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  ‘If it’s like this with Europeans,’ Nick commented, ‘God save us at African borders.’

  ‘That,’ Peter said, ‘is what our 3,000 sponsored Marlboro cigarettes are for – border easement. The modern version of coloured beads.’

  Peter kept a diary, unlike the rest of us, so I have quoted from it from time to time over the following pages.

  On arrival at Genoa we parked near the port, for our ship to Africa was still unloading its previous passengers. Although we were gone from the vehicles for less than half an hour, the locked cab of my Land Rover was broken into and my briefcase was stolen. Luckily I had with me at the time my passport and travellers cheques, but all the key permits for Africa, which had taken me so long to obtain, were gone. I phoned the Automobile Association and my embassy contacts for replacement papers to be forwarded to us at the British embassy in Cairo, and we took the ferry to Alexandria the next day.

  During the ferry trip two Scandinavian hippies entered our cabin and, not spotting Mike Broome (who was about 5 foot 2 inches tall), began to fiddle with the camera gear. Hearing them, Mike sat up on his bunk, cocked my revolver, and slowly spun its chambers with his best Clint Eastwood ‘Make my Day’ leer on his face. The hippies went white and rapidly exited the cabin backwards.

  Alexandria, where we unloaded, was once the headquarters of Alexander the Great and the greatest trading port in the world. Ships from everywhere in the then known world called there and their crews told their stories of far-flung lands and strange people. Ptolemy, soon after the time of Christ, produced the first map of the world based largely on information received from merchant princes and great navigators who called at the port.

  To ensure publicity for Hover-Air in return for their sponsorship, Ginny had prearranged an Alexandria press conference. This turned out to be a non-event, but she had taken the trouble to arm me with basic knowledge concerning the history of Nile exploration and this I had swotted up during the crossing.

  In 1860, the year my grandfather was born, the greatest geographical mystery in the world was considered, especially in Britain, to be the location of the sources of the Nile.

  For 2,000 years different dictators, including Alexander the Great and Napoleon, had sent out expeditions to find the answer to this conundrum, but all had been failures.

  The ancient Egyptians had travelled all the way through the Nubian deserts to the site of today’s Khartoum where the Blue Nile from Ethiopia meets the White Nile from the ‘dark hole’ of the Central African jungles. Because the Pharaohs realized that Cairo and the Nile Delta existed only because of the waters of the Nile, they naturally wanted some assurance that the source or sources of ‘their’ life-giving river would not suddenly dry up through natural causes or with human intervention. If the Thames dried up, London would still carry on thriving. Not so Egypt. Why, successive Egyptian rulers wondered, did the Nile water not evaporate or seep away on its journey through more than a thousand miles of dry desert? The Greek travel writer Herodotus travelled up the Nile in 460 BC to locate the source, but he turned back, no wiser, at the Aswan cataract. The Emperor Nero sent a team who reached the Sudd swamp before they, too, accepted failure. But by 1860, despite the Industrial Revolution and the detailed mapping of most of the world, including Australia and India, the Nile’s origins were still a mere topic of speculation as in the days of Herodotus.

  Conjecture was based on the first map of the world produced by Ptolemy which was published some 150 years after the birth of Christ and showed the river arriving in what is now Cairo, via the Nubian Desert, from the Equator in Central Africa.

  Further conjecture and, in the Royal Geographical Society which was (and is) Britain’s nerve centre of geographical and scientific exploration, heated disagreements were stirred up by two new sources of information. Or, as some geographers maintained, misinformation.

  One source was that of Christian missionaries operating from East African coastal towns like Zanzibar. In 1848 one of these, Johannes Rebmann, said that he had, on an inland trip, seen a great mountain, Kilimanjaro, with snow on its summit.

  Learned RGS members pointed out that snow on or near the Equator was out of the question and Rebmann must have seen white rock. But a year later missionary Ludwig Krapf claimed that he had seen another high mountain (Mount Kenya) with a similar coating of snow. Legend has it that this claim was the origin of the saying ‘a load of old crap’. A third missionary, J. J. Erhardt, then published a map of his inland journeys showing a great lake, in the same zone as these two reported snowy mountains, which he called the Sea of Uniamesi.

  In addition to the wave, some would say plague, of evangelical missionaries bursting with Victorian moral rectitude and zeal to claim African souls for redemption, there were also the Arab slavers and ivory traders whose increasing interaction with the tribes of the interior caused news to be passed to Europeans in the newly cosmopolitan seaport of Zanzibar Island, where in 1832 the Sultan of Oman from Muscat had established his new court. From there his Arabs consolidated a near monopoly of trading stations on the mainland coast.

  From Zanzibar these slavers reached Lake Tanganyika in the 1830s and Lake Victoria in the early 1840s. Meanwhile, the Egyptian ruler Muhammad Ali had established Khartoum as his Sudanese power base from which he sent expeditions south through the Sudd swamp regions to modern day Juba, then Gondokoro, south of which the Nile became unnavigable due to a series of cataracts. So the reported region of great lakes and snow-laden mountains was by the 1850s being slowly approached from the north and from the east. Only the hostility of local tribes prevented successive missionaries, slavers and explorers from locating the font of the great river.

  By 1855 some of the great lakes in the general region where high mountains had been seen were known by name – Lakes Ujiji, Nyasa and Nyanza. Mountains and lakes are the necessary ingredients of great rivers. Streams link them all together, and although by the 1850s very little of Africa had been colonized by the European powers, all were keen to stake their claim, and none more so than Great Britain.

  Due to their Industrial Revolution and with the greatest merchant navy in the world, the British were keen to protect their main trade routes both for exports and for the import of raw materials. Having successfully taken South Africa from the Dutch, they needed to ensure that the seaports of East Africa remained accessible to them and that whatever raw materials lay in unknown Central Africa would quickly become available to Britain. To this end they encouraged the Royal Geographical Society to spur on all efforts to locate the Nile’s source.

  In 1856 the Society selected two Indian Army officers to lead their first such mission.

  The many individuals who, with support from the Society over the next four decades, eventually traced Nile waters from their very beginnings were powerfully motivated. Some, like Dr David Livingstone, had chiefly evangelical and anti-slavery ambitions, but the majority, most of whom became household names in Britain during their lifetimes, were driven by the sheer excitement of exploration into the unknown and the chance, if successful, of personal recognition. The first man to lead an RGS-supported Nile journey, Captain Richard Burton, wrote, ‘The gladdest moment in human life is the departure upon a distant journey into unknown lands.’

  On 16 June 1857, only 101 years before we reached Alexandria, Burton and his companion John Hanning Speke set out from Zanzibar on their very first Nile-source search.

  Soviet warships crammed much of Alexandria’s harbour, alongside other East European vessels involved in the ongoing building of the great Nile dam at Aswan.

  If the Thames were to dry up, Britain would carry on with business as usual, but the Nile is the very heartbeat of Egypt. Since its vital water arrives by courtesy of several other countries (each of whom could, in theory, severely affect its flow by building dams or canals), it is a cause of national insecurity similar to that of the Dutch, whose nation is largely below sea level.

  To the north of Cairo the Nile splits into
two proud rivers, each with its own canals and dams which help irrigate the famous fertile zone known as the Delta, where the Egyptians harvest the best cotton in the world. For many years the cotton mills of Lancashire depended on the cotton fleet from Alexandria.

  A Thomas Cook official approached me. His name was, of course, Mohammed and he looked entirely honest. He offered to help us ‘defeat the Customs’. He was definitely a godsend, but even he with his network of friends within the Customs Hall bureaucracy found it well nigh impossible to explain that we were in no way Israeli spies despite our military equipment and total lack of any form of export licence, or indeed any paperwork at all. My explanation of Genoese thieves and replacement documents, even now awaiting us at the Cairo embassy, was sneered at. Money changed hands and Mohammed made sure that I observed each sub-table transaction, since I would in due course be reimbursing him.

  God knows how he did it, but after five hours of wrangling, Mohammed beamed a beatific smile of victory and, after payment of his rightly hefty bill, he waved our convoy, complete with all suspicious items, out of the Customs zone and into Egypt by way of a mule-cluttered market square and past the crumbling fortress of Qait Bay, which was built, Mohammed told us, on the site of the once world-famous lighthouse of El Iskandariya (The Alexandria). Said to be 575 feet high, this remarkable landmark included an outer spiralling ramp up which blinded mules towed cartloads of fuel for the beacon.

  The jet trails of MiG fighters criss-crossed the sky above the silhouette of the fortress to remind the three of us (with recent army experience of awaiting a Soviet attack in Germany) of the ongoing Cold War. Mr Putin, the new Adolf Hitler-of-the-moment is, as I write this, threatening the world with a new conflict, but back then our worries about Soviet-inspired aggression were limited to the likely ripple effects of their ongoing troublemaking between Egypt and Israel.

  At the local British consulate the car park was jammed with caravans, camper vans, Dormobiles and motorbikes, all of which it transpired had been turned back by police at the roadblocks set up at all exits heading out of town, no matter what visas the drivers held. This dampened my joy at being given an envelope sent to us care of the consulate by the Automobile Association, which contained copies of all the key travel documents stolen in Genoa.

  A serious blow, also included in our forwarded mail, was a letter sent to my home address by the British embassy in Cairo. Since I had, by the time it arrived, departed to collect the hovercraft, my mother had forwarded it, as pre-agreed, to Alexandria. It instructed me to abandon the expedition altogether. This was a problem, bearing in mind that we were already in Egypt.

  The letter said, ‘The Ministry of Tourism has reluctantly turned down your hovercraft expedition. This must be a great disappointment to you. It is partly as a result of the recent Israeli Commando raid on Upper Egypt. Security restrictions have been increased. The authorities cannot guarantee your safety . . .’

  Attached to this letter was a copy of a long signal sent from the Defence Policy Department at the FCO to my regimental commanding officer which included the words, ‘Any military expedition through Egypt and the Sudan would be vetoed, the more so as tensions are rising in the Middle East at present . . . This is all rather depressing and, frankly, I am pessimistic about the expedition obtaining political approval at this juncture. The political ramifications, though, are legion and no amount of willingness to help can eliminate them.’

  There was clearly nothing we could do at this stage other than confront our people in the Cairo embassy and hope to persuade them to let us at least try to break through whatever police or military blocks we encountered.

  The Alexandria British consulate stand-in that day was a Spaniard who wished us well in Cairo, and he called the embassy there to warn them that we were on our way, as though we were likely to prove a lethal liability.

  We had hoped to take the tarmac Delta Road to Cairo, but it was blocked due to a military convoy, so we had to use the more south-easterly route which was a narrow desert track flanked by salt marsh and running through endless miles of sand and gravel on the northern limits of the Libyan Desert. Sand had drifted across the track for long stretches so that, especially after dusk, there was no sign of its course.

  A trailer wheel punctured, its wheel nuts jammed and, losing my temper with it in the dark, I applied too much pressure with a spanner and a nut sheared off. Peter took one look, and said, ‘Dear boy – ’ he sounded exasperated – ‘it has a continental thread. You’ve been trying to tighten not loosen it.’

  Since the trailer was manufactured in Cornwall, not France, I thought my assumption was perfectly natural, but Peter from then on showed alarm if I tried my hand at any mechanical activity.

  Luckily Anthony had an inspired solution to the nut problem by way of a makeshift bolt, and we carried on to Cairo.

  Our first stop was the airport to collect the Hover-Air ‘mechanic’. This mechanic turned out to be Lady Brassey’s son Charles, who was the company’s sales director. He appeared at first sight to be entirely unsuited for the Nile job. He wore city clothes and, apart from a smart suitcase, carried an umbrella, a collapsible fishing rod and a pair of green wellington boots. A folded copy of the Financial Times was tucked under one armpit.

  Our team of six was now complete and we drove to the Cairo embassy by way of the Pyramids at Giza. We came to them at midnight and parked in the sands to stand silently while Anthony filmed them. The moon had come out and was visible as a darting boomerang between racing nimrod clouds. Pi-dogs howled from the desert behind us and I thought of the pre-Islamic days of the glorious Pharaohs whose desire for posthumous recognition had resulted in these amazing icons of early human engineering brilliance.

  I had read the history of the pyramids, as described by Herodotus, which explained that 100,000 slaves had toiled with a horrendous death rate to fashion the Great Pyramids of Giza. Over twenty years later in the early 1990s archaeologists would unearth new ruins behind one of the pyramids which indicated that Herodotus had got it all wrong. Then in 2014 further digging confirmed the identity of the original labour force to be indented, paid Egyptian workers. Egypt’s archaeology chief, Zahi Hawass, stated that the Herodotus myth, copied in many Hollywood movies over the years, of a multitude of Israelite slaves building the pyramids was rubbish. Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin on a visit to Cairo in 1977 stated that Jews had built the pyramids, but the chief professor at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University scoffed at this on the grounds that ‘Jews did not exist at the time the pyramids were built.’ He also explained how the labour force, in fact, involved no more than 20,000 workers over a period of twenty years; not the 100,000 slaves of Herodotus. It was also proven by DNA sampling of skeletal remains that only ethnic Egyptians made up the work force.

  The ancient Egyptians probably chose that distinctive form for their Pharaohs’ tombs because of their solar religion. The Egyptian sun god Ra, considered the father of all Pharaohs, was said to have created himself from a pyramid-shaped mound of earth before creating all other gods. The pyramid’s shape is thought to have symbolized the sun’s rays. Egyptians began using the pyramid from shortly after 2700 BC, and the great heyday of constructing them for royalty endured for about a thousand years.

  The seventh-century fanatics from Arabia, when first their blitzkrieg overwhelmed the Pharaonic armies, established a fortress where Cairo now is and, at that time, the planet Mars was in the ascendant, known to Arabs as El Kahira. Hence Cairo, their new capital of Egypt. They went on to brutally sack the old Egyptian capital of Alexandria, which would never regain its former glory.

  Peter’s diary, 26 February: Cairo was in a state of emergency with soldiers on every street corner and gun emplacements on bridges and public buildings. This had followed a series of Arab/Israeli incidents which had ended in the bombing of a commando camp in Syria last Monday. This does not bode well for our journey south.

  At the embassy, the military attaché, who had sent me th
e letter not to leave Britain, gave us a warm welcome and accepted that, ignorant of his orders, we had arrived in good faith. He arranged beds in the embassy compound for all of us.

  He also explained that we could not have come at a worse time. The very morning that we had arrived in Alexandria, the Egyptian government had announced a countrywide state of emergency and instructed all citizens to watch out for Israeli saboteurs posing as tourists. Hovering on any part of the Nile inside Egypt was clearly out of the question. This was incidental to our main aim, which was to follow the course of the river by any means, but we would certainly need to use the hovercraft once we reached the Sudan, where we had agreed to give hover demonstrations, including one to the President in Khartoum.

  So, since we couldn’t hover, we must drive down the riverside roads to the border and, according to the military attaché, there were now over ninety roadblocks en route.

  The British ambassador advised me that, although UK-Egyptian relations were currently good, they could rapidly turn bad if, as he warned me was quite likely, there was a sale by the Ministry of Defence of old Centurion tanks to the Israelis. (I wondered if any of these were the same ones in whose turrets I had spent many weeks on anti-Warsaw Pact training exercises in Germany.)

  Over supper that evening the military attaché talked about past Anglo-Egyptian relations, which seemed to have see-sawed from good to bad and back to good several times over the past century or two. To summarize this in simplistic terms and ignoring pre-Islamic times, Egypt was occupied by the Arabs in AD 640 and their influence was such that Egyptians soon began to consider themselves as Arabs.

  For centuries Egypt was merely part of the Ottoman Empire, but in 1869 the Khedive or puppet ruler, Ismail, became fabulously rich due to the American Civil War which increased the value of the annual Egyptian cotton crop from £5 million to £25 million. Ismail paid off the Ottoman Sultan and became, to all intents and purposes, the independent monarch of Egypt.