AN ABAR AMAZON.

Bush Advocate, Volume XXIV, Issue 26, 20 April 1912, Page 2

AN ABAR AMAZON.

An Amazon frenzied with the lust of battle must be a fearsome looking object. Mr Allan Ostler, the Exi press' correspondent in Tripoli, had t the good luck (from a journalist j point of view) to see this rare type !in action, and the description he gives of her is impressive. It was in the fierce fighting at Gargaresh, when the Arabs stormed the Italian trenches, that this woman appeared. At the head of the attackers, who broke over the trenches like a wave, was "a figure cloaked and hooded in russett brown, who (tarried no weapon but a staff of olive wood, and whose voice rang high and shrill above the shouts and rattling rifle fire. The face beneath the russet hood was of so deep a brown as to be 'almost black. The eyebrows met a savage frown over keen, glittering eyes; the jaw was square and heavy,' the. nose short and straight, with widely-distended nostrils; and a collar the broad brown bosom." She scolded and exhorted the Arabs in a voice that the correspondent ungallantly described as like the scream of an angry stallion, and shrieked out terrible curses against the Italians. Before the charges she had been struck by a. fragment of shell, but she shook her bleeding hand in the men's faces, and bade them earn glorious wounds like hers. The charge over, she stood with arm aloft, "a statue of the Goddess of African Battle." After the battle she strode about the Arab camp, the. idof of the men, one hand bandaged and the other still brandishing her staff. "This woman chanted through the lines of the Israelite tents when the host of Sisera was overthrown. Turks and Arabs alike praised her courage. But she wanted not praise, but a. gun; and she came to the door of the tent of the Turkish leaders, and made her petition there. And a carbine was given to her. She shook it aloft, threw bade her head, and closed her eyes, and sent out a high, ringing cry - a musical, long-drawn note." It is not exaggerating to say that such a woman might be worth a good many men in the inferno of a charge.