‘That’s not what I mean!’ said the driver with a laugh, settling into the easy drive along the deserted highway east. ‘It’s party time in Mawanga! The Secretary General of the United Nations is here. There are all sorts of important people here! Why, there’s going to be a festival nonstop until the first thousand tons of that iceberg are carried into the refugee camps. They say the men on board your ships are all going to get rewards. They say your captain is going to get the Medal of Honour! Don’t you want to be here to see that?’
‘See what?’ asked the passenger, who must have dozed a little during the driver’s impassioned speech.
‘Don’t you want to see your captain being awarded the Medal of Honour?’
‘No,’ answered the fare, ‘I don’t think I do.’
‘Well, hell,’ said the cabby, very surprised, ‘what do you want to do?’
‘I just want,’ said the fare, ‘to go home.’
Authorities
‘Much has been written in recent years about the possibility of using icebergs as a freshwater source. (Small cubes of ice from the Greenland ice-sheet are already being sold to discerning Americans who like their Scotch to be diluted with pre-industrial ice!) On a vastly greater scale there are plans for towing tabular icebergs from the Ross Sea and other parts of the Antarctic pack-ice belt to areas where there is a desperate water shortage. There are plans to irrigate deserts of western Australia, Peru, Mexico, California and even the Middle East with water from giant bergs towed by tugs.’
‘Plans to tow icebergs from the Arctic to solve Britain’s desperate water shortage have been rejected in a discussion document by the National Rivers Authority… “Towing icebergs to warmer waters should be feasible in other parched areas of the world but would be uneconomic and unworkable here,” Mr Jerry-Sherriff, the authority’s head of water resources, said yesterday. “Even after moving an iceberg, we would have to find somewhere to berth it, a way to control the rate of melting and collect the water. The environmental impact of a huge iceberg moored off the South Coast would be unimaginable.” ‘
‘HARMATTAN — a very dry wind blowing from the interior of Africa to the Atlantic in December, January and February that is said to cause human skin to peel off.’
Source Books
John and Julie Batchelor, In Stanley’s Footsteps (Blandford 1990)
Charles Berlitz, The Bermuda Triangle (Grafton 1975)
Ray Bonds, The Illustrated Dictionary of MODERN AMERICAN WEAPONS and The Illustrated Dictionary of MODERN SOVIET WEAPONS (Salamander Books 1986)
Chris Bonington and Robin Knox-Johnston, Sea, Ice and Rock (Hodder and Stoughton 1992)
Richard Brown, Voyage of the Iceberg (Bodley Head 1983)
de Marenches and Ockrent, The Evil Empire (Sidgwick and Jackson 1988)
Frank Dodman, Observers SHIPS (Bloomsbury 1992)
Gale and Hauser, CHERNOBYL The Final Warning (Hamish Hamilton 1988)
Haynes and Bojkun, The Chernobyl Disaster (Hogarth Press 1988)
Robert Hendrickson, The Ocean Almanac (BCA/Helicon 1992)
Brian John, The World of Ice (Orbis 1979)
Nicholas Luard, The Last Wilderness (Elm Tree 1981)
Eileen MacDonald, Shoot the Women First (Fourth Estate 1991)
William H MacLeish, The Gulf Stream (Abacus 1989)
Peter Matthiessen, African Silences (HarperCollins 1991)
William Millinship, FRONTLINE — The Women of the New Russia (Methuen 1993)
Dervla Murphy, Cameroon with Egbert (John Murray 1989)
Shiva Naipaul, North of South (Andre Deutsch 1978)
Conor Cruise O’Brien, To Katanga And Back (Hutchinson 1962)
Douglas Phillips-Birt, Reflections in the Sea (Nautical Publishing Company 1968)
Piers Paul Read, ABLAZE — The Story of Chernobyl (Seeker & Warburg 1993)
Reader’s Digest ‘Discovery’ series: The Frozen World; The Challenge of Africa; Secrets of the Sea (Aldus 1979)
John Ridgway, Storm Passage (Hodder and Stoughton 1975)
Rosenblum and Williamson, Squandering Eden (Bodley Head 1987)
Ray Sanderson, Meteorology at Sea (Stanford Maritime 1984)
J. M. Scott, Icebound (Gordon and Cremonesi 1977)
Richard Snailham, A Giant among Rivers (Hutchinson 1976)
Gerry Spiess, Alone against the Atlantic (Souvenir Press 1981)
D. A. Taylor, Introduction to Marine Engineering (Butterworths 1985)
Jenny Wood, Icebergs (Two-Can 1990)