Heat

by Ranulph Fiennes

  We had at some point passed from desert into that semi-arid zone known as the Sahel. The common perception of this region, which is south of the Sahara and north of the rain forests, is one of creeping desertification where the desert is advancing, vegetation is dying and dire changes are taking place at various levels of ecosystem function.

  Mean rainfall in the Sahel belt was adequate for local crops, but almost every year from 1970 until the present time it has been increasingly dry. Scientists now believe that this desertification is caused more by wind-blown dust than by lack of rainfall. The irradiant effects of the dust are known to influence climate change.

  Food, animal feed and fuel are all in high demand in Africa’s troubled Sahel region, but supply is not rising to meet demand. Researchers have analysed figures from twenty-two countries in the region, and have identified a falling availability of resources per capita along with increased famine risks. Between 2000 and 2010 the region’s population grew from 367 million to 471 million, but the production of crops did not increase at the same rate. Population projections indicate that the region will be home to one billion people by 2050.

  The region has already been hit by a number of famines, and harvests are set to decrease due to higher air temperature. If future droughts occur at similar climatic magnitudes as the ones that took place in the 1970s and 1980s, the Sahel will be at risk of mega famines, the researchers conclude.

  As the days passed and we moved south from the desert into the savannah scrub along its southern fringe, camels gave way to mules and oxen.

  From the relatively disease-free heat of the Sahara we had now entered the humid, pestilential fringe of the tropics. River blindness, dengue fever, yellow fever and malaria lurked and would soon increase as we followed the Niger south to Mopti. There was little evidence of poverty as we drove between the roadside villages, but the Sahel has a high death rate of children and the hotter the world gets, the greater the spread of disease in such regions.

  Every year seven million children die of disease and starvation and one billion have no access to clean water.

  One clump of bushes where we camped produced a throng of black Arab-speaking Mauritanians who sang to us at sunset, clashing their shields with their short spears while their women bounced their multi-coloured bead necklaces against their banana-shaped breasts to a rhythmic beat.

  For three days we drove south-west through foetid swampland forest and the irrigated rice lands of Kouruma until, at Markala by the Niger Barrage, we came to proper tarmac. Charlie in his shorts threw himself down and kissed this ‘real road’.

  Our camps were now in forest, not savannah, and under swaying baobab trees. One moonless night I heard Ginny moaning outside our camp perimeter, and when I found her she was lying on hard ground and ignoring the ants crawling over her legs. For several years she had suffered infrequent, but worsening, stomach pains. Tests had indicated a spastic colon, but this was never confirmed. I gave her aspirin, and by morning she felt well enough to drive. Twenty-five years later, suffering the same pains, she died of stomach cancer.

  Simon’s eyes were badly bloodshot, caused by the dust and the non-stop dribble of sweat which was made worse by his contact lenses. In Loulouni, near the Ivory Coast border, he bartered a pair of khaki shorts for guavas and yams, from which exotic mix he produced a tasty meal. We sat round a log fire in a clearing surrounded by tall elephant grass, while lightning forked and thunder rumbled in the rain forests all around.

  We crossed the Ivorian border at Ouangolodougou and, prompted by Ollie’s last collection task for the Natural History Museum, which was to obtain water snails from the Bandama Rouge River, we entered the rain forest via Tiassalé.

  Ginny had failed to find a single fairy shrimp in the Sahara, but she had a second mission for the Museum which involved collecting a certain type of termite. And, she stressed to me, there was a huge difference between termites and ants.

  I studied Ginny’s detailed ‘ant and termite habitat’ notes:

  The need to conserve moisture . . . dictates that a termite colony must build a nest. Many build enormous mud fortresses. Each labouring insect makes its own bricks by chewing earth, mixing it with liquid cement from a special gland above its jaws, and producing a small pellet which it kneads into position on the rising wall with a shaking action of its head. Millions co-operate to construct their immense tenements. These may measure as much as 3 or 4 metres across. Some may have spires 7 metres high. Ventilator chimneys run up within the buttresses around the sides to allow spent air to escape. Deep shafts descend through the foundations to moist ground where the workers go to collect water. This they smear over the internal walls of their galleries and so prevent a lethal drop in the humidity of their microclimate.

  Ants, too, live on the grasslands, but unlike termites, have a hard, impermeable outer skin to their bodies, so they are able to march above ground, even in sunlight, with little risk of desiccation. Harvester ants swarm through the turf, indefatigably collecting grass seeds and carrying them back to their underground granaries. There, workers belonging to a special caste with huge jaws crack them open so that other less well equipped members of the colony can eat them. Other species, the leaf-cutters, demolish living plants, using their scissor-like jaws to shear the leaves and stems of the grasses into easily transported sections.

  Ants cannot digest cellulose any better than termites. They too recruit the help of a fungus. It is not the same species as that cultivated by termites, and the ants eat it directly. The nests of the leaf-cutters are not as obvious as termite hills, for they are built below ground; but they are even bigger. The galleries may go down to a depth of 6 metres, extend over an area of 200 square metres and provide a home for seven million insects.

  For an insect-free camp, we cleared away a patch of bamboo and undergrowth with machetes. Charlie, nonetheless, found a nine-inch black scorpion hiding in his sleeping bag and gave it to Ollie, who pickled it ‘in case it is of interest to the Museum’. Simon roasted a three-day-old chicken over a fire of bamboo embers using a Land Rover starting handle as a spit.

  Ollie led all of us into the surrounding jungle and along the banks of the Bandama with ‘all eyes out for snails’. We traversed a column of many thousands of half-inch-long black ants. Ollie swore when one bit his backside. The tree boles all about us were massive. Underfoot the vegetation was deep in decayed foliage and convoluted roots. Butterflies, weirdly marked moths and noisy dragonflies criss-crossed the dappled gloom until, as dusk fell curtain-like, darting fireflies took over.

  Ginny and I bathed in the dark, assured by the all-knowing Ollie that there were no crocodiles or piranha in the Bandama.

  Later in the week, once Ollie was happy with his slimy snail-haul, we left the jungle for the coast and the Ivorian capital of Abidjan, where Anton Bowring, Transglobe Expedition’s ‘marine leader’, met us and guided us through busy fish markets to our ship. Two of his crew were sick with malaria and were being nursed by Jill, the ship’s volunteer cook (later to marry Anton). Simon, with swollen glands and heat exhaustion, soon collapsed. He had done well to keep going until then.

  Late in November 1979 we left the Ivory Coast to steam south at our maximum speed of nine knots over the Equator and down the Greenwich Meridian into the Benguela Current.

  Flying fish died on the sweltering decks and the ship’s ancient refrigerator system gave up the ghost, so that two tons of sponsored mackerel, enough for the crew for the next two years, unfroze and turned into a stinking sludge that leaked into the ship’s bilges so that everything and everyone soon smelt of rotten mackerel. I dread to think what would happen if there was a similar freezer breakdown on a huge modern container ship on the Asia–Europe route, the longest leg of which is from Malaysia to Port Said in Egypt. This takes ten increasingly stifling days. By the end of this, crew members say, the containers (which are refrigerated) sweat as much as they do. A power failure on this run would turn to mush a typical cargo of 33
,300 kilograms of frozen fish roe loaded in China.

  The weather closed in and the ship rolled forty degrees each way. Somewhere in the Benguela Current off Angola and down in Number Two hold our forklift truck broke loose and crushed a generator, which caused battery acid to run free over the cargo in the hatch below.

  At times I began to fear the worst but, as we edged down towards the Skeleton Coast, the seas grew less aggressive and we reached Cape Town in time for us to prepare for the next phase of our circumnavigation, the first complete surface crossing of Antarctica by a single group.

  There is no place in a book titled Heat for our experiences below zero while completing the first one-way-only crossing of Antarctica, but some eighteen months later Anton and his crew, still all unpaid, managed to rescue the five of us from the Pacific side of Antarctica and took us up to New Zealand and Australia, where we held an exhibition in Sydney on the quayside and right by the famous Opera House.

  Ginny and I had long been fascinated by the vast heartland of Australia and had often discussed an expedition to traverse its deserts. Leaving Anton in charge of the preparations in Sydney, we stayed with an old friend from the Australian SAS regiment who regaled us with tales of early Aussie explorers.

  The most successful of the Australian desert explorers was a Scotsman named John McDouall Stuart. Aged twenty-three he emigrated to Australia and worked for the South Australia Surveyor General, Captain Charles Sturt, who had by then completed several successful journeys into unknown regions of Australia.

  In 1844 both men left Adelaide to explore the arid centre of the continent and locate the great inland sea of many Aboriginal rumours. They found no lake, but they did visit two great desert areas which they named the Simpson Desert and the Sturt Stony Desert. When Sturt’s second in command died of scurvy, John Stuart was appointed to the job. Both he and Sturt nearly died of scurvy too but, although the latter never fully recovered and retired, Stuart, after a rest of six years, was able to mount six ambitious attempts to cross the continent from south to north. The first four did well and the Royal Geographical Society awarded Stuart a Gold Medal, their greatest honour, and one they gave soon afterwards to Dr David Livingstone on the other side of the world.

  In 1860 Stuart and his steadfast colleague William Kekwick were sponsored by the Australian government to travel once again as far north as possible with various subsidiary missions. They had some months previously commissioned another expedition with more or less the same tasks. This other team was led by Robert Burke and his aide William Wills and they were already well on their way north.

  In April Stuart reached the epicentre of Australia, over 1,000 miles from both the south and the north coasts. Eventually, sick, tired and with scurvy symptoms he turned back.

  The same year Burke and Wills with two others, King and Gray, had struggled from their central base at Cooper’s Creek all the way to the coastal marshes near to the northern coastline and they did actually reach the sea. On their desperate return journey through the central deserts, three of them by then with two camels (having set out with fifteen members and sixteen camels), they became weak through lack of food, and when Burke caught Gray stealing food he beat him. Gray died soon afterwards and the other two eventually reached Cooper’s Creek only to find that their base party, after waiting for them for four months, had just left that very morning. Burke and Wills died soon afterwards and King only survived thanks to Aboriginals who fed him for months before a rescue group found him.

  Soon after Stuart set out on his sixth attempt to cross the continent, a horse kicked him unconscious and trod on his hand. Nonetheless he continued on with ten men and seventy-one horses. They were attacked by Aboriginals, but in July 1862 they reached the northern coastline and the Pacific Ocean. They had achieved their goal through Stuart’s dogged determination.

  The Simpson Desert produced temperatures and sand dunes to rival the Sahara. Some quotes by explorers into the region include this by Ernest Giles (1874):

  Being in a chronic state of burning thirst, my general plight was dreadful in the extreme. A bare and level sandy waste would have been paradise to walk over compared to this. My arms, legs, thighs, both before and behind, were so punctured with spines, it was agony only to exist; the slightest movement and in went more spines, where they broke off in the clothes and flesh, causing the whole of the body that was punctured to gather into minute pustules, which were continually growing and bursting. My clothes, especially inside my trousers, were a perfect mass of prickly points.

  And about Charles Sturt (1845):

  In 1844, aged forty-nine and partially blind from earlier expeditionary work, Charles Sturt left his beloved wife Charlotte and started on a third and final expedition – this time aimed straight at the heart of the continent. There, he believed he would find ‘a large body of inland waters’, so he equipped the expedition with a boat for sailing on this mythical sea. Instead, he discovered a sea of seemingly endless sand dunes – the Simpson Desert – and temperatures so extreme they shrivelled his supplies, prostrated his horses and burst his thermometer.

  Sturt was possessed by an almost manic obsession. Scurvy was turning his men’s skin black, and large pieces of spongy flesh hung from the roofs of their mouths. They were rotting where they stood, but still Sturt, now all but blind, pushed on. He wrote that he preferred death to defeat by this terrible land.

  From Australia our ship took us up to the mouth of the Yukon River, from where Charlie and I (Ollie had left the team for domestic reasons) made our way by open boat and skis to the most northern island in the world. The following dark winter months we spent in two huts with Ginny. When in the spring of 1982 the sun reappeared, we left Ginny to begin our traverse of the Arctic Ocean via the North Pole.

  Two weeks later, Ginny was woken by the alarm in her radio shack. She looked out of her window and saw an orange glow around the door of the neighbouring stores hut. Forgetting the temperature, which was minus 40° Fahrenheit, she rushed across to the store and, on opening the door, was faced with a fireball. The whole hut, with all our precious stores and parachutes, was a mass of flames from end to end. Ginny tried to use fire extinguishers, but she might as well have spat into hell.

  She woke Simon, but they could do nothing but watch as eight 45-gallon drums of stored gasoline exploded, soon followed by our rocket flares and 7.62 ammunition.

  Newspapers and TV reports all over the world screamed ‘POLAR EXPEDITION IN FLAMES’ and ‘CONFLAGRATION AT POLAR BASE’.

  Charlie and I carried on towards the Pole and arrived there on Easter Day 1982, the first humans in history to reach both Poles by surface travel. But, only a couple of hundred miles later, solar radiation had so gnawed at and broken up the sea-ice that we had to seek the safety of a floe which looked solid, in the hope that it would float us south to the ship before being crushed by collision with other million-ton floes.

  After seven months out on the moving sea-ice, the remains of our floe did eventually float us to within twenty miles of the point that our ship bravely managed to reach, despite near-critical damage to her hull caused by ramming ice floes.

  A month later we steamed up the Thames to Greenwich, some three years after we had left that point. Mankind had for the first time in history travelled vertically around Earth’s surface, a journey never yet repeated by any route.

  All the members of our team returned to their various homes across the world, including to the USA, Canada, Fiji, Scotland, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand.

  Anton, Ginny and I spent eighteen months paying off the expedition debts, and then we began to plan other challenges, including how to make a living. After so long in cold deserts of ice, we yearned to get back to the hot, sandy variety.

  CHAPTER 15

  The Long Hunt

  Ginny’s hard work in the polar regions was recognized when she became the first woman ever to receive the coveted Polar Medal. This was given to her by Her Majesty the Queen. She was al
so the first female voted into the hallowed portals of the Antarctic Club. But given the choice of expedition work zones, she would always choose the hot ones.

  In 1984 The Guinness Book of Records voted me ‘The World’s Greatest Living Explorer’ in their World Hall of Fame.

  In that same year Billie Jean King was their ‘Greatest Sportsperson’ and Paul McCartney the ‘Greatest Musician’. Their choice was in each case based on the number of world records the individual had achieved in their specific field. One such record in the ‘Highly Specialized’ category was that of the American Vernon ‘Komar’ Craig who had walked barefoot over a set distance (some 40 metres) of red-hot coals at the hottest recorded temperature of over 1,000°F (535°C). When, at the awards ceremony, I asked him how he avoided badly burnt feet, he said that he wasn’t certain but probable factors included the fact that water has a very high specific heat capacity whereas embers have a very low one. Therefore the temperature of the foot tends to change less than the coal. Water also has a high thermal conductivity, and on top of that the rich blood-flow in the foot will carry away the heat and spread it. When the embers cool down, their temperature sinks below the flash point, so they stop burning and no new heat is generated. Firewalkers do not spend very much time on the embers because they keep moving. Vernon assured me that he had, as yet, never been ‘badly hurt’ by his fire-walking and he was still seeking to beat his own heat record.

  The Guinness Award did not help to get me a dependable income, although I used it in my CV with all my ongoing job applications.

  By chance a good friend of my mother’s answered her plea to find me a job ‘somewhere exciting’. She was worried that I might end up doing something crazy and she knew that her friend had excellent Foreign Office contacts.