THE MIDDLE EAST

Evening Post, Issue 149, 20 December 1935, Page 3

THE MIDDLE EAST

BRITAIN'S GIBRALTAR

IMPRESSIONS OF ADEN

I suppose there are some things we hoard close in memory and which, in the naivete of our romanticism, we hug tighter with the years, writes Archer Russell in the "Sydney Morning Herald." J3o my first visit to' Britain's Gibraltar- of the Middle East is with me. And yet—flames of Belial!—atjk my transgressions ever find me out iT was there. Perhaps that is why I so often remember it. 'I had been wandering up the east coasts of Africa; at Kismayu the Umona picked me up, nosed in and out some Somaliland ports, and, crossing the Straits of Bab-el-Mandeb (Hells Gates), dumped me ashore at Aden. And of all the times it had to land me there it had to be at midnight. It was the quartermaster on the gangway who smilingly hoped I would enjoy myself as, bag in hand, I went down over the side. "Some plyce. Aden, he said, and then in soto voce i «•♦*£•' J believe<l Wm before I left it—literally believed him, I mean —for a spent three weeks in Aden on that occasion, and if there is a hotter drier, or more desolate place in this n?£ rfor that m*tter' ta any other, then I hope I may never know it. Meanwhile, however, Aden was haypg like a page out of the: "Arabian Nights." It was a night of a glorious Arabian moon; flooding the world with eerie glow, it lit the lava hills of Jekel Shamsham into ridges of burnished lead. Out upon the waters of the bay the riding lights of steamers blinked and dipped; on colliers and tankers many of them; for Aden is one of the most important fuelling stations in the East. Those lower clusters of stars are the lights in a fortress on the heights: that dim glow beneath the looming hills is Steamer Point; that smell— well, that smell is a reek of Oriental stench, and you know what that is. ,v ..had come t0 find tn*c romance— albeit the scents—of the glamorousEast I had found it here—here beneath a crescent moon pendulous above a gateway to the land of Haroun 'el Raschid. BEAUTY DISPELLED. But the morning after—what a disillusion! beautiful as Aden and the hills of Jebel Shamsham had been under the silver light of the moon, the beauty is dispelled when morning breaks. The whole place is a ba£ baric waste of rock and desert. Little or no vegetation exists; plants cannot thrive without moisture, nor can they root in stone. • Aden is what it now looks—a furnace of blazing lava rock by day, an. oven of sweltering heat by night. And there is no escape. But what an interesting old place it is! In the town of Old Aden (which one must not confuse with Steamer Point, the town you see from your steamer) you stand within the crater of an extinct volcano, the plain on which the town is built being the actual bed of the crater, and the stark lava hills that rise about it, the ■ crater's old-time walls. Wholly Eastern in character, its streets are narrow and tortuous;" its houses flat-roofed, square-built, and fantastically colour-washed—a phantasmagoria of camels, goats, donkeys, peoples, colours, raiments, and tongues. Here the Arab water-seller still plies his ancient calling, serving the water in earthern pitchers from goatskin bags slung like liuge bladders over the shoulders. Here, too, ride the lordly Somali and Arab of the desert, hotblooded and warlike, their stabbing spears held aloft and .. their shields hitched for use on the bedizened trappings of their bleary-eyed camels. In the centre of the town is an open square, where sheep and goats are herded on market days, and where, camels and donkeys come, some in. caravans and others in high-wheeled cars, laden with the merchandise of Yemen and other distant parts across the great deserts. ORIENTAL ATMOSPHERE. This great mart, together with that at Sheikh Othmann, still retains its Eastern character, the same today as it has been through all the ages. My visit to Shiekh. Othmann remains a living memory. In the course of a short desert journey, I stepped back into wildest Arabia, into the feudal barbaric Middle East of Raschid and Omar and Mohammet. Over three hundred thousand camels enter the oasis of Shiekh Othmann in the course of every year—the greatest camel mart, probably, in all the world. Right down through the centuries Aden has always stood as an important centre of Eastern trade and commerce. In fact, long before the Western world had embarked upon her great industrial stage there had been established in Aden an emporium of trade so great and wide as to include Northern. Africa, India, the Persian Gulf, and even China and the East Indies within its radius. Not, however,, until the opening •of the Suez Canal, in 1869, did she become the important focus commercially and strategically that she is today. '- , ' And so we come to, what, from Britain's point of view, Aden is most of all. Whatever Aden may lack in aesthetic features is more than counterbalanced by her practicability—the strategic position of the place and its natural adaptability for fortification. Because of these two'prime factors and her undoubted invulnerability, Britain holds today, in Aden and Sokotra, two of the keys, if not the master keys, to the command of the Red Sea. and therefore of the Middle East and Northeast Africa. •