NIGHTMARE COUNTRY

Gisborne Herald, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20623, 26 November 1941, Page 5

NIGHTMARE COUNTRY

DESERT LANDSCAPE "UTTER DESOLATION” CAIRO, Nov. 18 Unless one visualises the immensity of the desert, it is difficult to picture the operations, says the war correspondent of the Sydney Morning Herald. Here, with hundreds of miles of arid desert running inland from the coast until it loses itself in the rolling sandhills of the great sand sea, there can be no ordered battle lines. There are miles of barbed wire and great minefields protecting strategic points there is a kingdom of nothingness, which is the happy hunting ground of armoured patrols and mobile raiding columns. It is difficult to convey in words the utter desolation of the desert landscape. It is desolation made absolute. I have driven hundreds of miles across the bitter, grey-brown landscape without seeing a single living creature, a single bush, or a' single blade of grass. There is literally nothing for mile after mile but dead land covered with a thin crust, which the passing wheels churn into powdery clouds of choking yellow dust. The surface of the desert inland from the coast is not sand, but dustashes of a once fertile land which is now not even a memory. For this hideous nightmare country was once the granary of half the world,