Heat

by Ranulph Fiennes

  After many minutes of painfully slow descent, the two-inch-long alloy crocodile clasp, which slid down the rope at a speed that I could control with a lever, suddenly came up sharp against a knot of rope coils. I winced as the rope elasticated. I imagined the feel of it breaking and the sudden rush of air. Panic was not far off. Sweat stung my eyes. Because all my body weight rested on the point where the metal teeth grasped the knot and since there could be no upward impetus from my dangling legs, it took me many long minutes to free the impediment without disentangling my lifeline by mistake. For a while I despaired, then a lucky tug freed the coil, and ten minutes later I arrived, shaky kneed, at the floor of the great shaft.

  The foul stench of civet dung hung about in the warm air and I heard the scrabble and snarl of the striped cats in the darkness. Andy arrived after twenty minutes and I followed him, via boulders and sloping ledges, past stalactites and a descending series of passages, to the edge of a scum-laden lake. The beam of his head torch disturbed a cloud of flying creepy-crawlies.

  On a previous visit Andy had secreted two Land Rover inner tubes close by, and stripping down to our pants and desert boots, we slipped into the evil-smelling waters.

  Andy beckoned me away from one side wall where a swarm of wasp-like insects rose in anger or alarm from their nest.

  ‘There are blind fish in the caves.’ Andy pointed downwards and added, ‘Keep close.’ I nodded, needing no second warning.

  For fifty minutes I swam on my black tube and soon gave up any attempt to memorize our tortuous route. Sometimes the ceiling on the tunnel approached within inches of the water and, copying Andy, I turned over and swam on my back. There was just enough room to breathe and then, when the gap improved slightly, to haul on a long cord attached to my tube to pull it under the obstacle.

  I kept a nagging claustrophobic fear at bay through total trust in Andy’s cavemanship, if that is the right term. But it came to me how easily he might suffer a sudden heart attack, for he was well into his fifties. How then would I find my way out of these evil waterways? Certainly not by memory.

  My faith in Andy collapsed and my inner fears surged when his white beard lifted from the oily surface and he spluttered, ‘Which way did we enter this chamber?’

  I told him and he disagreed. We bobbed under an even lower ledge with no more than three inches of clearance and I smelled putrefied flesh close at hand. An animal skull with wet, green flesh attached in floating ribbons nodded against my shoulder – some civet or goat lured to its death by thirst.

  After an hour and a half Andy shook his head, dislodging all manner of flying insects.

  ‘I can’t understand it,’ he grunted. ‘The main passageway must be underwater. I just can’t locate it.’

  So we gave up and, to my considerable relief, Andy found no difficulty in retracing his route to the entry point.

  We slept on a ledge free of civet dung until dawn when, back at the base of the crater and the single length of rope, Andy attached two special grips to my foot and shoulder.

  ‘You go first. If you get into trouble, shout, but do not look down.’

  After about four hundred feet the tautly stretched rope felt as thin as string. The swish and shriek of disturbed grackles and my empty stomach combined to make the climb unenjoyable, but I managed to force from my mind the tiniest thought about the ever-increasing drop below.

  When Andy joined me at the upper rim of the crater, he looked disappointed. ‘Never mind,’ he said, ‘we’ll come back when the water level drops.’ My enthusiasm to find the cave graffiti had lessened, but I took care not to show it.

  Some five weeks after the first key finds at Shisr, a police van with four armed officers arrived around midnight with a summons for me to go at once to the palace in Muscat. The officers drove me to Salalah and, by Royal Oman Police flight, I reached Muscat the next morning. A royal limousine took me to Seeb Palace, where various new ambassadors were being accredited. After an hour’s wait in what must rank among the most splendid palaces in the world, I was shown in to His Majesty Sultan Qaboos’s majlis. He was delighted with the success of the expedition and was keen to ensure continued excavation at Shisr until the ruins were fully revealed. He asked me to give him a list of actions I thought might best be taken to follow up the discovery.

  ‘Is it definitely Ubar?’ he asked me.

  ‘I believe so, Your Majesty. It is difficult to know what else it could be.’

  The warmth of his smile and the strength of his handshake reminded me of my meeting with his father twenty-four years before. I felt then that the long years of hoping, the setbacks and the false trails had all been worthwhile.

  I asked in my report to Sultan Qaboos that Ali Ahmed Ali Mahash be appointed Field Director for Archaeology in Dhofar, that Juris be contracted to continue excavations and that the Shisr site be protected against damage by visitors.

  To my delight, Ali Ahmed was duly appointed as director with responsibility for all future heritage work in Dhofar. I was to ensure that all artefacts were handed over to him before Juris and the team left Oman. Since I had personally given Dr Ali Shanfari, the Minister of Heritage, a document taking full responsibility for all such items, I was keen to comply.

  I sat on the floor of Ali Ahmed’s new office in the Ministry of Information for some three hours and handed Ali more than thirteen thousand artefacts, all fully computerized with individual reference numbers.

  The day we left Salalah, Jana Owen, Juris’s team leader, gave me her thoughts on the dig. ‘Very exciting,’ she said, ‘but hot, real hot. When things started to appear it was like striking gold. It was a lucky find but it is a very significant site. Now we have at least a year’s work of analysis.’

  On 5 February 1992 an article by John Noble Wilford was splashed across the front page of the New York Times, giving the news of our discovery of Ubar. This article was picked up and given widespread coverage worldwide, for there was a shortage of hard news at the time. All leading newspapers and TV networks across the USA gave the story prime rating and suggested that the project was an entirely American-inspired success. ‘Guided by ancient maps and sharp-eyed surveys from space,’ wrote the respected Mr Wilford, ‘archaeologists and explorers have discovered a lost city deep in the sands of Arabia.’

  When in March I returned to Salalah and told Juris that the American media were implying that we were led to the discovery by satellite imagery, he said, ‘That’s not entirely true, but it sounds good. It sounds like technology is at work and all that kind of rubbish. The truth is, it was found by hard work and excavation. The satellite imagery allowed us to eliminate sites so that we could concentrate on the most probable areas.’

  ‘Did all that LANDSAT/SPOT stuff about water help?’ I asked him.

  ‘No.’ He was adamant. ‘That’s just for publicity.’

  ‘Could there not be other Ubar sites yet to be dug up?’

  ‘Sure there could be, but where?’ he exclaimed. ‘I have been all over Saudi and the Empty Quarter for twenty years and nobody has come up with another site, let alone one that is both where Ptolemy put it and has Roman pottery. Something as big as Shisr shows up on air photos. ARAMCO and PDO oil surveyors had tracked all over the Sands for thirty years, never mind the bedu and the army. Yet nobody has reported an alternative. Perhaps it is buried in sand, but sand doesn’t move that fast, as you can see at Shisr.’ Juris thumped his knees. ‘Shisr is unique. There is nowhere like it in the desert for nine hundred kilometres.’

  In April 1992 I was asked by the Oman Minister of Information to become International Adviser to the Ubar Committee, a post which I welcomed, for where else is there a people and a land of such enchantment?

  CHAPTER 16

  As the Sun Goes Down

  Turn your face to the Sun

  So the shadows will fall behind you

  One summer in the early 1960s I was determined to enter the Special Air Service but was warned that the Selection Course in Wales was
too difficult for the vast majority of candidates. So I decided to train very hard while on leave from my regiment in Germany. An army friend who had tried the course and failed advised me to train by myself in the Brecon Beacons, always to carry 60lb in my rucksack and to map read by day and by night all over terrain as featureless and confusing as possible.

  One extremely hot summer weekend, somewhere in the Welsh mountains and out of water, I overdid my efforts, suffered a dizzy spell and a feeling of extreme nausea. I then collapsed and for a while must have been unconscious. I emptied the ballast of rocks from my rucksack and limped slowly back to the nearest road where I flagged down a lift back to my car. I believe I was on the verge of hyperthermia. Maybe I had not drunk enough at the time. Either way I subsequently took the Winter Selection Course and passed it without difficulty. Nonetheless my memory of that hot day in the Brecons came vividly back to me when, in 2013, I heard that three soldiers on the SAS Selection Course that summer had all died in the same mountains. They were on a sixteen-mile training course as part of the selection process which included an ascent of Pen y Fan, a mountain in the Brecon Beacons. The temperature hit 29°C (84°F) and, on his way down from the ascent, one soldier died of hyperthermia within two hours of becoming dizzy, and two others died days later suffering from multiple organ failure, all as a result of the high temperatures. All three men were young, tough and fit. Seven other soldiers suffered heat injuries that day.

  Some thirty years after my Brecon Beacons scare I received a telephone call from Mike Stroud and he suggested that we attempt a new record for marathon running. ‘It’s very simple,’ he explained. ‘We run a standard twenty-six-mile marathon on each of the seven continents over seven consecutive days.’

  ‘But neither of us are marathon runners,’ I pointed out.

  ‘With a bit of training,’ was the reply, ‘anybody can run a marathon.’

  He then went on to say that he had looked carefully at the challenge and the key to success would be to avoid heat, ideally running by night. Two continents would be hot – Africa and Asia – but research into the central computer of British Airways (our long-time sponsor) showed that existing jumbo jet flights could not give us a schedule which would allow our Asia run (which would have to be in Singapore) to be done by night.

  The African location was a choice between Egypt and Libya, and we chose to avoid the latter on reading that Libya held the all-time world record for the highest temperature ever recorded in the shade (57.8°C or 136°F) in September 1922.

  Singapore, which would have to fit into the pattern of BA’s intercontinental flights, would need to be run during the day in great humidity (immediately after Sydney and before London). Each run would be for a different charity and for the Singapore event we chose the Singapore Heart Association because I had, some three months previously, had a massive heart attack followed by a double bypass operation and three days on a life support machine.

  We tried hard to change the BA schedules but could not. Anyway, the first three marathons – in South America, the sub-Antarctic Falkland Islands and Australia – all involved reasonable temperatures.

  We were unable to sleep on the flight to Singapore, and on arrival there had only three hours’ rest before the pre-dawn marathon start.

  Mike kept a diary of that run:

  It was still dark outside the hotel but it was already stiflingly hot. It was also unbelievably muggy. Although we could sweat freely, we would gain little or no benefit. It was simply too humid for sweat to evaporate and the wetting of our skin would not therefore meet its physiological needs.

  Prior to starting, I asked the Sponsors whether needles and syringes could be waiting at the finish so that I could confirm my new suspicion of rhabdomyolysis and check that my kidneys were not in danger. This check is known as a creatine kinase (CK).

  Within an hour of starting the run I realised that this was the marathon too far. I felt sick and my legs, although still painless, had become utterly useless as the first few miles went by. The heat was stupefying and I thought that my whole body might melt into a pot of tallow.

  The remainder of the Singapore run was hard on both of us. The temperature climbed and the humidity remained total. Ran, too, was utterly exhausted, and he said later that at one point he had been sure he would fail. Nonetheless, he tottered onwards, drenched with water every few minutes by the helpers who were accompanying him.

  When the CK test results came back, I was passed a slim folder by the Sponsor’s chief medical officer and I quickly scanned down the printed figures. I was surprised to see that Ran’s CK was raised to nearly fifty times normal. He at least was suffering from significant muscle damage. Then I looked at my own results – which took a moment or two to sink in. My CK was a shocking five hundred times normal. It surpassed anything I could have imagined and confirmed beyond doubt that I had suffered massive muscle loss. This explained the trouble with my legs.

  Mike did somehow manage to complete the Singapore run and said afterwards that it was the hardest thing he had ever done. But we caught the flight that evening to London where we ran the Europe leg, then squeezed the last two marathons (Africa and North America) into the next forty-eight hours, including flights.

  The Egypt run began at the Great Pyramid of Giza with a speech from the Sponsor, Suzanne Mubarak, whose husband was President of Egypt. After the tortuous conditions of Singapore, Cairo by night was blissfully cool.

  As Director of the Army Personnel Research Centre at Farnborough, Mike had access to laboratories including a heat chamber, and at one point he trained and acclimatized an army team to run one of three races rated as ‘the toughest foot races in the world’. One of these was a 135-mile race in California’s Death Valley, which started 282 feet (86 metres) below sea level and ended on Mount Whitney at 8,360 feet (2,548 metres). This race takes place annually in mid-July when temperatures of over 120°F (49°C) are not uncommon.

  Another such ultra-marathon, over an even longer distance, is the Marathon des Sables (Marathon of the Sands) in which Mike had entered his team. His diarized account of that nightmare challenge in the Saharan deserts of Morocco made interesting reading:

  The race is held annually, and each year it attracts increasing numbers of competitors. They come from all over the world, keen to pit their strength against one of the most difficult of environments, covering in one week the equivalent of five marathons – not on smooth London tarmac but over rocks, plains and shifting sand. To make matters more difficult, competitors must each carry a backpack containing all food for the entire week plus all other requirements. With this fairly heavy rucksack, rough going underfoot, and the fierce desert sun, it is not a venture for the faint-hearted and many find it difficult to understand how such a race can be run. The answer lies in our remarkable ability to cope with heat.

  Running through our bare skin is a network of blood vessels that dissipate heat through the processes of convection, conduction and radiation, and if that is not enough, we also have tens of thousands of sweat glands which can automatically wet the skin to add the power of evaporation to our cooling. This ability to cope with heat stems from the millions of years of our early development in the hot cradle of Africa where our primate ancestors met a climate which would have cut down those who could not keep strong, fit and, above all, fertile through the worst of the blistering summers. Natural selection melded early humans to make them extremely heat tolerant and when, one hundred thousand years ago, they started to spread to cooler parts of the globe, they took this potential with them.

  Mike found it difficult to sleep at the desert start, due to growing doubts about the challenge ahead. He had acclimatized assiduously in the Farnborough heat chamber, but now with the sand dunes of the Sahara all about him, apprehension and self-doubt crept in.

  Some disconnected excerpts from his daily diary give an idea of the rigours of the event:

  The heat added to my consternation. It became exceedingly warm, far worse tha
n I had thought possible in April. By midday we were positively roasting, even lying shaded by the canopies. When the wind blew, it somehow made things worse, engulfing us in a wave of crushing heat rather than providing the relief one might have expected . . .

  The air began to stir and a light breeze started to flap our shelters. Within minutes the breeze rose to become a stiff wind and then a full-blown gale. It was an extraordinarily rapid change as the stars that had been gleaming with unearthly intensity disappeared behind the blowing sand. Indeed all was lost in an increasing, whirling stream of violence. Under the shelters the sand filled everything, and all but the heaviest of our belongings threatened to blow away. It led to another hurried exodus, after which there were pathetic attempts to eat without consuming too much of the wind-blown dust . . .

  At around 11.15 we departed, running down a trail directly into the storm. It was a bizarre experience. The sand was everywhere, and despite scarves around mouths and noses, we inhaled it, ate it, coughed it. Whatever we did with the rest of our clothing, the sand also got to our skin, and soon all moving parts became sore and chafed. It was desperately hard to run against the constant battering, and even when we changed direction, the wind still seemed to blow against us . . .

  Wherever we looked, the harsh sun shone. Its heat was reflected from every surface, burning the face despite the dust that now coated every one of us. Although only the second day, our lips were already dry, cracked and swollen. I knew that my core temperature would be running higher than was safe. Once again, I also suffered cramps and nausea as I became increasingly dehydrated. My body was sweating at a rate that my drinking could not match . . .

  With the heat and the constant pounding, my feet had swelled up, and the shoes I wore were now tight. Several toenails were bruised and, indeed, were later to fall off. The soles were also blistering . . .

  There before me lay the desert of the movies – rank upon rank of these huge sand hills extending to the horizon. Some were small, some big, and some gigantic . . .