Road to Ubar Pa - Nicholas Clapp [64]
On that uneasy note, as darkness overtook us, we each spread our allotted two blankets on folding aluminum camp beds. These put us a few inches above any creatures that might go slithering or skittering through the night. As we bedded down, Ran propped himself up on his elbow and casually mentioned that we were in the domain of a solpugid commonly known as the camel spider.
"Not asleep yet?" he queried, to be sure no one missed his tale. He then recalled that some eighteen years earlier, he and his Omani military patrol had also camped on the edge of these dunes.
"My signaler, Ibrahim, got visited in the night. The spiders are six inches long, hairy legs and big mandibles."
"For their size, I daresay," Andy Dunsire chimed in, "they have the strongest jaws of any creature in all the animal kingdom."
Ran continued, "One of them couldn't get into Ibrahim's sleeping bag, so it started to eat his face! It desensitizes before it bites, so that you don't know it's biting. This fellow woke up in the morning, and half his nose and all of his cheek had gone AWOL!" Ran let this last thought hang in the desert air, then signed off with a cheery "Sleep well!"
Saturday, December 14. Day 2: into the Rub' al-Khali. The weather front that had moved in the previous afternoon had driven the overnight temperature down to near freezing. Some of us had stoically made do with our two blankets, others had tried to sleep sitting up in the Discoverys. A rather droopy Mr. Gomez, a gray blanket draped over the shoulders of his cook's whites, brewed an inky pot of coffee and doled out a round of MREs. The combination perked us up. "MREs, we love 'em," Kay commented. "All protein and sugar. Fighting food."
We packed up and set out northwest across the dunes. Our first objective was the Wadi Mitan at a point where it terminated in a distinctive dry lakebed, twenty kilometers long. With our satellite navigation inoperative, this would be a reliable waypoint.
For what lay ahead, there were two theories—two extremes—of how to handle your vehicle. The first, widely practiced by the bedouin, was a kind of Zen of dune driving. They would "read the sands," evaluating slope, texture and color to determine exactly what path to take at what speed. They would then effortlessly float out across the terrain. No sideslips, no spinning wheels. It looked so easy, so effortless. To the skilled and confident bedouin, it was.
The other way was our way. Not having the faintest idea if the sand ahead was hard packed or treacherously soft, we careened recklessly up and down, over and around the dunes, foot to the floor, driving as fast as we dared. It looked like joy riding. It was joy riding. But it was also a survival tactic. To slow down was to risk getting stuck.
With Ran at the wheel, the first of our Discoverys crested the shoulder of a dune and for a second or two flew through the air. "Whaa! Ha ha!" Ron shouted as we crunched down into the sand. Soft sand. "Uh-oh," we all reacted. The vehicle fishtailed, slowed a bit, then lurched on, and we careened up and over the next dune. And the one after that. The next was much higher, and just short of its crest we hesitated for no more than a split second, not sure of what lay beyond. With a heart-sinking whir, the Discovery's tires spun out of control.
"Whoa!" we shouted in chorus. We got out. We were dug in up to our hubcabs.
"Someone call nine one one," Ron suggested.
In what was to become an oft-repeated routine, we lowered our tire pressure to sixteen pounds per square inch. We then shoveled as much sand as possible out of the way before jacking up the rear wheels, which we then dropped back down onto aluminum sand ladders. The five-foot ladders gave us just enough of a run to send us on our way.
By radio we advised the vehicles following us when to follow our tracks and when to take a longer, easier route.