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  Peter gave the radio’s microphone to the President who said hello to Charles and congratulated him. The microphone then went from general to general, allowing each to greet Charles and tell him to exercise some order or other. One wanted Charles to reverse and another asked if the machine could dive to the riverbed.

  Eventually Peter took back the microphone and ordered Charles to head back to Omdurman before he or the machine overheated.

  The President and his entourage, both the military and the civilian types, thanked me and again shook hands. The President said that there was definitely a great future for hovercraft in his country and he wished us well for our continued journey south. This last blessing was music to my ears.

  Within the hour the crowds, after much clambering about on and inside Baker, disappeared for their siesta.

  A few months later a military coup overthrew the President and his government and began to display a violently anti-Western policy. A number of Khartoum-based British businessmen were jailed for ‘spying activities’. But this was in the future and we cared only for the immediate moment and, specifically, to make much better mileage with speed in order to beat the imminent start of the annual rains which would quickly block any chance of us clearing the vast Sudd swamp zone of the Nile.

  As we basked in the success of our demo, black thunder clouds gathered south of Khartoum.

  CHAPTER 9

  The Sudd

  For thirty miles south of Khartoum, a low land of rolling grasslands through which the White Nile sped to meet its Blue sister gave us an easy ride on both road and river. Then at the Jebel Aulia dam we loaded both Hawks onto the trailers and drove them to the nearest point where road met river near a usable entry beach. This was close to the camel village of Ed Dueim.

  We camped where great flocks of smelly goats and families of camels waded and dipped in the shallows to drown their fleas, and where they appeared to hold their heads back to gargle with mouthfuls of filthy water.

  At dusk, unlike in Nubia, the day’s heat did lessen a touch, but the clammy atmosphere of high humidity made us quickly tetchy, a mood considerably aggravated by the noisy swarms of flying ants that seemed to favour attacking our eyes, nose and lips. In Arabia the desert flies usually disappeared at dusk, but not in Ed Dueim where they buzzed about, fat and slow with a potent bite.

  Within a week of leaving Khartoum I nursed a number of raw spots in various parts of my body where scratches and sores had suppurated and grown into swollen areas which failed to respond to my antiseptic cream.

  My finger, squashed and half-severed on exercise back in Oman, was now badly infected and, as a result, throbbed much of the time. Various open sores on my feet and ankles refused to heal, which made wearing shoes uncomfortable, and barefoot walking was inadvisable due to the omnipresent camel thorns which were needle sharp.

  We propped the machines up on jerry cans, in lieu of heavy jacks. This was precarious but workable and our mechanics, Charles and Peter, wriggled underneath both Hawks with pop rivet guns to strengthen the skirts wherever river flotsam had caused tears to develop.

  We woke early, boiled water for coffee and set out in order to make maximum mileage, ever mindful of the imminent rains. Soon all tracks within a hundred miles would be submerged by the swollen river, making them impassable for the next seven months. Since all our planned refuelling camps were, of course, beside the river, no Land Rovers meant no fuel for hovering. We therefore wasted no time and put up with minimal sleep.

  Most nights beside the river were accompanied by an orchestra, at least till midnight, consisting of the croak of a thousand giant toads, the churr of nightjars, the beat of distant drums and the querulous hooting of marsh owls.

  We came to Kosti and found a muddy spit below the road bridge, and there we waited for the Hawks. They were very late due to a sudden increase in the floating rafts of water hyacinth, over which hovering was a rapidly learnt and very necessary skill. Peter explained the problem thus: ‘Because any matter that gets between the skirt and its contact with the water breaks the vacuum of the cushion of air on which the Hawk floats, you need maximum speed to traverse each new stretch of hyacinth. So you have to be constantly aware of your speed and of the exact extent of each new obstacle ahead which you can’t avoid. If your speed runs out before you reach clear water beyond a given “cabbage patch” – that’s what I call the hyacinth isles – you will grind to a halt enmeshed in it. Then the only way forward is to lean overboard and methodically clear away the “cabbage” by hand and bit by bit.’

  Whenever we were forced to wade in the shallows, we kept an eye open for snakes and crocodiles, especially the latter. The green-eyed Nile crocodile is the biggest of Africa’s twenty-three crocodilian species and accounts for as many as 200 human deaths a year, typically by exploding from the shallows to pounce on anyone on the riverbank. It is smaller than its saltwater cousin, found in Australia and south-east Asia, but none the less daunting in its dimensions. The larger of its kind will measure up to 20 feet and weigh 1,650 lbs (730 kg). When it achieves this considerable size, the crocodile will take not only fish but zebras, small hippos, wildebeest and humans. These creatures, a throwback to the age of dinosaurs, which can hold their breath underwater for two hours, are the indisputable kings of the river. But they haven’t had it all their own way. During the colonial era and beyond they were hunted until populations were desperately small. Particularly prized was their rough reptilian skin used for shoes and handbags.

  I hoped that the crocodiles that doubtless watched our own passage up their river and through their hunting grounds would be put off grabbing us by the noise and unusual appearance of our hovercraft. The two that I saw in the swamp zone were sunbathing on a papyrus island and looked docile. Their jaws were half open which, according to the all-knowing Charles, was to keep them cool, rather like dogs panting.

  ‘Further upriver,’ Charles added, ‘in Lake Tanganyika and the Burundi region of the Ruzizi River, there is much perennial civil strife and bodies are often tossed into the river which provides a ready food source for the local crocs. In that area individuals have been measured at 25 feet long and weighing a ton.’

  ‘Snakes,’ Charles continued, ‘are also at home in the river, especially where the water hyacinth attracts large frog populations. When my accountant was canoeing last year on the Ugandan Nile, she was bitten at a riverside night-stop by a black mamba. The tour guide sucked at the twin holes of the bite, but she died in less than an hour.’

  Unfortunately we found parts of the river where the green weed formed barriers that stretched, with very few gaps, right across the waterway. Only Peter’s admirable skill prevented him from being trapped in mid-river on many occasions. Charles said that river fishermen were increasingly worried that their industry would soon be wiped out in Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda unless some means of eradicating the floating plant (Eichornia crassipes) could be found. ‘Maybe a larger hovercraft with spray tanks would be the answer,’ he mused. ‘Especially since the water trapped beneath the floating bulbs is a known breeding ground for such deadly diseases as cholera, bilharzia and malaria.’ In places, when hauling a hovercraft out of the river, we had to wade through several yards of floating weed and could often walk over the solid mass of vegetation. Insects love the fetid heat and the abundance of rotting debris which provides an ideal spawning ground. Mosquitoes, giant wasps and every form of fly choke the air, and dragonflies feed off butterflies, spiders and death’s head moths.

  Romolo Gessi, an Italian colleague of General Gordon of Khartoum, wrote of the Sudd, ‘In the dead calms in these vast marshes the feeling of melancholy produced is beyond description. The White Nile is a veritable Styx.’

  Word passed around of our arrival in Kosti and in no time at all several hundred locals were climbing all over the Hawks, making it next to impossible to work on them. We decided not to camp at all until we could find a human-free area.

  During the brief period we spent
on the Kosti mud-spit, several rafts of the mauve-coloured flowers of the hyacinth floated up against the spit and separated the Hawks from the nearest open water by the length of a football pitch. Our attempts to charge down the spit at full speed failed dismally and merely ensnared both machines in the heavy dragging weed.

  We all waded out up to shoulder level with our feet ankle-deep in glutinous Nile mud. Peter tried to start a drive motor and showered Nick and me with slime. Charles commented that we were blacker than the locals.

  With the aid of a tow rope we hauled Burton back onto the spit and then spent several hours clearing a five-foot-wide hoverway as far out as we could wade and where the wind direction did not cause our freeway to be quickly refilled with ‘cabbage’.

  Charles and Peter then drove at full speed down the spit and along the freeway, managing – just – to break through the remaining weed into open water. With great relief and up to our necks in slime, we watched the two Hawks disappear upriver.

  We all grew to hate the hyacinth which sticks some six inches out of the water with mauve flowers sprouting from green leaves and with bulbous stalks and roots which are buoyant and blown about in islands by the prevailing wind.

  Anthony switched between the Hawks and the Land Rovers. At Kosti the main rail track crossed the road bridge, which was too narrow for our trailers. We blocked the rails over the plank-bridge and waited until a lorry arrived with thirty or so hitch-hikers bouncing about precariously on top of its cargo. Together they managed to hoist one of our trailers above their own load and high enough to avoid the constricting side fences of the British-made bridge.

  Nick later found a fisherman with a rowing boat nearly as big as our remaining trailer. For money and a pack of cigarettes he agreed to ferry our trailer over the river. So after ten hours our convoy finally set off south from Kosti.

  Peter’s diary, 17 March: Hovering had seemed remarkably easy until we reached the first of the water hyacinth near Kosti, some 200 miles south of Khartoum. This attractive flowering weed slowed us down so much that we couldn’t get ‘off the hump’ – a term given to the configuration when the friction of water is too great to allow the craft to rise on the air cushion and therefore one moves like a leaking boat rather than a magic carpet.

  It was at this point that we decided to lighten the load, and I travelled alone until the next rendezvous point some 50 miles upriver. I was happily weaving in and out of the clumps of weed when my starboard engine cut out, and I spun violently to the right and half submerged. Now I really was alone, or was I?

  In the far distance and close to the bank stood an extremely tall and naked man with a spear, gazing intently into the water. As I paddled slowly towards him he looked up and shouted in perfect Queen’s English, ‘I think you probably have the incorrect petrol/oil mixture for today’s heat. If you have any neat petrol I’ll help you sort it out.’ This was a staggering statement from someone who could never have seen a hovercraft before. It turned out that he was the local prince down from Oxford visiting his tribe for a spot of fishing. ‘My English friends tell me that salmon fishing is the finest sport, but this requires far more skill.’

  As I hovered onward to meet up with Ran, I couldn’t wait to recount my Alice in Wonderland experience.

  The days and nights passed by, a time of sores and dirt and sweat, but also of meeting interesting people. At one camp five men appeared with nigh on 300 camels. Each carried a shield, some four feet long, and a heavy broadsword slung over a shoulder. They had only to whistle for the camels to come to an obedient halt – something I had never before witnessed in Arabia.

  We learnt that they were men of the Manasir, a small proud tribe from the Northern Province who wandered into the lands of certain other tribes at great risk due to deadly feuds from decades past. They knew every path by the Nile for a hundred miles in all directions, and they knew weird ways of hunting, such as training venomous snakes which they tethered near known drinking holes and allowed to bite deer, which then died. Once the poison had coagulated, the venison could be roasted and eaten.

  They waved as our Hawks roared away in the morning and laughed when their camels scattered in all directions.

  In the district of Renk the locals, mostly Dinka, grew isolated patches of lucerne and dourra wheat out in the scrubland where the road moved away from the river. Here the road lay beneath coats of red dust which spumed behind Nick in the lead vehicle, kicked up by his trailer and which I had constantly to wipe off my goggles.

  In the isolated Dinka village of Paloich we stopped at a hut with a Coca-Cola sign and bought a meal of beans and dourra flour. There was no Coca-Cola but there were Tetley tea bags. The dourra balls were tasty and our teeth crunched on numerous raisin-like bits, which turned out to be large weevils. The tea trickled like nectar down our dust-dry throats.

  At the remote hamlet of Malut near Renk village we were searched by a detachment of local Dinka police, who locked up our weapons and radios in their hut. They told us to camp in their compound for safety. The wretched-looking prisoners in the compound’s lock-up, who smelt even worse than we did, watched our every move with intense concentration as though we were aliens. They chatted and spat through the long night. I found it difficult to sleep in the dark throbbing heat with the whine of mosquitoes searching for some small rent in my mosquito net or a bare limb laid carelessly close to its gauze.

  Peter, who had become an expert at hovering between the omnipresent hyacinth isles, told us of large otter-like animals that played on muddy platforms amid the cabbage plants, and obese herons apparently too idle to fly, even when approached closely by a Hawk, who remained dozing on their personal hyacinth lilos and fished with a languid movement of their great beaks as they drifted along with the current.

  Soon after leaving Malut, a brief but violent storm passed us by with a startling exhibition of forked lightning and thunder, enough to announce the Apocalypse from a dark grey sky.

  The storm clouds soon lifted and the heat from the sun redoubled after its brief absence.

  The interior of the cockpits, Peter said, felt like miniature sauna baths. Each driver and Anthony carried three pints of water at the outset of each day, but Charles, heavily built, had drunk all his water by midday and lost sweat in streams. A hand used by the driver to wipe sweat from an eye at the wrong moment when dodging between obstacles could spell a blocked Hawk, which meant the other craft also had to stop as soon as a sloping beach could be found on which to land.

  After hundreds of miles with no indication that we were in the twentieth century, other than a single Coca-Cola sign, Malakal was a sudden shock with its concrete airport buildings, radio tower and high wire fencing with brightly coloured Shell/BP signs on tanker lorries. From the airport, the town itself stretched away to the south, hugging the river with shady avenues of palms.

  Ancient paddle steamers were moored to crumbling piers, and gangs of children shrieked with pleasure as they dived into the river from the gaping windows of these once proud Queens of the Nile.

  The majority of locals here were Shilluk, who have little or no use for clothes. Adult women often wore inadequate G-strings, well-endowed men sported only shoulder-slung spears, and teenagers as naked as monkeys congregated about us in intimate groups as we tried to work on the Hawks.

  Soon after our arrival the local police chief, a Dinka but trained by the Leicestershire Police Force, came down to the river.

  His predecessor in Malakal, who was British, had been drowned with his wife when caught in a local storm while boating.

  ‘No photographs of naked people,’ the police chief told me. ‘They can be used as propaganda by our enemies down south.’ He did not expand on this, but I warned Anthony to be careful when filming.

  ‘But,’ he observed, ‘I need people in the film and I can’t tell them to get dressed.’

  I agreed and left it at that.

  The police chief wanted an official demonstration which would be seen as having
been organized by him. We agreed to provide one on the only gently shelving bank not hemmed in by hyacinth platforms. This was a muddy slope between lines of anchored paddle steamers.

  While the police chief sent his runners to villages in the neighbourhood and to all the local suburbs, we drove the Land Rovers to the demo site where Peter and Charles filled up with fuel. Our plan was to head south by river and road immediately after the demo and with an armed road escort promised to us by the police chief ‘because,’ he stressed, ‘the enemy are active immediately south of town. They may do nothing for days, and then they attack our outposts, mine the tracks and lay ambushes in the forests.’

  On the face of it the government forces were in control all the way to the Ugandan border, but lone enemy machine gunners could, and did, annihilate entire convoy groups while avoiding major conflicts with the Sudanese Army. The larger rebel units kept to the swamp country and to more remote forests.

  On the muddy bank beside the Land Rovers, great bundles of hippopotamus hides in long thin slices were being rolled into temporary hyena-proof storage shelters by naked Shilluks, their faces, necks and shoulders scarred with tribal cicatrices. Trotting about among these workers were Arab supervisors in clean white robes, armed with notebooks and taking tally of the hides, and higher up the bank they were sifting and weighing sacks of dourra grain.

  For several hours before the announced time of our demonstration, groups of locals arrived on the bank and stood about gossiping. Some climbed the great neem trees that overlooked the river, others boarded the paddle steamers, and an ever-deepening crowd lined the roped-off space for our vehicles and the Hawks which the police had thoughtfully erected to give us a place for preparatory work at the launch site.

  By the time our police chief arrived to a drum beat, which quietened the din of the crowds, many hundreds of onlookers were massed around our patch.