WARNING!
The instructions in this book are for extreme survival situations only. Always proceed with caution, and ask an adult to supervise – or, ideally, seek professional help. If in doubt, consult a responsible adult.
Table of Contents
Welcome to your adventure
Desert Facts
Water Chart
Glossary
eCopyright
Welcome to your adventure!
STOP! Read this first!
Welcome to an action-packed adventure in which you take the starring role!
You’re about to enter the Sahara Desert, one of the most inhospitable places on Earth. On each page choose from different options by clicking on the links provided – according to your instincts, knowledge and intelligence – and make your own path through the desert to safety.
You decide . . .
• How to escape a deadly scorpion
• Where to find water in a parched desert landscape
• How to handle a pack of hungry hyenas
. . . and many more life-or-death dilemmas. Along the way you’ll discover the facts you need to help you survive.
It’s time to test your survival skills – or die trying!
Click here to begin your adventure.
You open your eyes and blink quickly to get rid of the sand. You’re lying on the desert floor with your backpack next to you, completely covered by a blanket.
It’s swelteringly hot. You throw the blanket off, and with it a thick layer of fine sand, which also seems to have found its way into your hair, nose, eyes and clothes. The sun is so dazzling that you have to shield your eyes. You look around you – the arid desert landscape stretches for as far as you can see in every direction.
You piece together the events that led you here: you were on a camel safari, part of a group of ten people, including two knowledgeable guides. A sandstorm blew up: the noise of the howling wind, and the sand flying in all directions was confusing and disorienting. You thought you were following everyone else, but you must have been stumbling blindly in the wrong direction. There’s a movement in the bright blue sky – a dark shape circles. You gulp: it’s a vulture.
There is no one to be seen. The sun beats down relentlessly. You are completely lost, and, as far as you can tell, totally alone. You know you need to find help. But where?
You set off with nothing but the clothes on your back and your backpack, which contains a few useful things that might help you in your journey.
How will you survive?
Click here to find information you need to help you survive.
The Sahara Desert is the largest hot desert in the world. It stretches for more than nine million square kilometres across most of the northern part of Africa, in the countries Algeria, Chad, Egypt, Libya, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Western Sahara, Sudan and Tunisia, from the Atlantic Ocean in the west to the Red Sea in the east. It’s one of the hottest places on Earth, and one of the most hostile. People have walked into the vast, scorching desert never to return. If you’re going to survive you’ll need to have your wits about you.
Desert Perils
The desert’s lack of water is the greatest peril for any traveller. Danger also lurks in the form of deadly scorpions and snakes: the deathstalker scorpion is one of the most deadly on earth; the saw-scaled viper is responsible for thousands of human deaths every year. There are also larger animals that might prove to be a threat: baboons, ostriches, hyenas and jackals.
Saharan Landscape
Think of the Sahara and you probably imagine enormous dunes of fine, shifting sand. Sand dunes like this, known as ergs, can rise up to 180 metres high, and take up about 20% of the Sahara Desert. Most of the desert is made up of dry, rocky plains, called regs. Hamadas are large areas of exposed rock, which have been worn smooth by the wind. There are mountains in the Sahara too – the highest peak reaches more than 3400 metres high. Apart from the Nile River, there are no permanent rivers or streams in the Sahara. Known as wadis, rivers or streams are seasonal and most of the time they’re dry. Water reaches the surface at oases.
Desert Life
It might look like a lifeless wasteland, but some plants and animals thrive in the hot, dry conditions of the Sahara. Plants include the baobab and acacia trees, grasses and shrubs. Some have long roots that reach underground water reserves – especially those near wadis or oases, such as date palms. Animals include jerboas (small rodents), addax (a type of antelope), Barbary sheep, camels (which were introduced to the Sahara around AD 200), as well as deadly scorpions, spiders, ants and venomous snakes. Most people who live in the Sahara live near the oases. There are also nomads, who herd animals and trade between oases and cities on the fringes of the desert.
Dry Desert
Deserts are defined by their lack of rainfall: they receive less than 250 millimetres of rain per year. In the Sahara, most regions receive less than 130 millimetres of rain on average, though in the mountains it rains more. Rainfall is very variable – some areas might have no rain at all for a number of years, then 500 millimetres might fall in a sudden downpour.
Sizzling Sun
During the day the Sahara is hot. Temperatures of around 38 degrees Celsius are common, but it can reach to more than 50 degrees Celsius. The highest temperature ever recorded in the Sahara was a blistering 58 degrees Celsius! At night, the temperature plummets, often by 25 degrees or even more. During the winter months the temperature often falls below freezing at night.
Click here to find out some useful desert survival tips.
Desert Survival Tips
Here are a few basic tips that might affect your chances of survival in the desert . . .
• Water is your first priority and you need to be aware of how much you need. This varies dramatically according to temperature and whether or not you are using energy, but you might be surprised at how much water you need in hot conditions. Someone working strenuously in 40 degree heat would need 20 litres of water a day! However it can also be very dangerous to consume too much water. There’s a chart that can be found here to show water consumption.
• Keep your skin covered – it will burn very easily if you don’t. Loose clothing will help keep you cooler as you sweat (the wet cloth against your skin will cool you down). Cover your head, too – if you don’t you risk getting heat stroke.
• Keeping hydrated isn’t enough, you need salt too because you lose salt as you sweat.
• Don’t eat – it will only make you thirstier.
• Breathe through your nose to conserve as much moisture as possible.
• The temperature drops dramatically at night so make sure you have something warm to wrap up in.
• If you have no idea at all where you are, you are probably better off staying in one place, signalling as best you can, and awaiting rescue. But where’s the fun in that?
Click here to continue your adventure.
Even though the sun isn’t at its highest point in the sky, it is still blisteringly hot. You dread to think what the temperature will be like at midday, as you stagger across the barren, rocky ground towards the meagre shade offered by a large boulder. You sit down while you decide what to do.
You could stay put and wait for rescue – maybe you could spell out SOS with rocks. On the other hand, you could easily die of thirst before help arrives. You think about it . . . you feel you have to do something – just sitting around waiting will drive you mad.
You check in your backpack – things could be a lot worse. You were one of the water carriers in your group and so you have four litres of water in plastic bottles. You take a grateful swig from one of them. There are matches in
your backpack too which will come in handy for making fires, as well as several other useful items including a spade, sun cream and an aluminium mess tin, which you can use to boil water. You’re well dressed for the desert in a loose cotton shirt, trousers and a scarf which you can wrap around your face in case of another sand storm. You also have a blanket for the cold night.
The water you have probably won’t last very long if you walk in this terrible heat, so you’ll have to find another water source pretty quickly. It will last much longer if you rest and travel at night, though.
If you decide to go in search of water, click here.
If you decide to rest now, shelter from the sun, and travel later, click here.
You feel as though you’re being slowly roasted. The trees seem much farther away than you thought. It can be hard to judge distances in the desert, because there aren’t any of the objects you’d normally use for reference – cars, lamp posts, people. A pile of rocks could be small and quite close, or large and far away. The same goes for trees, if you’re not familiar with the type. You’re sweating so much that your cotton shirt is drenched, and the weighty backpack feels heavier than ever. Maybe if you took off some of your clothes you might feel a bit cooler?
If you decide to take off some clothes, click here.
If you decide to carry on as you are, click here.
You wriggle out of the cave. You’re right to be careful of dark, enclosed spaces – there could be snakes or other creatures lurking in there. And, in fact, in that cave there were deadly scorpions!
You make yourself comfortable in the shade. Even though you’re still hot, resting and keeping as cool as you can is the best policy in the desert during the day. At night the temperature drops dramatically and the exercise will keep you warm. You rest and doze, making sure you take sips of water whenever you’re awake.
As dusk begins to fall, you spot a dry stream bed and decide to go and investigate, in search of water.
Click here.
You approach the feeding pack. Most of the jackals scatter, but three remain, feeding on the animal carcass – it looks like a young gazelle. The meat looks fresh, and isn’t smelly, so it must be a recent kill. The jackals seem to be nervous creatures, and you’re not worried. You think about using some of your matches to get a fire going and roasting some of the meat.
You’re a metre or so from the dead animal. Two of the jackals lope off, but the remaining one growls at you and bares its teeth. You wave your arms, expecting it to run away, but it runs towards you. You aim a kick, miss, and the jackal bites your arm. You cry out in pain. The wound isn’t bleeding much, but it’s very painful. You aim another kick at the jackal and it runs off to join the rest of its pack.
You sit down, feeling faint. You know that all members of the dog family harbour a wide variety of bacteria in their mouths, so you use some of your water to wash the wound. The bleeding soon stops, but unfortunately, despite the fact that you poured water on the wound, the jackal has given you blood poisoning, also known as sepsis. Soon the wound is red, painful and oozing pus. You feel weak and dizzy, and have to lie down. Alone and without medical attention, you’re too weak to find more water. The infection and lack of water soon kill you.
The end.
Click here to return to the beginning and try again.
Click here to find out more about jackals.
Jackals
• There are three species of African jackal: the common or golden jackal, the side-striped jackal, and the black-backed jackal. The golden jackal is the one that lives in northern Africa, and it’s also the biggest, at about one metre long and half a metre to the shoulder.
• Jackals usually hunt singly or in pairs, although sometimes bigger family groups hunt in packs. Groups might congregate to feed on carrion.
• Jackals eat a wide variety of food: they prey on rodents, small mammals, lizards, snakes, carrion, fruit, insects (including dungbeetles) and also young gazelles. They attack animals up to three times their own weight. However, it’s extremely unusual for them to attack a human being – usually they will run away.
• Jackals are crepuscular (active at dawn and dusk), to avoid the heat of the desert sun.
Click here to return to your adventure.
You take off your shirt and trousers, but you don’t feel any better, and soon you put your clothes back on, realising that you were cooler before anyway. The skin across your shoulders stings as you put your shirt on.
By the time you get to the parched-looking trees, you’re sunburnt, exhausted and dehydrated. There’s no visible water. Wearily, you begin to dig – but this just makes you sweat even more and you soon develop heat exhaustion and then heat stroke. You crawl into a patch of shade under a tree. Your last thought is that you should have rested until nightfall.
The end.
Click here to return to the beginning and try again.
Click here to find out more about heat stroke.
Heat Stroke
• Heat exhaustion occurs when the body temperature rises above 37 degrees Celsius, which can be treated by drinking water and keeping cool.
• Heat stroke occurs when the body temperature is above 40 degrees Celsius. Victims can be confused, with shallow and quick breathing.
• If heat stroke isn’t treated immediately, the body overheats and organs stop functioning normally, eventually leading to death.
Click here to return to your adventure.
You’re pretty sure this is south. Ahead of you stretches a gravelly, arid plain, with dunes in the distance. It doesn’t look very promising. But you trudge off, using the dunes and a rocky escarpment to your right to keep you on your course.
Click here.
Unknown to you, there are scorpions in this shallow cave, sheltering from the heat of the day just as you are. One, a large deathstalker, is scuttling further back into the cave to get away from you when you move your foot and kick it by accident. Alarmed, the scorpion raises its deadly sting and strikes, injecting a lethal dose of venom into your ankle.
The pain from the sting is agonising. You curse yourself for not checking inside first as you hurriedly move out of the cave to avoid risking another sting. You don’t know what’s stung you, but you remember there are dangerous scorpions in the Sahara.
Your ankle becomes numb. You use some water to wash it, in case it helps. Unfortunately, it doesn’t. Your tongue becomes swollen, you feel dizzy and feverish, and begin to have difficulty swallowing and breathing. Your heart races.
It’s not long before the scorpion’s venom kills you.
The end.
Click here to return to the beginning and try again.
Click here to find out more about the deathstalker scorpion.
Deathstalker Scorpion
• The deathstalker scorpion is one of the world’s most venomous scorpions. Despite this, a sting from a deathstalker wouldn’t usually kill a healthy adult human – though the sting is extremely painful. If you are sick, a child or an old person, you’re in more danger.
• Deathstalkers are found in North Africa and the Middle East. They can grow up to about ten centimetres long and are yellowish in colour.
• They prey on insects and spiders. Their pincers are weak, which is why their venom is so powerful – so that it kills prey quickly to stop it scuttling out of the scorpion’s grasp.
• Along with most other scorpions, deathstalkers are nocturnal, spending the day in burrows or under rocks.
• There are more than 1,500 different species of scorpion. Most live in desert regions, but there are also scorpions that live in rainforests and temperate regions.
• In times of food shortage, scorpions are able to lower their metabolic rate so that they can survive long periods – up to a year – without eating.
• Scorpions usually prey on insects and other invertebrates, but they’ll eat almost anything, including other scorpions.
Click here to return to your adventure.
A movement catches your eye: in the moonlight you spot a snake side-winding down a sand dune, leaving a regular pattern behind it. It’s a sand viper, which prey mostly on lizards. You watch as it moves gracefully off on its night time hunt.
The dunes stretch into the distance, where they look as though they must be several storeys high.
Should you trek along the sand dune, or find another route? It’ll mean changing from your chosen course.
If you decide to alter your course away from the sand dune, click here.
If you decide to walk in the dune, click here.
The building’s little more than a tiny mud hut, half falling down, but it provides all the shade you need. After checking for creatures, you spread out your blanket and rest all day in the heat, making sure you drink enough water. As dusk descends and the temperature rapidly cools, you pick up your things and decide which direction to take.
But your attention’s caught by some noises outside. You investigate, and discover a group of what look like dogs in the distance. You recognise them as jackals. It looks as though they’ve found a dead animal to eat.
As long as the animal is recently dead, you could shoo away the jackals, then make a fire and cook some of the meat for yourself.
If you decide to shoo away the jackals from their food, click here.
If you decide to steer clear of the animals, click here.
You scan the landscape for somewhere suitable to shelter from the sun for the day. There’s a ridge of higher ground with plenty of big boulders that should provide shade. Or, further away, you can see what looks like a small rectangular building.
Lost... in the Desert of Dread Page 1