Travels With My Hat: A Lifetime on the Road. Christine Osborne
for some puzzled Bedouin to find. And despite his protests, Raouf agreed to abandon his tent. Checking my watch in the moonlight, I saw it was 3 am. We’d been walking for six hours and especially tired after last night’s episode, I sank down for a few minutes sleep only to be jolted awake by Morris shaking my shoulder.
‘Get up. We’ll fry if we don’t reach the sea before sunrise,’ he told me.
By 5 am, we were crawling on hands and knees when the boys let out a shout.
‘We’ve made it! I can see the sea,’ Morris called back over his shoulder and after staggering up a final dune, there was the Red Sea, spread out before us like a dark-blue satin bedspread.
‘Yippee,’ we cried, running down and plunging into the water just as the hot eye of the sun popped onto the horizon.
We’d emerged from the desert at one end of a vast bay, desolate except for a concrete house, once a weekend retreat for expatriates working in the Egyptian capital. Now it was just a shell, its walls covered in swirling Arabic graffiti. The rooms had lost their doors—probably used as firewood by Bedouin, but they would afford Ruth and me a degree of privacy. The roof would also shield us from the sun, if not the heat. Carrying in the water tin, the boys placed it reverently in a corner, but on opening the lid, I found it was only a quarter-full of very rusty water.
‘It’s the youth camp garbage-bin,’ said Muhammad, a serious third-year veterinary science student.
This was awful news. Ruth and I had only a bottle of water each to last until the driver returned. To be thirsty was one thing, but to get a stomach upset was unthinkable. We’d been laid up with dysentery in the Mahdia Youth Hostel in Tunisia; our lavatory in Dishdaba was a shit-pit in the dunes.
But we’d made it. Pulling on my mask and snorkel, I followed Morris out into the bay where I looked down on an underwater Eden. Corals covered every inch of the reefs. Some were soft pink and yellow ‘flower’ corals, feathery tentacles waving in the current as they sifted in plankton from water around their colony. Others were hard, limestone corals— mosaic, organ-pipe, brain and grass coral interspersed with lacy sea fans. Still others like the light brown stag-horn coral, tipped in blue, were the size of small cars. Moreover, the abundance of fish was extraordinary. Now I appreciated why Cousteau was so enthusiastic about the Red Sea where marine biologists have recorded more than 1,200 species of fish and invertebrates.
In the first minutes, I spotted a school of black-white-and-yellow butterfly fish, red banner fish, rainbow-coloured wrasse, yellow striped goatfish and a cheeky blue-and-black mottled triggerfish. As I was admiring this colourful galaxy, a giant silver trevally rose up from the deep. A member of the Caranx genus of fighting fish beloved of anglers, it swam slowly towards us as Morris placed the butt of his speargun in his belly and drew back the rubbers.
Unwilling to see such a regal fish killed, I gave him the diver’s ‘palm down’ signal not to shoot.
‘There’ll be others,’ I said as we both surfaced for air, then dived again.
Visibility was good. A wall of soft corals dropped 5 metres (16 feet) to a plateau bristling with coral like the antlers of a highland stag. I spotted a red hawkfish resting in the branches of an orange sea fan, a graceful angelfish hovering above a cluster of lemon-coloured anemones and green-and-mauve parrotfish grinding coral polyps with pharyngeal teeth. A school of eight squid, my favourite marine creature, jetted through the water like a team of Red Arrows. When I swam after them, they flushed brown, then yellow and green, and the last animal squirted a defensive puff of sepia-coloured ink. Surfacing again, I was brushed by a soft, brown and turquoise-trimmed nudibranch (gastropod mollusc) known as a badia in Egypt for its undulating movements resembling those made by a belly dancer.
Swimming farther out over the trench, I observed a brown mass hovering in the distance. Surely it couldn’t be a whale shark? As the mass moved closer, it resembled a swarm of bees. It was a quivering bait ball of millions of immature anchovy, which sprayed out in all directions as they were attacked by jack and bonito. Sensing my presence, the ball moved away, forming, re-forming and exploding like a catherine-wheel each time a predator zoomed in. Then suddenly it vanished, leaving a few silver scales drifting slowly down to the bottom.
Morris and the other boys speared several fish, but there was no wood to build a fire to cook them. More than a thousand years ago, the Baghdadi scholar Ali al-Mas’udi had described the Red Sea coast as barren, so unlike the Pacific Ocean there was no driftwood on the tidemark. Ruth and I had brought a tin of Chinese corned beef, and a packet of biscuits from Hurghada, but they would not stretch far when shared between six of us. The boys had brought nothing at all.
‘How can you go camping without even a little primus stove?’ I asked with astonishment.
‘Mother gave me one for our holiday, but it was thrown away on our walk,’ said Raouf wistfully.
Muhammad and I decided to check if the Germans had left anything at their camp-site. We returned with leaves of rock-hard khoubz, a lump of dried-out salami, some rotting grapes and a sandy, but unopened plastic bottle of mineral water. We shared this for supper, and later I lead the smokers in a treasure hunt for cigarette butts. That evening saw us happy, if slightly peckish. As the sky darkened we scooped out holes in the sand for our hips and shoulders and lay down to sleep among the ghost crabs.
Next morning found us thirsty enough to start sipping water from the garbage-bin, but diving acted as a remedy of sorts. I ventured out again with Morris and Ruth accompanied Sharif and Muhammad, leaving an increasingly miserable Raouf by the house.
This time we swam further out to where the coral was anchored around 20 metres (65 feet) deep. Morris, who said he dived in the mouth of the Nile, easily reached this depth on a single breath, stalked and shot a fish. At one stage a bronze shark, accompanied by an escort of remora suckerfish, glided out of the green, but when we swam towards it, it vanished with a flick of its tail. I watched a spotted eagle ray wing past, and to my delight, a big blue-green Napoleon fish swam up to goggle at me.
After an hour or so, we were snorkelling back to shore when I spotted a solitary barracuda zooming in behind Morris. Its jerking sideways movements indicated a possible attack. Turn around, screamed a voice inside my head, but before I could signal, a wave washed me onto the reef and I was bowled over and over in stinging fire coral.
As I stood there spluttering, Morris scrambled up behind me.
‘Sharks don’t bother me, but I don’t fool with old man barra.’ He grinned, but his smile faded at the sight of scarlet wheals across my back.
With nothing to relieve the pain, suddenly Dishdaba had become quite threatening. We rationed the last water and at Sharif’s suggestion, we began chewing raw fish whose salty taste exacerbated our increasing thirst. When midday passed without sign of the driver, we reluctantly accepted he wasn’t coming back, and little Raouf, the youngest among us in his red, white and blue striped bathing trunks, began to cry.
Habitually uncomplaining, Ruth seemed unaware of our plight, but I was now seriously concerned. How would we explain that we had gone off with strange men in the desert and without food or water? Trifling things assumed importance. An anemone swallowing a shrimp, or a crab missing a claw brought us running to look. Muhammad complained of a headache, that Ruth and I agreed was due to salt loss: we were all sweating profusely in a temperature of more than 40° Celsius (104°F).
That evening, Sharif did not join us on the beach. Instead, he headed off in hope of encountering the camel corps that patrols the Red Sea coast for smugglers. He returned at dawn, his brown curls were full of sand grains, and his eyes were bloodshot with fatigue.
‘Mahfeesh,’—nothing, he said and flopped down beside us.
On the third day we were seriously hungry. Clearly someone had to walk back along the coast to Hurghada. But could he make it under cover of night? Morris snapped some matches and the boys drew lots. Morris picked the shortest one and would set out at dusk. We agreed he must have the last sip of water, but going to the tin, I found only a dry orange crust.
All that morning we lay in