PERILS OF THE AFRICAN DESERT

Evening Star, Issue 21630, 27 January 1934, Page 5

PERILS OF THE AFRICAN DESERT

Mr Nicholas Boonin, manager of an Indian mine, has travelled from Calcutta to London by car, and tells some strange tales of his journey. According to the speedometer iho covered 11,568 miles. Part of the time he climbed to 10,000 ft above sea level; and at one part, which he will not easily forget, he was below sea level. Mr Boonin chose to come by way of North Africa rather than through Turkey and Central Europe. Consequently half the journey was across wearisome sandy tracks along which a car might go with bare safety at five miles an hour, and now and again let out to ten. When Mr Boonin found a stretch of desert road on which he could make sixty-five miles an hour he thought of the lovely highway across the world this might be, properly made. . In the meantime this highway led him very near the gates of death. His most terrible experience came in x the desert between - Beersheba and Suez, where he got wedged in a sand drift. It was already unbearably hot, and he had no water left. For some hours he toiled with a spa!de, digging sand away, and as fast as he dug more sand rolled into the hole.

Perhaps, he thought, a caravan might appear, coming out from Suez. In a state of exhaustion he climbed a rise about a mile from the car to see if anything was moving on the desert track. He saw nothing but a sunparched waste. At that point, when human nature might have said this is enough, the unconquerable man set off to walk to a Bedouin camp five miles away. He tottered into the place more dead than alive, sank down, and begged for water. But in all the camp_ there; was only half a cup left, in the bottom of a goatskin. ■ ' • The Bedouins, willingly gave him this, and they put- him on a camel and sent him back to his car. In the meantime two of them went into Suez for help. The thirst-tortured, weary man got down from his camel and sat by the car to wait. The dark and vast night of the desert swallowed up the speck of life in its midst. Dawn came, and still no help. In all Mr Bonin had to wait twenty-four hours, without food or water, in that unbearable .heat, before the relief party came from Suez. ■ The eight deserts he' had to cross in the course \of his journey were the traveller’s most dangerous and trying experience. | Among minor difficulties, he spoke most bitterly of horseshoe nails. He might cross thousands of miles of sand and nearly die, but he would never have a puncture. On the 300-mile stretch of road outi from Teheran he had to stop constantly—a horseshoe nail every few miles. When he was nearing Cairo he had four punctures in ten miles. Mr Boonin laughed to remember the awkward five minutes when he was threatened with arrest for, taking a photograph! of a Turkish street where some women happened to be. It was a comfort'to take ship from Algeria to 1 Gibraltar, and Mr Boonin found the travelling through Spain and France happy and pleasant, but not nearly so happy and pleasant as the few score miles that led from the white cliffs to London town.