FATUMA SAYS NEGATIVE

I would like to take you away to a distant and mysterious land, which has come to prominence for all the wrong reasons recently.

WAS FLYING A PILATUS PORTER, the iconic Swiss short-field, single-engined, ten passenger bush aircraft, for a French seismic survey company. We were prospecting for oil in South Yemen, based in the rugged, barren desert around the historic canyons of the Hadramaut Sultanate.

We had a camp on the floor of a one thousand foot deep canyon called Wadi Mankhar near an ancient little mud brick village called Al Qatn which sheltered under the rock-strewn buttresses of the main Wadi Hadhramaut.

We lived in trailers with the bunks arranged one up and one down in three tiny compartments in each trailer. The trailers were arranged in a square with two accommodation trailers on two of the sides and the office, the generator, the kitchen, the cold store and the 'Mess' occupying the other two sides.

The Crew Chief was a bearded Frenchman called Henri. His office trailer contained his office equipment, with his computer and the long-range HF radio whose dipole antenna was suspended between two thirty-foot masts across the diagonals of the square.

Read more in this month's edition..