IN FAR PLACES

Evening Post, Volume CIX, Issue 88, 14 April 1930, Page 9

IN FAR PLACES

.VALUE OP RADIO

SOME HUMOUROUS

INCIDENTS

(Copyright). (By Louis Golding). If wireless has been found to lac indispensable in great cities; like New York and Vienna, who can estimate its importance in remote villages, almost entombed in colossal drifts of snow, where tho very waterfalls are frozen into glass in that exalted and marvellous air? These sequestered Austrian villages are the last stronghold of the middle ages; so that there it holds an element of paradox and fairy-tale to see an aerial connecting some ancient pinetree with a reeeivingjset hidden deep in 'the interior of some stout larchwood cottage, with enormous icicles suspended from the gables. The Austrian Tyrol is a smaller country than it was before the war, so that in these obscure villages I am speaking of, the number .of sets must still be very limited. But can you conceive the excitement in the bosoms of those applecheeked maidens and blue-eyed woodcutters iii the lucky villages? How they will scramble in from the powdery snow-storm into the warm shelter of the huge clay stove that fills half the room. THE VILLAGE ENTHUSIAST. But you must not imagine that it has all been, or is going to be, plain sailing for wireless in these intensely superstitious villages. I recall very forcibly an incident that took place not far from the Brenner frontier into Italy. I had become very friendly with Herr Schrauz, the village school-mast-er. He was a foredoomed victim to wireless from the day of his birth. He was the complete Gadget King. I am afraid that the sight of a new gadget put out of his mind all thought of the arithmetic or Bible history ho should have been imparting to his pupils. His eye's would light up, his nostrils would quiver, lie would put aside his miserable savings month after month to acquire the new set of gadgets, whatever shape they were ultimately destined to take —motor-pump, cinema, or wireless set. I was staying at the Tnn of the White Lamb, overlooking the schoolmaster's study, when he was bitten by this last and most dangerous' "bacillus. He would stay up hours after midnight, twisting wires, planing wood, soldering joints. His idea was to keep it all secret, and then burst.the finished miracle on the astounded village. Duly he issued an invitation one evening to the mystified-villagers. He tuned up. 4l series of hideous oscillations rent the air. "The devil! He has summoned the devil!" twittered two poor old beldames, blue with fright. After a little frenzied manipulation, he struck home. The air was full of the most bewitching dance melody. The children clapped hands ecstatically. The youths and maidens seized each other by the waist. But the beldames were bluer than before. If they had merely suspected the devil before, they were certain of him now. They tottered" out of the houae, shaking thenheads wickedly. Three days later the schoolmaster came in from a long walk in the woods, to find his new toy smashed to smithereens. Weeping and wailing, he went over to the old ladies, who were milking the in tho shed. They denied all knowledge of the affair. "The evil one!' they repeated. "The evil one!" And as a matter of fact every peasant in that valley is now firmly convinced that it ■was his Satanic Majesty himself, who liad destroyed his own handiwork. The ■prospects of wireless are not bright in. that particular valley; but to eounter"balaiuse that, the valley on the other side of the mountain is wireless mad, and the priest himself is one of the most fanatical listeners. THE WIRELESS SHEIK. I do not know. which air is more, superb—the mountain air of the Alps or the fierce air of the Sahara. They are both pleasant thoughts —Alps antl Sahara; and if I saw the crudest set in my experience in an Austrian village, I saw the most marvellous outfit I ever set eyes on in a merchant's house in Gabes; an oasis in the sandy wastes of Tuisia. It was • a lovely . single-storied house, bla.uk' wall on the | outside, enclosing a lovely courtyard bright with greenery and musical with fountains. My friend, Sidi ben Ali, could be described, I suppose as a sheik. The fact is that I had actually made his acquaintance at Oxford, where he studied.engineering, and where even then he indulged in the cabalistic mysteries of wireless. Yet when his father died he gave up his desperately twentieth-century education without a murmur, and became a seller of carpets in every bazaar in Tunisia, like his father and his father's father before him. But wireless remained his. hobby. Herr Schranz in the Tyrol fixed his aerial to a bearded pine, Sidi ben Ali fixed it to a feathery palm— of such sweet contrasts is the world of radio constituted. The stations he listened for, I suppose, were mainly Algiers, Rome, and Toulouse,, though he had such a fearsome contraption that I am certain he would have had no difficulty with the North Pole or Mars.. . , .. So there we sat, my friend and I, m this oasis set between the fringes of desert and the shallow Africa sea. His wives were hidden away from the infidel in a further chamber, behind thick curtains. Yet frequently in the pauses of the music I heard their tittering and the jangle of their heavy golden bracelets. Sidi ben Ali and I sat on low inlaid stoola amid a bewildering pile of rugs and cushions. Solemnly we passed the long ebony pipe ■between us, puffing it contemplatively, till the fumes of smoke and the waves of music engulfed us both—the wanderer from England and the wireless sheik of the African oasis.