Dan the turbo termite lived in the Obelisk, which was a turbo termite mound. One day a big and very noisy four-wheel drive drove up the Old Man Range and parked next to the Obelisk. A middle-aged guy got out of the truck. He then started walking around and round the termite mound. All the turbo termites wondered what he was doing. Turbo termites could fly, so they flew down and started landing on him.

He yelled, ‘Get off me, you stupid wasp things!’

Then he jumped in his truck and was in such a rush to get away he put it in neutral and it went, ‘Brrrrrrrm, brrrrm.’ And that was the last they saw of him.

Three days later a red van with big speakers and five doors arrived at 6am and two people in beekeepers’ suits stepped out, both wearing climbing harnesses, but one with trad gear and a drill, the other with a belay device. The guy with trad gear used a wire, then a cam, to get to a big ledge with good handholds, while the belayer belayed. Then he bridged up a wide crack to the top. There he sat to catch his breath. After a couple of minutes he stood and put a drill bit in the drill and turned it on. He pulled two climbing anchor bolts out of his pocket and drilled them into the rock exactly where he climbed up. Then he put a climbing rope through the bolts and abseiled back down to the ground.

Next he took off all the trad gear and replaced it with more climbing bolts and started climbing up while drilling bolts into the rock. Then he abseiled down again and drove off while loud music blasted from the speakers.

After a few months the rock was eroding and the bolts started ripping out. Then, almost a year after the men in the beekeepers’ suits had arrived, another truck drove up, this time with five people instead of two. Three of them had flamethrowers and the other two were in climbing gear, ready to climb the Obelisk. The three with flamethrowers positioned themselves around the termite mound. The other two got ready to climb and belay.

The man who was climbing made it up three bolts fine, but then on his way to the fourth his hands and feet slipped and he fell. The third bolt held him for a few seconds before it ripped out. Those few seconds were enough for the turbo termites to realise what was happening and turn on their turbo jets and fly at 134.8 km/h and catch him just centimetres off the ground. They had saved his life.

At first he didn’t realise that, so he told the flamethrower guys to incinerate them. After 30 seconds he figured out what had stopped him hitting the ground.

He yelled, ‘Hey, stop, stop! They were the ones who caught me!’ Luckily no one had been burnt by the flames. He thanked them and promised to tell everyone what had happened and tell them the turbo termites meant no harm.