Incident on Mount Kenya (5199m)
"F... off! Quenda chini!"
That's no great welcome in any language. We had turned up at our six-man club hut on Mt Kenya, only to find it being used as a cook house by a party of twenty-seven Germans and their six guides/cooks. As they were larger than us both physically and numerically, we disappeared round the nearest corner with murder in our hearts and a tin of jam in our packs.
Anglo/German entente was low, as the four of us pitched our solitary two-man tent on the remaining rocky patch of gorund. This slight friendship was non-existent after we had been kept awake most of the night by the hysterical screams of one of the German party. "Altitude sickness", I told the others in the tent, with the full weight of my three days at high altitude to back up my diagnosis.
Next morning dawned bright and clear (sorry, but I had to slip it in somewhere) and we woke at about 8 o'clock to find that half of the German party, including the party leader and the doctor, had gone to kick stones on each others' heads on Mt Kenya. The sick member of the party had by this time gone to "sleep". About an hour later, one of the African guides, on his own initiative, got out a collapsible stretcher and began putting it together. As he seemed to be having some difficulty, we strolled across to give him a hand.
"What happened to the medicine chest that's meant to be here?" I asked. "Destroyed when the other hut burnt down" was the most comprehensible reply.
Later, when we carried the invalid out of his tent, a sort of white phlegm was running from his nose and mouth. It was then that we realised that he was suffering from pulmonary oedema, a complaint that, we learnt later, kills about six people a year on Mt Kenya.
With the aid of the porters and the only two fit or interested Germans we carried the patient down to the next camp. Here, some porters took him on towards the road. We almost ran back to the top hut, knowing that food for twenty-seven was lying scroungeable and unguarded there. Even we forgot about food when on entering the hut we saw, lying on one of the bunks, both an oxygen set and a medicine chest. I remembered reading about oedema in the guide book, "anybody suspected of suffering from pulmonary oedema should be given oxygen and taken down to lower altitude immediately, even if it is at night".
"Wouldn't it be sick if he died now?" one of us said.
And it was, because he did.
Contributed by Robin Cole.
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