EUREKA - Snowball Earth - page 44

temperatures slipped quickly down into the thirties. Back in camp, the next race would be to build up
the wood fire in a sandy hollow, and then to huddle around perched on the cooler boxes that serve as
chairs.
Preparations for dinner take place by the light of a headlamp. Peeling and chopping is on a trestle
table, spread with a garish plastic sheet. (And I mean garish. Think enormous pink and purple flowers,
shocking even by torchlight.) There are usually fresh vegetables in the cooler, red peppers say, or
beans, which can be a little frayed at the edges if it's been a couple of weeks since the last resupply.
They go into a pot over the fire, along with onions and garlic and tins of fish, mussels perhaps, crabs,
shrimps or tuna. And then there's rice or pasta or potatoes. Paul's wife, Erica, was astonished the one
time she saw him cooking for himself in the Canadian Arctic. At home, Paul is determinedly hopeless
at domesticity. Even in the field, the more culinary of his students wince sometimes at his vagaries.
Paul puts cucumber into stews. Once a student trained in Italian cooking caught him adding ginger to
spaghetti sauce. After a hard day in the field, though, you're ready to eat anything. You'll soak up the
food with dark, heavy bread and sip Namibian beer, “the best in the world”. And then, in the darkness,
you rinse off your plate or bowl carefully, sharing the miserly dishwater allowance. Paul has his own
utensils in Namibia, his own red plastic bowl and enormous coffee cup, white with a dark rim. He
jokes about his possessiveness, but nobody else touches them.
Water is the really scarce commodity. Namibia has hundreds of miles of coastline, but not a single
year-round river. There are plenty of river channels, and water can run in them briefly during the wet
season, when it's too hot to work. But by the time Paul arrives in Namibia, all the rivers are dry. He
has to carry his water with him in giant plastic barrels crammed into the back of the Toyota. Water
sets the limit on how long he can stay in the field before he has to go into town for a resupply. It is
reserved strictly for drinking and cooking. Washing is banned. You're even supposed to swallow the
water that you use for brushing your teeth rather than waste it by spitting it out. The lack of water is a
blessing, of sorts. Namibia contains plenty of dangerous wildlife, but most shun the dry regions; lions,
cheetahs, rhinos and leopards all rely on open waterholes to survive.
Still, the desert has hazards of its own. Late one afternoon Paul was driving down the dried-out
bed of the Ugab River. The light was starting to fade, and he flicked on the truck's headlights. He was
starting to feel worried. In Namibia, darkness falls quickly, and it would soon be too late to find a de-
cent campsite.
Paul wound his way hurriedly down the canyon on the sandy river floor, dodging the rocks and
branches swept there by an old flash flood. Up ahead his lights picked out a thick black log, maybe
nine feet long, lying in the sand. The Toyota could handle that, no problem. But at the last minute Paul
swerved around it, striking what might have been a glancing blow. The log had seemed to twitch as he
passed.
He was intrigued. He slowly backed up, craning his neck to see the scene illuminated by his white
tail-lights. The log had vanished. No, it was standing up, and heading towards the vehicle, fast. It was
chest high, four and a half feet above the ground, just about the height of the Toyota's open window.
Now Paul could see that it had curious yellow rings the length of its body. It was a zebra snake, a
western barred spitting cobra. It had spread its black hood angrily around its face and it loomed un-
nervingly large in the wing mirror. Paul remembers wanting to laugh. This was like the T. rex scene
from Jurassic Park . “Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear.”
But he also knew that zebra snakes were deadly. The toxin would quickly paralyse his muscles,
and shut down his breathing. He had no serum as an antidote, since serum has to be kept cool and Paul
had no refrigerator. Without immediate artificial respiration, he would suffocate. If someone pumped