ORDEAL BY HEAT

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 911, 25 January 1957, Page 10

ORDEAL BY HEAT

by

SUNDOWNER

DECEMBER 22

WICE this month it has been hot enough to send all my living creatures to earth: the dog into a cave of pampas grass; the cat to bare soil under the rhubarb; the fowls into a ditch behind the car shed; the sheep and

cows to wind tunnels under the pines.

On the first day the thermometer reached 84, and on the second 86. That is heat in Canterbury, and in Auckland would be suffocation. But in the really warm corners of the earth it would be cool or cold. L. M. Nesbitt, who made the first traverse by a white man of the Danakil country of Eastern Abyssinia, brought ‘his party through shade temperatures of 167 degrees, travelling on foot to save the dying camels. Because he has a head to help his belly and his. legs, man is the toughest of all the bigger animals, in heat and in cold. From his caravan of 18 men, 25 camels, and four mules, Nesbitt lost three native carriers, none by sickness or exhaustion. But ten camels and three mules died of thirst, starvation and fatigue. What the figures would have been if all had been given precisely the same treatment-the same food and drink in proportion to their size and weight and the same hours of rest-it is not easy to say; but if there had been no human beings with them to supply these things, and preserve and ration them, the animals would all have died in the first week past the waterholes. The wild ass seems to be one of the toughest creatures in the desert, and to be able to keep itself alive where camels dare not go; but camels can live longer without water. The bulk of a camel must be a handicap where food is as hard to find as drink, though camels on this journey often gave themselves a meal by eating dry thorn bushes-closing their jaws on the rough branches and stripping them sideways of bark and twigs-while the mules stood and starved. What kept the men alive was foresight and discipline; but two of them, when the journey ended, were strapped on the back of camels, | moaning, muttering, and _ periodically yelling, quite out of their minds.

DECEMBER 23

od ms SINCE Cherry-Garrard’s book appeared I have believed that the expedition for the penguin’s egg was the worst recorded journey in modern times. But some of the horror in that story was in the telling. Some was in the setting. Some was in the fact that death walked

every mile with them and waited

Svyeszy sigs VUMLSIUOS their sleeping bags. But they were a picked team,’ of high intelligence, high morale, and unshakable integrity, Nesbitt had two white companions, both Italians, and both, as it proved, of fine loyalty and ‘courage, but the other members of his party were pre-Abraham in culture. It was an incredible feat to hold them together and bring 15 of the 18 out alive-thre& were murderedthrough more than 400 miles of hostile and-unexplored country, some of it high mountains and some of it gorges and burning plains 300 feet below sea level. But the worst spots in the world have their surprises. Through much of this

territory a river flowed, not often in a straight enough line to be followed, but usually near enough to the line of march to make death by thirst improbable. That sounds comfortably. safe. But the river was so full of crocodiles that it was not safe even to wash one’s hands in it; the jungles on its banks were full of dangerous animals; the mud pools harboured hundreds of venomous snakes lying in cracks round the edges for birds dropping down to drink. One night there was a continuous and dreadful agitation in the forest on the opposite bank of the river. The smaller animals screamed in their terror from one end of the thick woods to the other, as they ran wildly up and down, passing close in front of our camp. The forest awoke more fully all around us, and became filled with desperate cries. From the river below came a roaring and splashing and thudding of fighting crocodiles,. punctuated at intervals by. the wailing scream of the vanquished. Above all other sounds was that of the awful blows delivered by the hippopotami. It is, I think, a matter of temperament whether sounds like those would be more terrifying than the night noises

Cherry-Garrard heard that were neither human nor animal, but came from the very abyss. of desolation. he ate a

DECEMBER 26

— * oe HERE is a thunderstorm raging as I write this note, with those big drops of rain (and some hail) that you can follow as they come down. Sheep and cattle as far as I can see have disappeared into plantations and small birds into thickets of leaves. But a kingfisher is sitting it out on a power

line with flutterings that must _ mean

pieasure. Neither the hail nor the rain is producing any effect on him, but an occasional jerking of his head and twisting of his neck as blows descend on his crest; and I cannot doubt that it is all as pleasant to him as sunshine, and more exciting. But other native birds, too, if I could hear them above the din, are probably adding their appreciation of the rain now that the hail has ceased. Warm showers, when they do not last long, must be as refreshing to birds as a bath is to a man; but birds not accustomed to rainand that means most of our importations -suffer badly in continuous downpours. It was pointed out many years ago by Guthrie-Smith that fantails will go on hawking for flies in a deluge heavy

enough to kill sparrows. There are no fantails about as I watch, but there were warblers on the wattle trees before the storm began, and I am sure that they are sitting it out comfortably. On Tutira, where Guthrie-Smith made most of his observatiens, there can be a foot of rain in two or three days. That is far more than we get in the South Island east of the Alps; but both in Canterbury and in Otago I have seen dead sparrows and finches after several days of rain. We forget, of course, that most of the birds in New Zealand in 1956 are newcomers, They have not been here long enough to adapt themselves to conditions which, though they are in general much easier than those of Europe, are in the matter of rain more extreme. In that respect our birds resemble goats which, though they will live in the desert and on the mountain-tops, will die in a few hours if left without shelter in continuous rain, That kingfisher, on the other hand, has been riding out rain storms since Kupe, and through thousands of years before that. Seventeen points of rain in seventeen minutesthough it dropped to the ground a few moments ago, it is now back on its wire -have no more effect on its health than the barber’s spray on the head of a schoolboy. (To be continued)