Going to Extremes

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Sir Ranulph Twistleton-Wykeham-Fiennes — Ran Fiennes to his friends — put the five frostbitten fingers of his left hand in his workbench vice, one by one. With a fretsaw, he cut off the blackened end joints.

"If the finger bled or hurt, I just moved the saw up a little," he says. Fiennes was frustrated that five months after his return from the North Pole his hand was still intensely painful and he could be of little help to his wife on the farm. His physiotherapist, who also treats horses, examined the stubs and said he had done "rather a good job." Fiennes was even happier that his work had knocked $11,000 off the eventual surgery bill.

If you are "the world's greatest living explorer," as the Guinness Book of Records dubbed Fiennes, a spot of self-amputation is no big deal, any more than is forcing a frozen boot onto a gangrenous foot and walking on (as he did in the Antarctic). It goes with the job, but then so does watching every penny. Fiennes, who is a second cousin of actors Ralph and Joseph, is not privately wealthy, despite a line of aristocratic ancestors stretching back 1,000 years. Financing his expeditions is as big a nightmare as being trapped on a moving ice floe for 100 days in the Arctic Ocean, or dangling on ropes 200 m into a cavern alive with spiders, scorpions and large white moths in southern Oman.

Fiennes, 57, did not succeed in his bid last year to become the first person to trek solo and unsupported from Canada to the North Pole. Trying to rescue his sledge from Arctic waters and almost losing his left hand stopped that. But Fiennes has already chalked up 10 expeditionary world records, and with his usual generosity is advising a younger contender who is now trying for the record he missed. Fiennes is a regular on the lecture circuit and has written 16 books, including novels, travel journals and a fitness guide. His latest, The Secret Hunters, is the chilling story of a man who joins a group that tracks down genocidal killers. Fiennes says he came across the journal of Derek Jacobs, a German-born Canadian welfare worker whose mother died horrifically under the Nazis, in a shelter in Antarctica in 1995, and he just filled in some blurred parts. So what is fact and what is fiction? Fiennes won't say.

But then, Fiennes isn't much for giving things away. Whether thanks to the bullying he endured at Eton or the torture-resistance training he received as a member of Britain's covert Special Air Service, Fiennes' upper lip remains stiff. He is laconic, maddeningly matter-of-fact: discovering a fabled lost city in the Oman desert in 1992 was "luck." Facing down a polar bear on an ice floe? "An extremely worrying 30 minutes." Chopping off fingers? Saved money.

Q&A

TIME: What drives you to keep taking on these challenges?
FIENNES: I would love to give a pleasing answer, but the truth is I always wanted to match my father's achievement. He commanded the finest of all regiments, the Royal Scots Greys. I joined but was unable to pass the exams required to become an officer, and I had to leave the army when the maximum time for non-regular officers was up. The only thing I could do was teaching soldiers climbing, skiing or canoeing. Expeditions were another option.

TIME: What was your most difficult expedition?
FIENNES: Physically, the hardest was completing the first unsupported crossing of the Antarctic continent in 1993 with Mike Stroud. It took 97 days, but after 50 we had lost all our body fat and were cannibalizing our muscle.

TIME: Does your age now hold you back?
FIENNES: It wastes time because since turning 50 I have had to increase the time spent in training, which I don't like. As an incentive to myself I enter international endurance races. The U.K. has four teams of four, and I'm still, just, in one of them. I do a race — whether canoeing, biking, a mountain marathon of 80 km — every month just to force myself to keep fit.

TIME: Is there any bit of the world left unexplored?
FIENNES: Not on dry land, but only 4.8% of the oceans have been explored. Oceanographers with access to special technology have a lot to do, and scientists — geologists, botanists — have a vast amount to discover.

TIME: What's next?
FIENNES: A book about a man who has been falsely vilified for decades, Robert Falcon Scott. And maybe I'll try for another lost city in Arabia.