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  If only Sultan bin Nashran or Hamed al Khalas had been with us, they would have known firm surface routes to follow rather than driving using mere compass directions.

  We veered off to an old oilmen’s trail leading to their 1950s exploration camp at Fasad, close to the edge of the Sands. We arrived after a great deal of manpower, sand channel usage, two burst tyres and a shattered half-shaft. I felt uneasy, for none of the men had been to this area before, but using the sun and the passage of time for direction we headed due west from Fasad wherever the terrain allowed and, after twenty-four miles of flat, stony plain, we came to a low wadi with many camel trails leading north-west. We stopped to examine them.

  Corporal Salim joined me by my vehicle to kneel beside one such track. I reflected that Hamed or Sultan would probably have garnered a great deal of information from the track, but Salim said nothing.

  ‘Could this lead to Ubar?’ I asked him, for I had explained my interest that, while looking for PFLOAG of course, it would be nice to find an old city too. He had agreed and sworn all our group to silence. They enjoyed the ‘shared secret’, he assured me.

  ‘Yimkin . . . Mumkin . . . Insha’Allah,’ he replied, shrugging and grinning. Maybe . . . God willing.

  We looked up at our eight men and our two drivers still outside the vehicles. Their heads were all mummy-wrapped in green Arab headcloths from which only their dark eyes emerged, their eyelashes dusted with white sabkha powder.

  I could see that they were unconcerned as to whether or not we traced the lost city, being happy simply to be free of the normal fear of landmines and ambush. My own fear of military censure at being so far from the Dehedoba trail did not touch them.

  We moved on, having decided that all the camel trails were ancient with no sign of recent usage by bedu or PFLOAG.

  When, in a narrow rocky defile which Murad had unwisely entered as an intended short cut, we jolted through a jumble of football-sized rocks and sheared another half-shaft, I decided that we must turn round just as soon as we escaped from the defile. But my desire to search the Wadi Mitan, often rumoured to be the site of old artefacts, was too strong. The wadi was, after all, only ten miles to our west. So on extricating ourselves from the defile and making Murad promise to drive without his usual abandon, we did reach the Mitan, and crossing it, for the surface was firm, we came upon a camp of nomadic Kolbani with a sizeable herd of piebald goats.

  After greetings, we collected hatab, the dead driftwood to be found in most wadis, made two fires and, having paid the Kolbanis for a goat in exchange for a large bag of rice, gave it to Murad, our skilled executioner and butcher. Some hours later, joined from nowhere by two old Rashidi bedu, we sat around two fires, each group with its great tin dish of goat and rice.

  An old Kolbani treated us, uninvited, to a seemingly endless dirge devoid of both tune and rhythm, which reminded me of the similar noise that often emanates from the Eskimos of North Greenland.

  Despite this mournful lament, I noticed that the platoon members were more cheerful than I had seen them for weeks. They began to sing a pop tune known to Omanis and Baluchis which drowned out the dirge and even achieved harmony at one point. They kept the beat by slapping the butts of their rifles.

  Normally any chit-chat between us when on patrol, or even in our Ayun camp, was muted, since anything above a low whisper was expressly forbidden under my platoon rules; as was smoking, belching and use of aftershave sprays. The adoo jebalis have a remarkably keen sense of smell and, to use an Omani expression, can hear a lizard sneeze in a thunderstorm.

  A young Kolbani with a permanent scowl interrupted the silence during a lull in the merriment, firing a question at Corporal Salim while glancing at me.

  Salim looked at me, clearly embarrassed. ‘This boy is shwaya magnoon [slightly mad]. He says you are a Christian. Aren’t you afraid of death, knowing that you will burn in hell? What shall I say?’

  The Kolbani, the Rashidi and the platoon men were now all staring at me.

  Luckily I had been told the story by Peter Southward-Heyton of just such an Ibadhi belief held by many bedu. So I was primed with the stock response.

  ‘We Nasrani [Christians] are, like all Muslims and Jews, people of the Book which clearly states that we will all go to Paradise. It is correct that the followers of the Prophet will go there before those who follow Christ, or those who killed Christ, but the Book does not say that we will spend the waiting period in Hell . . . Insha’Allah.’

  There was much nodding of heads and the platoon men looked relieved. The Kolbani had looked nonplussed and unconvinced.

  During another period of silence, I spoke to Salim since, although my Arabic was by then fluent when conversing with the soldiers, it could not cope with bedu dialect. Salim nodded and asked the old Rashidis, to whose tribe these deserts traditionally belonged, if they knew of an ancient lost city named Ubar or Wabar which had belonged to the ancient people of Ad and which was referred to in the Quran as Irem al-Adaat.

  An intense and colourful babble instantly arose involving both Rashidi and all the Kolbani, including their elder womenfolk. Salim listened intently and eventually culled the information that, although like the Loch Ness monster there had been many a sighting of ‘old ruins’ in the Sands all over the place, nobody present could specify an actual location. However, the Rashidis did have a cousin who ‘knows everything’ and was currently to be found at or near the head of the Wadi Jadileh, only a couple of hours to the west by vehicle.

  The next dawn, already sweating before sun-up and the ritual mug of Indian tea, I set my compass for the direct route to the Jadileh, took our leave of our Kolbani hosts and filled their modified vehicle inner tubes, which served as water carriers, from our jerry cans. The tubes, I reflected, were probably obtained from abandoned army or oilmen’s trucks.

  Before we set out I told the men that, whatever we learnt from the bedu at the Jadileh, we must then turn back to join the rest of the platoon at the Dehedoba. To my delighted surprise, they all looked unhappy at this news and Hamed Sultan, Salim’s powerfully built machine gunner, said, ‘But we have come a long way and the city is made of gold. We must find it before others do.’

  At the Jadileh we found nowhere that could be described as its ‘head’, since it petered out into flat gravel here and there, only to assume the distinct shape of a wadi again. And many places were soft bad going. There were no signs of any bedu. We were clearly looking for needles in a vast haystack so, by the second evening after leaving the Kolbani, exhausted from the hellish heat of the Jadileh search, we headed south and east, luckily without further breakdowns, to our correct patrol zones. My first search for Ubar had failed. In future, I determined, I would never try again without a bedu guide. At the end of Ramadan we were recalled to Bidbid in northern Oman to train with newly issued, fully automatic weapons.

  At the time our colonel was concentrating on hard training in the three northern Oman company camps. ‘Reveille at 5.30 a.m. in order to get most of the serious training over before the weather was too hot,’ he recorded. ‘By midday the temperature rose to 120 degrees F in the shade, the sun warming the volcanic rock and shale so that the heat burned through the soles of our boots . . . and the sun’s heat addled the brain.’

  He later added a description of a terminal training exercise with my men acting as adoo against the rest of the Muscat Regiment.

  The dreaded Recce Platoon . . . were told to be as daring and aggressive as the real rebels in Dhofar. They took this very seriously. They ambushed us before the exercise officially started, threw stones at us when we assaulted their position and blew up blanks and explosive charges in our faces. When night fell and we were securely in our sangars [stone shelters], they attacked us with fiendish stealth and ingenuity with an overwhelming weight of blank ammunition and pyrotechnics until, as I rallied my men and told them to sit tight in their position, the unmistakable crack of a live round whizzed past my ear. This could be dangerous, I realized,
and blew the whistle.

  Shortly afterwards Richard John, who had just returned from a long period of hospitalization in Britain following his chest and shoulder wounding in Dhofar, rejoined the Muscat Regiment as a company commander and suggested that my platoon act as enemy for a big night exercise in the Hajar Mountains. Unfortunately things got out of hand and over-realistic. Three soldiers were badly hurt and a Baluchi soldier crushed one of my fingers against a rock with his rifle butt. Our medic decided to cut off the damaged end of the digit with his blunt scissors in the dark. Luckily the bone defied his efforts, so he splinted the two half-severed bits together. Unsurprisingly, the wound later went gangrenous. At the time I was due a month of annual leave so, after a party in our barracks with the men, I shook all their hands. ‘Come back safe to Recce,’ Corporal Salim said as he dropped me off at Seeb Airport. ‘Where will you go?’

  ‘Up the River Nile,’ I told him, and then added, ‘Insha’Allah.’

  CHAPTER 7

  The White Aeroplane

  Two years earlier, during army leave from tank exercises in Germany, I had parachuted onto a 6,000-foot glacier in Norway and then completed the first recorded descent of the avalanche-infamous Briksdalsbre Glacier. That Norway team included Scots Greys helicopter pilot Peter Loyd and ex-Parachute Regiment Nick Holder who, after his spell with Gillette in Bahrain, had signed up again, this time as a captain with the Scots Greys.

  At some point over the years, Nick had suggested an expedition involving no glaciers nor hair-raising parachute jumps, but far more ambitious nonetheless. His idea was to ascend the White Nile, which was one arm of the Nile, the longest river in the world at 4,160 miles from the sea to its source. Nick pointed out that almost a hundred years had passed since British explorers, mostly ex-army, had first risked their necks attempting to discover the great river’s mysterious source which was known to be somewhere in the depths of Africa’s unknown interior. We should, Nick announced, mark the centenary of those great men by travelling the river ourselves, which he said could be done during a standard six weeks of annual army leave if I could get Land Rover sponsorship.

  As encouragement, he posted me a copy of The White Nile by Alan Moorehead.

  The idea did sound attractive and, glancing at a road map of the whole of Africa, there appeared to be roads or four-wheel-drive tracks all the way up or near to the river from the sea, passing through Egypt, the Sudan, Uganda and Lake Victoria in Kenya.

  Since Livingstone’s days, hostile Nile tribes were no longer expected to kill, or even rob, visiting foreigners as a matter of course, and Land Rover had sponsored me on previous less interesting trips. By 1970 such a journey was to become impossible for many years due to civil strife in Sudan, but at the time I applied to join the Sultan’s Army, there seemed no political or geographical obstacle to Nick’s idea.

  So in 1967 I asked Land Rover for a free vehicle. They said no, and that a 10 per cent discount was the best they could offer. However, they said they would help us to sell the vehicle when we reached Kenya.

  I visited the relevant African embassies in London, all of whom said they would grant us the necessary visas. Peter Loyd was, Nick and I assumed, a mechanic since he was a helicopter pilot, so we invited him to join us.

  By the time that I was on my Arabic language course prior to going to Oman, the supply of most of the requirements for our Nile drive had been agreed by civilian sponsors, or else we had been promised them on loan from friendly army stores. Where maps existed, I obtained them from London antiquarians, and Horlicks provided us with packs of iron rations. High frequency army radios came from Racal (founders of Vodafone). My fiancée Ginny agreed to organize things in England once I had gone to Oman, with advice from the hero of army expedition wannabes, Major John Blashford-Snell.

  I had earlier been advised to purchase a revolver and rifle in London and take them with me to Oman. These should suffice for self-defence on the Nile.

  During my language course in London, two of my original contacts at the four relevant embassies sent alarming messages warning me that visas would not, after all, be available to us, nor indeed to any foreigners without diplomatic status.

  In Egypt there had long been a military stand-off with the Israelis. This had suddenly worsened and the Nile was obviously the main north–south line of defence in readiness for any Israeli attack. Worse still, the British Ministry of Defence was rumoured to be considering the sale of a batch of Centurion tanks to Israel. Were such a deal to materialize, the MoD would not want serving soldiers, who could become hostages for Cairo to hold against delivery of the tanks to their enemy, wandering around in Egypt.

  And, after a period of relative peace in the region of South Sudan and northern Uganda, where rebels against the Sudanese government roamed forests and attacked army convoys, trouble was resurgent and ordinary tourists were no longer getting visas.

  An article about prototype hovercraft being developed to spray crops more cheaply than aircraft gave me the idea that our expedition might become ‘interesting’ to both the Egyptians and the Sudanese with their vast areas of cotton crops to be sprayed. We could, by giving demonstrations of such revolutionary machines on our way up the river, become more of an attraction than a nuisance.

  I approached Hovermarine, who had already made a suitable machine, but a fire burnt down their production line. Then I tried Hover-Air in Lincolnshire, who made the two-seater Hoverhawk which had a clever spray attachment to deal with crops in areas where wheeled and tracked vehicles would sink.

  Hover-Air’s owner, Lady Brassey, liked the idea of her machines proving their reliability on a Nile journey supported by Land Rovers carrying fuel and spares for them. A visit to Shell reaped an agreement to sponsor the fuel in remote places.

  With the hovercraft theme in place, I approached the embassies once again and received a completely new and highly enthusiastic reaction. The Sudanese ambassador, who had been Prime Minister of the country a few years before, personally interviewed me and agreed to write to his superiors in Khartoum in order to acquire the visas, which were currently unavailable to normal tourist applicants.

  To record the expedition for posterity, we recruited a freelance photographer, Mike Broome, and a movie cameraman, Anthony Brockhouse, to produce a documentary. Hover-Air agreed to provide a specialist mechanic. So, with a team of six, we clearly needed two Land Rovers and two Hoverhawks.

  A good friend of mine married the daughter of the boss of the Automobile Association, and he kindly agreed to give us an old retired (yellow-painted) AA Land Rover as well as an up-to-date report on Nile-side roads which were only usable in many places for a few months each year.

  The flow of the main Nile at the peak of the flood season (August/September) is usually some sixteen times that of the lowest period around mid-April. And well over half the volume of water for the year flows in only ten weeks between July and September, during which period the tracks running south in the immediate vicinity of the river are submerged, forming a swamp bigger than England.

  To obtain our visas we promised our embassy contacts a well-organized hovercraft demonstration on demand in Egypt, and in both north and south Sudan on specified dates. Should we make it all the way to the source of the Nile, Lake Victoria, a final show to the Kenyans would mark the end of our White Nile ascent. None of the four transit countries had previously ever been visited by hovercraft, so we had the attraction of novelty on our side, without which we would, like the vast majority of other tourists, never have received many of the regional permits necessary for travel anywhere near the Nile.

  The downside of this new hover-front for our basic goal, which was merely to travel the length of the river, was that we would now have to take the machines and their trailers with us all the way, an administrative problem summarized by Nick as a ‘monumental embuggerance factor’.

  Long accustomed to Nick’s habitual litany of complaints, I reminded him that you cannot have your cake and eat it.
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br />   ‘Well,’ he stated, ‘I am driving on this trip, not hovering.’

  Since Hover-Air had already nominated their senior mechanic to operate one machine, Peter had claimed pilotage of the other, on the basis that, as a fully qualified helicopter pilot, he was already an expert at hovering.

  In my earlier absence in Oman Ginny had kept a close watch on all things Egyptian, and we found ourselves experiencing very anti-Israeli feelings when one of their commando raids managed to blow up the main Nile bridge at Qena. This had the immediate effect of all tourists, whether travelling alone or in groups and irrespective of any previously issued travel permits, being forbidden to enter any of the countries within the nine Governorates of the Nile.

  Nonetheless I returned to Britain trusting in our newly acquired status as Hovercraft ambassadors and, ignoring all dire warnings of trouble ahead, we boarded a ferry from Dover in mid-February more or less on schedule and in freezing conditions with six inches of snow on the ground. Promised similar weather in France, in fact all the way to Genoa, we filled our radiators with antifreeze – strange precaution for a journey through some of the hottest lands in Africa. Unlike the rest of the team, I was well acclimatized, having arrived direct from Oman.

  Each Land Rover towed a trailer tailor-made by a company whose normal product was the chassis of babies’ perambulators. The two Hoverhawks, named Baker and Burton after Nile explorers, stuck out over the sides of these one-off trailers, for they were fifteen feet long and nine feet wide. So their width was 18 inches more than that of the Land Rovers.

  We passed through most of France in driving sleet, and on reaching the Italian border had a great deal of bureaucratic interference from two sets of Customs officers when they saw our automatic rifle, pistol, military radios, maps and the impressive array of cameras and lenses in steel boxes.