82 The Economist February 19th 2022
Obituary John Hare
Likemanyotherfolk,JohnHarefoundcamelsdifficulttolove
on first acquaintance. They could be surly beasts, obstinate as
mules and with a kick hard as a horse. They could batter you with
their long necks, smelt awful and had an unpleasant habit of re
gurgitating their breakfast over you. Really, the last thing he
meant to be was the camel obsessive he became—the man who
tracked down the fastvanishing wild Bactrian camels of the Gobi
desert and made sure they survived.
But there was another side to camels, which he saw when he
was posted to northern Nigeria. He went there in 1957 for the Colo
nial Administrative Service, the last man in, as he saw himself, to
act for Britain on the eve of independence. His area was Mambilla,
a remote mountain region without roads, where he oversaw
83,000 tribesmen on horseback or on foot. On one expedition,
south of Lake Chad, he used camels and was impressed.
His porters were admirable. But they also grumbled about
hours and pay, got roaring drunk on payday and had to be sprayed
daily with ddt to stop jiggers digging under their toenails. Camels,
by contrast, were strangely content with life. When they were
hungry, a thorn bush sufficed. Going through soft sand, where he
floundered, they would glide along serenely at three miles an
hour. Later, when he was making regular trips to the Gobi desert,
he even found himself on freezing nights snuggling up to a camel,
having first sluiced himself with kerosene to keep its ticks away.
He went to the Gobi because, transferred to Kenya as a unbu
reaucrat, he hated sitting at a desk. He wanted to be an explorer. He
was 12 when he announced that, and his father told him to be sen
sible, but he really, really meant it. His head was full of the grip
ping adventures of Colonel Percy Fawcett in the Brazilian jungle,
searching for the Matto Grosso and Inca gold. He too wanted to
“look behind the Ranges”, as Rudyard Kipling wrote, and go where
no one else had been. By a chain of amazingly fortuitous events, camels took him
there. At a reception in Moscow in 1992, where he had gone to cu
rate a unexhibition, a man in an illfitting brown suit and with a
Stalinstyle moustache turned out to be the leader of a Russian ex
pedition to the Mongolian Gobi. They could not take this eager
Englishman unless he had scientific qualifications or technical
skill, and he had neither. But they were going with camels, and he
knew a bit about them, he said; and he could also provide the team
with $2,000 in foreign exchange. So he was in. A year later, pre
senting the results of that expedition in Ulan Bator, he met by
chance a man whose brother, a general in the Chinese army, could
get his team into the Lop Nur nuclear test site in Xinjiang, long
barred to visitors, where many of the wild camels were.
Both expeditions were alternately wonderful and chaotic. The
teams travelled through some of the most hostile territory on
Earth, where temperatures ranged between 40°cand 55°c, where
most water was salt, and much of the going was over razorsharp
rocksalt that shredded the tyres of their trucks. Sandstorms could
obliterate everything, including their tracks when they ventured
away from camp. The Russian expedition was soused in vodka and
melancholy songs, and they found no wild camels. The Chinese
one featured universal chainsmoking, a driver who kept a pigeon,
for luck, in the glove compartment and a guide who itched to
shoot any wildlife he saw, camels excepted. He himself cut a Vic
torian figure, with his canvas holdalls and battered tweed jacket
and lack of almost any devices, except a compass and a copy of
Kipling’s “Kim” for tough times. But the desert also sparkled with
breathtaking colours, each oasis was a paradise, and when on a lat
er trip their tame camels fled in a sandstorm, carrying most of
their supplies, he was assured they would return by a lone stray
swallow that touched him, magically, with the tip of its wing.
He also found his wild camels at last. They were notably differ
ent from domesticated Bactrians, extremely shy, with flatter
heads, hairier kneecaps and humps set wider apart. They could al
so drink water that was saltier than the sea’s, and had survived 43
nuclear tests with no ill effects. Perhaps 1,000 were left in all, and
their numbers had plunged in a decade. Their chief enemies now
were hunters and miners illegally prospecting for gold.
At once he began to devise a plan to save them. He gathered
enough material for scientists to prove in 2008 that they were a
separate species, descendants of the original wild stock. This
brought Camelus ferusworld attention. He also cofounded the
Wild Camel Protection Foundation to campaign for a reserve,
sometimes with camel races across the English countryside, and
this drew money even from the World Bank. Because his relations
with the Chinese were so good, he was eventually granted a piece
of the Gobi, at Lop Nur, around half the size of Poland. With Aus
tralian help, he then set up a breeding centre in Mongolia with 12
wild camels. By 2021 he had 45.
His foundation had its hqin a shed in his garden in Kent where
in later years he lived in a Mongolian gerwith an Aga in the mid
dle, ideal for joyful dinner parties. (His baths he took, every ten
days, in London at the Reform Club.) In an old milking parlour, full
of tribal artefacts and stuffed beasts, he installed a huge billiard ta
ble. It needed only a throne to look like the tent of Genghis Khan.
He was not sure, though, that he had actually been much of an
explorer. Most of his wanderings had been in other people’s foot
steps. But he had been the first to discover some things. One was
that camels could be swum across a river (the Omo, in Ethiopia) if
towed by a dugout canoe with an outboard motor. Another find
was the supportpoles of an ancient building in an outpost of the
town of Lou Lan on the Middle Silk Road, abandoned in 330ad. The
best was a tiny unmapped sweetwater valley in the Kum Tagh
dunes where small herds of wild camels, sheep and asses had
clearly never seen humans before. So the “last man in” in Nigeria
was the first to look on that valley in the Gobi, where a naive young
wild camel instinctively followed his saviour’s caravan. nLook behind the RangesJohn Hare, explorer, writer and saviour of the wild camels
of the Gobi desert, died on January 28th, aged 87