RADIO IN FAR PLACES.

Auckland Star, Volume LXI, Issue 217, 13 September 1930, Page 7 (Supplement)

RADIO IN FAR PLACES.

SCHOOLMASTER'S LEAGUE

WITH SATAN.

MUSIC IS THE DESSKT

AN OASIS SHEIK'S WOXDER SET.

(By LOUIS GOLDEs'G.*

If wireless has teen found to be an indispensable accompaniment to Christmas in great cities like New York and "V ienna. with all their horde of counter

attractions, who can estimate its importance in remote villages, almost entombed, in. colossal drifts of snow, where the 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 pine tree with a receiving set 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 apple-cheeked maidens and blue-eyed woodcutters in the lucky villages? How they will scramble 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 ha? 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 Schranz. the village schoolmaster. He was a foredoomed victim to wireless from the day of his birth. You have met the type —he was the complete gadget king. I am afraid that the sight of a new gadget put out of his mind all thought of arithmetic or Bible history he should have been imparting to his pupils. His eyes would light up, his nostrils would quiver, he would put asde 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 Inn of the White Lamb, overlooking the schoolmaster's study, when he was bitten by this last and most dangerous bacillus. He would stay up for hours after midnight, twisting- wires, planing wood T soldering joints. - His idea was to keep it all a secret, and then burst the finished miracle on the astounded village.

Duly lie issued an invitation, one evening to the mystified villagers. He tuned up. A 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 house, shaking their heads 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 cows in the she'd. They denied all knowledge of the affair. "The evil one!" they repeated. "The evil one!' . And as a matter of facit every peasant in that village is now firmly convinced that it was his Satanic Majesty himself who had destroyed his own handiwork. The prospects of wireless are not bright in that particular valley; but to counter-balance 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 during an English Christmas —Alps and 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 die sandy wastes of Tunisia. It was a lovely single-storeyed house, blank wall on the outside, enclosing a lovely courtyard bright with greenery and musical with fountains. My friend, Sidi ben Ali, eould be described, I suppose as a sheik. I'he 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-cen-tury 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 su<;h a fearsome contraption that I am certain he would have had no difficultv with the Xorlh Pole or Mars.

So there Ave sat, my friend and I, in 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 stools amid a bewildering pite 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 Afgrican oasis.— (AngloAmerican 'N.S. Copyright.)