Benedict Allen - Explorer: The Quest for Adventure and the Great Unknown

Also by Benedict Allen

Mad White Giant

Into the Crocodile Nest

Hunting the Gugu

The Proving Grounds

Through Jaguar Eyes

The Skeleton Coast

Edge of Blue Heaven

Last of the Medicine Men

The Faber Book of Exploration (ed.)

Into the Abyss

First published in Great Britain, the USA
and Canada in 2022 by Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

Distributed in the USA by Publishers Group West
and in Canada by Publishers Group Canada

canongate.co.uk

This digital edition published in 2022 by Canongate Books

Copyright Benedict Allen, 2022

All photographs copyright Benedict Allen unless otherwise stated

The right of Benedict Allen to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on
request from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 78689 623 0
eISBN 978 1 78689 625 4

To Lenka, who kept the home fires burning.

How much better it has been than lounging in comfort at home.

Among his last surviving words, Robert Falcon Scott

We travel thus, proceeding from valley to valley. The desolation is superb!

Turkestan Solo, Ella Maillart

I too for years past have been stirred by the sight of a solitary cloud drifting with the wind to ceaseless thoughts of roaming.

Narrow Road to the Interior, Matsuo Bash

CONTENTS

PART ONE
A DANGEROUS YEARNING

PART TWO
A MOMENT LOST FOREVER

PART THREE
WHAT LIES ON THE FAR SHORE

PART FOUR
PAYING THE FERRY MAN

AUTHORS NOTE

This is the story of what led me, as a young man, to head off alone to the farthest reaches of our planet in an era when there were still valleys and ranges known well only to the isolated communities that inhabited them and the story of why, thirty years on, I returned to a mountain in New Guinea and asked that no one come to find me should I not re-emerge.

It is an account, drawn from memories, rough field notes and diaries, about the urge we all share to explore, and what it means to be an explorer in the twenty-first century. Above all, its a book about friendship the value of disconnecting from our own world and the importance of connecting with another.

Fiyawena Mission Station, Papua New Guinea, 17 November 2017

Last thoughts.
Outside, theyre very kindly praying for me.

Normally the ladies at least wait till dawn each day a little more fervent, and each day a little more high-pitched. The mist ascends, the birds of paradise open their wings in a shower of vanilla and gold, and up go the screeching pleas to heaven.

Last night Jokei lay on guard beside me, curled on his side, bush knife to hand. Now, though, my only companion is the moth that remains silent on the windowsill. Foxy brown and lightly furry, it lives on, like me. The difference is, all but the head, half a thorax and wings have been removed, gutted by the ants.

Time to say goodbye to my sanctuary, then: the dirtied window slats from which I hang my socks to dry, the motifs lovingly painted on the wall Jesus Had Compassion On Them and the blue vinyl floor where American missionaries once held hands in prayer but where I sweat out my fevers.

On a separate page I have set out my intended route. Im writing these last words here in case something else occurs.

Already Ive checked the medicines and bandaged up my feet. I have thought through the usual protocols, everything that will help me stayalive over the next few days. Theres little else to do now than study the map, tick off another checklist and say things to reassure myself. At such a moment its hard not to think back to times I might have died but didnt. To the life Ive lived and the life I havent.

I will take up my rucksack at around 8 a.m.

PART ONE

A DANGEROUS YEARNING

I

I watched the progress of my fathers aeroplanes, they say, even from my pram. Back and forth they flew, sleek birds that parted the grey clouds of Cheshire and laid their oily trails across my consciousness. Day after day through my earliest years my dad took the V bombers to the brink at first only the Valiant and Victor. Then there came into our lives a plane that was quite different.

This new one was far off when I first set eyes on it, aged four or five at most: no more than a black slit over Alderley Edge. Then, as if choosing to reveal itself, the aircraft banked, beginning a low run over Prestbury golf course. It was heading this way.

There was no forgetting the first sight of that silhouette (those gigantic delta wings, here at last the perfect paper dart), nor the commotion in its wake. We were watching from down by the stream, I remember. The cold water was spilling over the top of my gumboots. Stewart, my elder brother, held the half-filled bucket and I held a stick. Wed been collecting sticklebacks.

The sky roared and the garden shook. As we stood transfixed in the stream, the Vulcan bomber made its approach.

Stew, isnt that plane a bit low?

Its low, all right!

Shouldnt we duck down?

Such a screeching and howling as if from a creature in pain. By way of reassurance, Dad gave us a signal. He dipped the Vulcans left wing.

And, of course, looking back, I cant help but wonder if this precise moment a fathers salute from the sky was the source of my restlessness. As youngsters we all dream of taking off, but now, the triangular shadow thrown fleetingly across my innocent, upturned face, my father seemed to be giving me permission.

In those days (this was the early 1960s) we had a red cotton kite. Here was our very own bird of prey, as it hovered, rattling in the wind. We paid out the line, running and shrieking through the sloping pastures, beyond the oak tree, across the stream. The Vulcan, though, was not like the kite. Blatant, unapologetic, possibly vindictive, the majestic harpy was only ever seen in passing. Each day, over at Woodford Aerodrome, the aircraft lifted heavily from the tarmac, being readied for the time it would be trusted with our nuclear deterrent. Initially in a coat of anti-flash white and in later years painted to mimic the birch forests and rich chernozem soils of somewhere beyond the Iron Curtain, the strategic bomber went about its grim duty.

Through the passage of my early childhood by the age of six, my red kite snagged in the oak tree; by the age of seven, that tree a decorative feature of the new housing estate I kept to myself, and sometimes I dreamed of these flights of freedom.

It troubled me not one iota that the Mark II being perfected by Avro over my blond curls was an executioner, that its high-altitude mission might one day be completed with a terrible finality. I looked up at those spread wings, a dark angel forever heading beyond Macclesfield: one day I too would go somewhere over the horizon, to the place where my father was always heading.