Jeremy Clarke: ‘Can you part your cheeks a bit?’ I did so. There was a stunned silence

Sir Francis Drake died of dysentery while attacking the town of San Juan in Puerto Rico. He was buried at sea in a lead coffin. Henry V succumbed to it at 35. Accounts of the African missionary explorer David Livingstone’s lingering death from dysentery make grim reading. Near the end he was too weak to hold a pencil. He was found dead on his knees in prayer. Tough guy Ernest Hemingway had so many bowel movements in a short time he suffered a prolapse and afterwards went into a physical and mental decline. In Africa it is said to kill hundreds of thousands of children under five annually.

The first time I had dysentery, I had the watery, Shigellosis version. It visited me on a three-day hike up Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. Dysentery is inconvenient, apart from anything else. I ran out of toilet paper almost immediately and resorted afterwards to chapters torn from a paperback thriller, leaves and, above the tree line, smooth stones. My first week in Africa. I’d been on a derailed train and now this.

We were a party of 22, plus porters and a guide. During the afternoon of the second day my difficulties were compounded by altitude sickness and I fell behind. Each step took the whole of my strength and willpower to accomplish. In a weird volcanic landscape ominously dotted with small cairns, I gave up, lay down on my back, and ‘half in love with easeful death’ closed my eyes, and drifted pleasantly away.

Presently I heard voices and the approaching footsteps on the gravel of another party of hikers. Scandinavians, I think they were. Too weak to open my eyes, I heard them crowding around to have a closer look at the corpse.