VICTORY OVER DESERT

Greymouth Evening Star, 28 September 1928, Page 10

VICTORY OVER DESERT

MOTORISTS’ GREAT FEAT. There has been another victory over the desert. Six Englishmen with native guides lately made their way from Mafeking to Victoria Falls. They are the first white men to accomplish the journey. The party left Mafeking bn June 16, trvelling in cays and motor-trucks. Before them lay a. journey of a thousand miles through desert, swamp, and bush. They were outward bound on r, route untracked by Europeans, where disaster might very well be waiting for them. A few days out from Mafeking, the party turned into the dreaded Kalahari Desert, taking a route from east to west. This desert is a vast expanse of sand, thorn, and scrub, difficult to make way in and doubly difficult going in anything on wheels. Several times the men had their hearts •in their mouths, wondering if the machinery would hold out. For twelve days the little exepdition fought its way over the burning waste. They knew they were leaving good tracks behind them, with well borings which might guide wanderers over the desert again. When they emerged on the outer edge of the Kalahari and found a few scattered white people they were able to tell them that their wheels had conquered the waste.' The desert was not the only enemy to the expedition. There were swamps, malaria, and the tsetse fly menace to face. Strangely enough it was the natives who suffered most. They collapsed with fever and had to be nursed by the men they had set out to guide. The white men were all severely bitten by the tsetse fly, but they had with them all that medicine can offer to make for safety on such a journey and they recovered. Once in the course of the threeweeks’ journey from Mafeking to Livingstone the expedition was very near disaster. They ran into the region of a bush fire which was raging and advancing swiftly, roaring and filling the sky with blinding smoke. There was nothing for them to do but to race the flames to a point where they could diverge from the track. The fire covered a front of 12 miles.

Scorched, blackened, scarcely able to breathe, the drivers held oir to their wheels, not daring to think of the petrol tanks in the storage trucks. They won the race, and then, as it is just as well in the desert not to remember that you have looked death in the face, they went on and said nothing about. In due' course they were in the wonderful region of the sounding waters of the Victoria Falls, resting after their hard journey.