AN OUTPOST IN RUINS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 130, 4 June 1935, Page 6

AN OUTPOST IN RUINS.

There may be some Britons who prior to the present .appalling disaster in Quetta knew of that town only as the place that Mr. Kipling's Jack Barrett was sent to, in a version of the story of Uriah. Jack Barrett was sent from Simla to "that very healthy post"; "the season was September, and it killed him out of hand." That, however, was fifty years ago or so, and in the decades after "Departmental Ditties" was written Quetta was transformed from "a dilapidated group of mud buildings, with an inferior bazaar and a few "scattered remnants of neglected orchard cultivation, into a strong fortress and one of the most popular stations in the Indian Army." It is also a commercial centre of considerable importance. Mr. Hector MacQuarrie writes of the European residential quarter and military cantonments as "one radiant garden divided by wide avenues sheltered by-glorious trees." An important military station, it stands opposite Candahar of sad and glorious memory, and watches the southern section of the North-West Frontier. Living can be very pleasant there, but, as a message about the danger of an attack by the tribesmen shows, perhaps one need not go far to find life as cheap as anywhere on the frontier. Then suddenly comes such a visitation as that which a few days-ago overwhelmed most of the station. Quetta lies some distance south of the great belt of earth instability which runs through Southern Europe into Asia south of the Black" Sea, and falls south to the Himalayas. It is on the North-east Frontier in the foothills of the Himalayas, that earthquakes have most frequently occurred in India. The hill station of Darjeeling is notorious for these visitations, and Nepal suffered damage recently. -It is difficult to realise at all fully at such a distance what a disaster means like that at Quetta, but everybody has sufficient imagination and sympathy to picture the tragedy in a general way and to feel for its victims.