Days in the desert

A group of assorted Scots recently returned from walking across the Namib Desert raising over £125,000 for the Maggie Cancer Caring Centres. Nimesh Mody, PhD student at the Welcome Trust Biocentre was one, Carol Pope, university press officer another. Between them they raised over £6,000, largely through the generosity of university colleagues and friends, whose support they would like to gratefully acknowledge. Following is Carol's account of the trip:

I can give you it in dry numbers. Hot, dry numbers - 70 people walking 84 miles in six days in temperatures hitting 46 degrees C. But that conveys nothing of the impact of the experience - the awe inspiring landscape, the warmth of the group feeling, the sense of joy and freedom walking in one of the wildest parts of the planet; the sheer exhilaration of completing a challenge tough enough to draw tears.

In Canada they have a phrase: "It's a large day!" In the landscape of the Namib Desert large is simply not enough. "It's a vast day!" would come nearer the mark

Picture the scene. Plains, boundless and bare stretching in every direction and spanned by an infinite sky. The energy sapping heat closes down your body systems, stops even thought, so that you trudge trance-like across the desert in an affinity with eternity. There are few individual features. No Grand Canyon or Kilimanjaro; no giant redwood and definitely no Victoria Falls; but an overawing sense of the scale of the place - a scale so vast that it crosses dimensions into time itself. This is a landscape where car tracks last a hundred years; where the only sign of human impact on the environment was an old tree propped on a rock - a bushman's ladder leading to a honey cave.

Consciousness swings pendulum like from the spiritual to the mundane. Eternity to blisters. Feet and water. They dominate our days, our preparations, our conversations. When you are not filling up your body or your bottle with water you are patching up your feet. Blisters? Even our blisters had blisters. Some walked on raw flesh. We swiftly learned to lance, disinfect, tape and patch so that we could walk another day. And walk we did. Relentlessly. Mentally we walked through A Town Like Alice, Lawrence of Arabia and an Instant in the Wind.

For many the journey was an emotional one. Most had been touched by cancer in some way - a partner, a parent, a friend. In some cases a personal remission. These were the private journeys we pursued.

But there were moments too of pure elation. The blood red sunset splashing over the sky and sinking in a moment. Surprising a flock of ostrich, stumbling over quietly grazing zebra, spying a giraffe track, a leopard's lair, a lynx dropping! The zing of a mustard bush, the fragrance of balsam and the perfect crystalisations of the helicrysum flowers after last year's rare rain. The impact of the group experience is as hard to articulate as the impact of an environment like the Namib Desert. No single dramatic feature stands out but an accumulation of incremental instances and an indelible impression.

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