Excellently titled, and the first of Anthony Smith’s long line of travel
and science books, this is an excuse for a peculiarly British sort of romp.
No blind white Persian fish are ever encountered, but as a device they serve
their purpose admirably. Piscine promise persuaded the Oxford University
Exploration Club to cough up 850 pds about 40 years ago – then sufficient
to fund an overland expedition to Persia so that four undergraduates could
try to find the fish. Upon their return it is the tale of the one that got
away which prompted George Allen and Unwin to make Smith an advance of 25
pds, and start him off on his literary career.

The journeys to and from Persia, and the philosophising en route, at
times grind along as laboriously as does the expedition’s Bedford truck
as it crawls through the deserts of Mesopotamia. Far more interesting, however,
is the central section of the book, an account of two months which the students
spent in the villages of south-eastern Persia.

Here they get busy – making maps, collecting flora and fauna riding
camels and, in Smith’s case, exploring the qanat, the astonishing underground
water channels that apparently once extended more than 150,000 kilometres
under Persian soil.

The typical qanat is an amazing feat of workmanship, a horizontal channel
a metre or more in diameter and up to 40 kilometres long, with deep ventilation
shafts sunk every 50 metres, that allows water to flow freely from mountain
range to distant settlement.

Suddenly the lack of fish is unimportant, as in the darkness Smith bumps
into others – an old blind man, a crazy woman, and several maqannis, the
brave and hugely superstitious qanat builders – who more than compensate.

In fact, the scientific achievements of the expedition are few: most
of Smith’s animal specimens escape or are eaten by ants, while the plants
collected by one of his coleagues are never described. But ultimately the
trip is worthwhile. There is no hidden gold in the orchard, but the search
provides its own teasure.

There is much to be enjoyed here, paticularly in the wry offhand manner
in which the expedition members respond to sickness and other mishaps. There
is also, however, much which has aged less winsomely. These are still the
days of Empire, and Smith is something of a young patrician. He appears
to view many of the local people as lazy, evasive or downright mendacious.
He sides with the British-run oil company against local complaints of exploitation;
he sides with the carpet company managers against the ‘duplicity’ of their
weavers. Twice, sniffily, he refers to the disappearance of one of his handkerchiefs.

Neither is characterisation the young Smith’s forte. Of the humans in
the story, the author alone demonstrates recognisable signs of life. The
animals fare rather better: the team assembles a mobile menagerie of bats,
mice, snakes, hedgehogs and, most memorably the buz majjeh, a lizard a metre
long that eventually (appropriately) escapes to the safety of the British
Embassy grounds in Tehran.

Despite Smith’s youthful eye and general good humour, one suspects that
the reason Penguin chose to re-release the 1953 text as ‘The Classic Traveller’s
Tale of Post-War Persia’ had much to do with its charming postscript, written
in 1989. In it, the author concedes that the only blind white fish featured
in the original were he and his colleagues, and that they were indeed so
christened by the local British community. He also reveals that the genuine
article did actually exist, having been discovered (though not announced)
by two Danes back in 1937.

In 1976 he revists Iran on other business and, having a few days to
spare, decides to pay a visit to the site of the Danish discovery. He manages
to procure two specimens – pink rather than white, but unmistakably blind
– which he transports back to the Natural History Museum in London. There,
he is promptly informed that one is indeed the Danish fish, but the other
is a hitherto unknown species, the world’s first ever cave loach. It is
duly named Noemachelus Smithi in his honour: an appropriate flourish of
the dorsal fins for fish, expedition and book alike.

Ed Hooper is a freelance journalist and author of Slim: A Reporter’s
Story of AIDS in Africa, published by The Bodley Head.

AIDS HAS spread south from East Africa to Zimbabwe. At the start of
May, the country’s health ministry announced that Zimbabwe now had 2375
confirmed cases of full-blown AIDS – three times the official total nine
months before. President Robert Mugabe said in his independence day speech
that AIDS has become one of the country’s five major problems. He appointed
a known advocate of safer sex, Timothy Stamps, as Minister of Health.

Truck drivers have helped to spread the disease through the continent.
Three years ago, an unpublished survey of 300 bar girls living along the
two main arterial routes between Zambia and Zimbabwe found that some 70
per cent were HIV-positive.

The level is similar to that for groups of prostitutes and bar girls
tested in Uganda, Rwanda and Kenya at around the same period. Between 67
per cent and 90 per cent of them were found to have the virus.

Even more alarming are the figures for Zimbabwe’s first-time blood donors,
some 7 per cent of whom tested HIV-positive during the first months of 1990.
Over half the donors were teenage high-school students, hardly any of whom
were infected. Among the rest – the first-time donor adults, most of whom
were factory workers – about 15 per cent were infected.

Each donor was first examined by a nurse, counselled, and then made
to sign a form that sought to discourage donations from those who have had
many sexual partners. This suggests that HIV-prevalence, at least among
urban adults, may exceed 15 per cent.

Other statistics from around the region are just as alarming. A source
in Zimbabwe’s health service says that recent tests on adults in the Zambian
capital, Lusaka, found 32 per cent to be infected. Extrapolations made by
a consultant epidemiologist from Malawian survey data indicate that 17 per
cent of sexually active adults in the country’s rural areas, and 19 per
cent of those in towns, have HIV. The long-running civil war has prevented
widespread data collection in Mozambique, but last year 10 per cent of adults
sampled at random in the Beira corridor, and 24 per cent of a small group
of newly returned refugees, were discovered to be carrying the virus.

Such figures are ominously similar to those in Uganda, where a national
survey carried out in late 1987 and early 1988 found that nearly 800 000
people (including 12 per cent of the rural adults in one region, and 29
per cent of the urban adults in another) were HIV-positive. Last year the
Ugandan government estimated that one million people, or 6 per cent of the
total population, had already been infected with HIV.

The similarity ends here, however. Uganda currently reports 12 444 such
cases – or nearly three times as many per capita as Zimbabwe. All this would
suggest that HIV began to infect people in Uganda in large numbers some
years before it did in Zimbabwe.

The apparent sharp increase in cases of AIDS in Zimbabwe is partly the
result of an earlier cover-up. In 1988, Zimbabwe became the first country
in the world to downgrade its total of AIDS cases – as officially reported
to the WHO – from 380 to 119, because only the latter number had been subjected
to three separate confirmatory tests for the causative virus, HIV. In itself,
the incident was trivial, but it typified Zimbabwe’s public response to
HIV and AIDS during the past two years, when the health minister was an
army brigadier.

Over the past eight months, Zimbabwe seems to have embraced a far more
candid approach. First came the decision to allow doctors to inform patients
about their HIV status; then came official permission for ‘AIDS’ to be entered
as cause of death on death certificates.

The new atmosphere has allowed much more material about AIDS to appear
in the Zimbabwean press, but not all of it has been constructive. An example
was the advertisement placed by the ruling political party, ZANU-PF, during
the recent election campaign, which baldly equated the major opposition
party, ZUM, with AIDS.

Many epidemiologists believe that the reason for HIV’s rapid spread
in southern Africa – both from country to country, and from town to countryside
– is that the transport network is better developed than in east Africa,
allowing both humans beings and the human immunodeficiency virus to move
about more easily.

In many ways, Zimbabwe has responded energetically to the threat posed
by AIDS. A well-developed health service, and an excellent blood transfusion
service (only the third in the world to start screening blood for HIV nationally)
ensure that few people are infected through unsterilised needles or contaminated
blood transfusions.

Meanwhile, the national AIDS control programme (with a projected 1990
budget of Pounds sterling 3.3 million) does its best to reduce sexual transmission
by mounting health education campaigns in the media, distributing pamphlets
written in Zimbabwe’s three local languages, and undertaking education programmes
among groups such as prostitutes and truckers. This year alone, the programme
expects to distribute 26 million condoms.

Despite the education campaign, few people understand the risks of unprotected
sex. ‘Charles’ is a 27-year-old health worker who, in late 1988, recognised
that his persistent symptoms were indicative of immune suppression, and
who volunteered himself for an HIV test. He was found to be seropositive,
as was his wife. Their first child died a few days after birth, although
their second has tested HIV-negative.

Charles is angry with the health ministry for its former lack of candour
about the epidemic. ‘They were actually frightening people rather than informing
them. There was a poster saying ‘AIDS Kills’, but there was no real information
about what happens – not enough about what the virus does, and how it is
caught. The (health education) campaign was only emphasising that women
can pass the virus: nothing was said about men giving it to women,’ he said.

Stamps, Zimbabwe’s newly appointed health minister, admits that he is
far from satisfied with the level of awareness about HIV and AIDS in the
country. ‘The amount of work that needs to be done is pretty immense. Sexual
attitudes are not really changing . . . We have to establish mutually faithful
life-long marriage as the norm. Unless we can, any other (advice) like ‘choose
your partner carefully’, or ‘put a condom on’, is not going to reduce the
tremendous number of people who are joining the HIV-infection lists.’