months. That we had survived this long was due to a singular skill we had slowly developed for nocturnal movement with silence and speed and always using the easiest terrain rather than attempting to force a noisy way through scrubland in order to follow a crude compass bearing.

  But down in the Arbat we knew that the adoo would look for an army backstop to the defeated company attack on their Shpagin group. We could not risk retreating from our hides in daylight, but we needed to escape from the valley before the adoo searchers discovered our location. Salim Khaleefa agreed that the less evil option would be to stay put for the seven long hours till dusk and pray that we remained undetected.

  The heat and the flies notwithstanding, nobody moved a muscle. But towards noon two young girls came into the knot of scrub where we lay. Their eyes widened in fear. Said Salim touched me, his eyebrows raised in questioning mode and his stiletto unsheathed. I shook my head but, to be shamefully honest, I regretted my decision as soon as the girls had run off.

  I remembered the words of an SAS veteran who had once trained me. His group had been surrounded by tribesmen in the Radfan mountains in 1967. ‘The bastards got our officer and one other, but the rest of us got away. They cut off both our men’s heads and paraded them about on poles in Sanaa. It was our officer’s fault. He could have had us all killed. An old shepherd had spotted us and, by the book, we’d have slit his throat. But our captain said no, and the old boy told the Radfanis our location.’

  Two hours after the two girls disappeared we heard the thrash of people moving through dry grass. The sound came nearer and we moved out of our hides as silently as we knew how.

  Somehow our long hours of ‘ninja-training’, as Ali Nasser called it, paid off, and after half an hour spent creeping through low undergrowth, there was no longer any sound of third-party movement.

  My signaller whispered, ‘“B” Company has been ambushed on their retreat. They called in the planes, of which one has been hit.’

  Night came at last and we made it safely back to the nej’d and our vehicles.

  Later the Sultan’s Armed Forces summaries recorded of Fiend Force operations against the adoo: ‘On 30 July, after an ambush on the escarpment north of Taqa, the platoon was engaged by the enemy from five different dominating locations and sustained one slightly wounded. Captain Fiend rallied his men and conducted a skilful withdrawal (the only course open), frequently exposing himself to aimed enemy fire and firing the .50 Browning machine gun himself.’ And, ‘On 3 August in the Wadi Thimreen, Fiend Force was engaged by an enemy force of 20 to 30 armed with automatic weapons. The platoon assaulted and outflanked the enemy groups and forced them to withdraw.’ And, ‘In October, as part of Operation Green Cap, Fiend Force again demonstrated their determination to operate independently with a small force in an enemy area.’ And, ‘The endurance, judgement and initiative on independent operations of Fiend Force have proved the ascendancy of a small SAF force over larger enemy groups on many occasions.’

  The Midway Road was used only once again that year as the adoo in the Central region of the Qara became too strong for the army. My Recce Platoon never used the road again, and when I returned with a TV crew in 1973 there were only three SAF officers in Dhofar who had ever motored over the Qara.

  By closing the road, the adoo controlled all Dhofar from the Yemeni border to the lands of the Eastern Mahra tribe. Once this troublesome tribe was subjugated by PFLOAG, the Plain of Salalah would be cut off with its back to the sea. The colonel’s chain of blocking outposts, the Leopard Line, was certainly a good plan, but time would tell whether or not it would prove effective in blocking further PFLOAG supplies and men getting through to the east.

  We of Fiend Force were determined to let nothing and nobody through at our northern end of the Leopard Line.

  Back in Salalah for a visit to the medical officer to sort out bad desert sores, I met up with Patrick Brook, who had just had a surreal experience. An adoo had been caught with a backpack loaded with anti-tank mines. By chance he had been taken to Patrick for questioning and they had instantly recognized each other.

  ‘Last time I saw him,’ Patrick told me, ‘he was a smart British–trained sergeant in the Dhofari Squadron of the Trucial Oman Scouts in Sharjah, to which I was briefly attached before my posting out here. He had come to me for his Leave Pass. I signed it for him! Yesterday, when he was brought to me handcuffed, he gave me back his old Leave Pass and apologised for “being late back”.’

  CHAPTER 12

  The Hottest Place on Earth

  The desert guides, Sultan bin Nashran of the Bait Shaasha tribe and Hamed al Khalas of the Bait Maashani, were assigned to Recce while we worked in the nej’d, the vast volcanic region between the Qara Mountains and the Empty Quarter, wherein only bedu survive, including those belonging to the tribes of our two guides.

  We split into three groups, having left our two lorries with their drivers hidden near the Pools of Ayun, our fortnightly replenishment point for water and the only place available for those who wanted to enjoy a body wash.

  The purpose of this three-way split was to cover our huge area of responsibility. Each group had two Land Rovers, ten men, a High Frequency radio and two machine guns. We were by then past masters at avoiding tracks likely to be mined. But we could never afford to be complacent. David Bayley had left one of his mountain outposts lightly manned for two days while his company was away on patrol. The outpost was surrounded, isolated soldiers were killed and their weapons seized.

  We never developed routine schedules nor returned by our outward route, except when forced to by an unavoidable bottleneck. In such cases we always approached the danger zone with caution and after sending pickets out on foot. We knew that it would only be a matter of time before we too suffered an ambush or an attack, probably when and where we least expected it.

  One ravine which we had to pass through beneath the cliffs of Haloof was almost certainly under observation by adoo watchers. We determined to do what our predecessor SAF Recce Platoons had tried but failed to achieve: to find a safer alternate route. So one of our three groups under Ali Nasser was tasked to search high and low (literally) for an alternate route through the maze of nej’d canyons, wadis and mesas.

  A second group under the moolah and Mohammed of the Beard would ambush and patrol the Dehedoba trail, the most obvious infiltration route for camels from the Yemen. This left only the endless wastes between us and the Yemeni and Saudi borders where nej’d and sand dunes met. Since the Sultan had no helicopters and no desert patrols in north Dhofar, other than us, we needed to penetrate deep into this poorly mapped region to ensure that no adoo supplies were sneaked through by any means. My section led this third patrol group, together with Corporal Salim Khaleefa and with Hamed as our guide.

  Before splitting up for our first
three-way operation, we checked our schedules for daily radio calls, using Morse once voice contact was lost. And I warned everyone for the umpteenth time to be erratic in their actions, setting no daily patterns of movement and never relaxing their guard.

  Over the months to follow, often in scorching sands with shimmering mirages of mixed-up rock, lake and sky, I grew very close to the men of my section of Fiend Force. They became as near and dear in my thoughts as my own faraway family. It was during this period of the Leopard Line blockage that I determined to find the Ubar ruins that had so successfully eluded my predecessors, Bertram Thomas, Philby, Thesiger and the American Wendell Phillips. I persuaded myself and, I think, my men that since our military task was to search the area north of the Dehedoba trail up to the Yemeni and Saudi borders, which we were genuinely doing, there was nothing wrong in looking for ruins as well as PFLOAG camel convoys. Our previous short search in the Wadi Mitan area had made me feel guilty of improper usage of Sultanate vehicles and men for a private venture, but this time we could genuinely claim that we were searching an area designated in my instructions, whether in the nej’d or the Sands, so long as we stayed on the Omani side of the Saudi and Yemeni borders.

  When my group’s Land Rovers called in at the pools of Ayun after a fortnight’s patrol near Habarut, the colonel sent me a message which boosted my hopes of finding Ubar. The new order was to find another ‘new route’, this one to lead from Thumrait to Habarut but avoiding the current roundabout trail based on the old oilmen’s tracks to their various drilling sites. This new route, the colonel advised, should, where feasible, pass by or near to known water holes, thereby covering the likely ports of call of adoo arms convoys.

  Since I had deduced that water holes were as good a clue as any in the search for the location of Ubar, this new order from on high was fortuitous.

  Knowing that sooner or later it was likely that Fiend Force would run into trouble and need injury evacuation from the nej’d, we needed to find a usable flat airstrip with no rocky bits and a length of at least 400 metres.

  With Hamed al Khalas as our guide, from our base in Ayun we patrolled in great heat to the west and south-west, sometimes in the vehicles and sometimes on foot, filling our chaguls (water bags) from remote springs that we would never have found but for Hamed. Names of these gem-like springs were often strange, but three that I do remember are Thint where Hamed said the adoo had once camped for months by the water hole, Abrun and Al Ghayl, lost in a godforsaken wilderness of lava valleys. From Thint one sultry evening Hamed led us, weary and thirsty, to a high gravel plateau.

  ‘This,’ Hamed gestured all around him like Moses showing us the Promised Land, ‘is the most narrow place on the Dehedoba trail.’ We walked to a flat stretch where Hamed pointed to a faded set of tracks.

  ‘The Beaver aeroplane,’ he said. ‘This runway was once used by oilmen for bringing supplies. Maybe for one month only.’

  I looked on my old 1954 oil map and, roughly at our current position, was printed Pasadena: Position Approximate.

  I measured the usable, reasonably flat stretch of the old runway at a maximum of 350 metres, just enough for a Beaver to take off at sea level (whereas we were over 1,000 feet) in cool temperatures (not in the current furnace heat at dusk) and without much of a load. I hoped that I would never need evacuating from here. However, Hamed took us a mile or so to the north of the strip along craggy ridges to a tiny, hidden nook surrounded on three sides by gravel hillocks. This was an ideal defensive position in which to camp and hide our vehicles, yet be close enough to observe the narrowest part of the Dehedoba infiltration trail.

  This became one of our bases for many months. Patrick Brook, now the adjutant back in Salalah, named it Fiend Field.

  From there and the easily reached pools of Ayun we made long journeys into the Sands, saw places seldom seen by anyone but bedu and laid ambushes to kill people about to kill other people. I remember it as home. Hamed once pointed at the near horizon, at a low ridge running west–east. ‘Only there can the adoo and their camels come by from the Yemen,’ he told us over a well-cooked dish of goat and rice. ‘Or else much further north where the nej’d ends and the sands begin.’

  The nej’d looked lifeless and harmless. In reality every crack in the crumbling gravel of our new home concealed something that slithered or crawled. Over the next few months Fiend Force sent foot patrols out twenty-four hours a day from this base. When on patrol elsewhere we left but a single section in radio contact and well concealed among the sweltering hillocks of Fiend Field.

  Concentrating on water holes and always with an eye on Ubar as well as the adoo, we drove east from Ayun and Thumrait to the seldom seen oasis of Andhur. I had studied the records of Thesiger and Thomas, the first Europeans to visit the ruins there. In 1952 they were followed by Wendell Phillips who completed superficial excavations which revealed a pre-Islamic fort, clearly built to guard and control the harvesting and storage of the frankincense collected from the surrounding area, in which grew the finest incense trees in the world.

  We left the vehicles in the Wadi Shiswaws after a three-hour drive among gravel canyons, and we followed a line of crumbling crags above the tiny oasis and its sudden array of date palm trees until we came to the ruins of a single small room within a larger stone enclosure. Immediately outside this unimpressive shack were the two-metre-long troughs of cut stone, which Phillips had assumed to be storage containers for dried frankincense gum.

  Hamed disagreed about the purpose of the troughs. He clearly found them distasteful, hardly even glancing at them. According to legends passed on by some jebalis and long before Islam came to the Qara, priests had performed human sacrifice here. To appease the Moon God Sin, young girls were buried alive in the sand, captives were brutally circumcised, disputes were settled using trial by ordeal, and incestuous wedlock was encouraged.

  When Murad said we would need to do a lengthy repair job on our vehicle before moving elsewhere, Said Salim was definitely not happy. The place was evil, he said. Later at Ayun (a happy place!) Said explained the nature of the devil to me.

  ‘The Shaitan [Devil] is powerful whereas we mortals are weak because God created us only from congealed blood and from the water poured out from between the loins of man and the breastbone of woman.’

  I confessed to Said that I had not known this.

  Frankincense today is a booming export for the health and perfume markets of the world and comes from Somalia, India and Ethiopia, whereas the Dhofar trade has dwindled.

  Historically, the infant Jesus was brought frankincense by Arabs on camels from the East, along with gold and myrrh, because it stood for holiness. Pagans in Rome and elsewhere revered it in the belief that their prayers would the better reach their gods along with the wafting of incense smoke, whether at ceremonies or merely at personal prayer.

  There are records of its use in Sumerian temples in 2500 BC. Shortly before his death, Alexander the Great was planning to invade Arabia in order to control the incense trade.

  The anonymous Greek merchant who wrote the Periplus as a guide to sailors a few decades after Christ’s birth mentioned Eastern Dhofar and, specifically, the Abyssapolis of Ptolemy (Darbat’s waterfall) where he noted that frankincense ‘lies in heaps’.

  Marco Polo wrote of the great cost of the incense and that the Dhofar rulers made a profit at source of 600 per cent. World demand was voracious during the Roman Empire. Great storage halls were built adjacent to the Temple of Jerusalem. Chaldean priests burnt many tons annually at their temples in Babylon. Pliny wrote, ‘Let us only take into account the vast number of funerals that are celebrated throughout the whole world each year, and the heaps of odours that are piled up in honour of the bodies of the dead . . . It is the luxury of man, which is displayed even in the paraphernalia of death, that has rendered Arabia thus “happy”.’

  By the 1930s over 1,000 tons of prime frankincense were being exported by sea annually from Dhofar, and a lesser amount f
rom nearby Somaliland where a similar hot, dry climate allowed the growth of frankincense trees, but these produced an inferior product which could be harvested only once a year, whereas the Dhofar crops were collected in spring and again in the summer. Pliny noted that the best orchards were to be found in the great dry heat of the nej’d to the north of the Dhofar Mountains (for example, the Andhur region).

  With Salim, Murad and Mubarreq Obeid (Hamed Sultan’s replacement on our machine gun), I left the others drinking tea around the Andhur ruins and, taking an empty ammunition box and a machete, visited a nearby ridge where a dozen incense trees grew seemingly straight out of the rocky ground. Their roots must be extremely determined.

  ‘Bad folk,’ Salim informed me, ‘once did this . . . but no sex.’ This confused me at the time, but I later found that he was right. The Dhofar rulers who controlled the orchards were wont to send prisoners from Salalah to collect the gum, but nobody who had recently slept with a woman or touched a dead body was allowed to pollute the sacred trees by touching them.

  The Mahra bedu whom we met at Andhur sometime later showed me which of the weird, contorted little trees, once the chief source of Arabia’s wealth, would produce the best sap, how and where to make incisions in the bark of the trunk, and how many days (three to five) to wait before returning to scrape off the dribbles of milky resin. The harvesting must take place only between March and August.

  The end uses of the incense were many and diverse. For instance, women drank it as a powder mixed with water to help the birth of stubborn babies.

  Long before garlic was used to ward off Transylvanian vampires, frankincense was burnt at the doors of wealthy Arab houses to ward off evil spirits (and to keep insects out).

  In China and India, Arabia and Africa, the plague was thought to be kept at bay with incense burnt twenty-four hours a day, but only by the rich for it literally cost more than gold, weight for weight.