NEW SHIPS OF THE DESERT

Evening Post, Volume CXXI, Issue 36, 12 February 1936, Page 10

NEW SHIPS OF THE DESERT

The camel, poetically slylcd llic "ship of ihc desert" and made familiar to youth by the school book and scores of romances, lias in recent years been challenged, like other modes of transport, by latexdevelopments of locomotion in its own particular province, the oceans of sand which cover so much of Northern Africa and South-eastern and Central Asia. In the Great War the motor-car was widely employed in these regions of the conflict, both for offensive and transport operations, alongside the camel train. After the War came the conquest of the Sahara and the Syrian Desert by regular' motor services and the motor played a leading part in the construction of the great pipe-lines which convey oil from the Irak wells to the Mediterranean seaboard. But one might have thought that for the ceremonial visits of Arab chieftains the gorgeous, caravan of a thousand camels would still convoy these potentates across the leagues of burning sand that separate tHeir dominions. Shades of Lawrence! No. Ibn Saud, the veteran King of Arabia, who has established his sovereignty over most of the Arabian peninsula, goes to see his neighbour the Sultan of Kowert on the Persian Gulf not in the slow but sure "ship of the desert," with its stately swaying motion, like a clipper rolling in the ocean swell, but with a fleet of two hundred hired motor-cars. "Hired," mark you; the last word in the demolition of the gauzy fabric of romance. He travelled by taxi! We shall be wondering whether he paid up next, for the cable message described him as "up to date." Even the Indian ,rajah when he forsakes the richlycaparisoned elephant for the limousine de ■ luxe does continue to own his means of transport. But it is all in keeping with the trend of the age. Mechanism succeeds man and his faithful beasts of burden, but for how long? There is no knowing if and when another turn of fortune's wheel may not complete the circle and bring back the age of the horse and the ass and the camel and the associations of romance they imply.