Death in the Desert.

Gisborne Times, Volume V, Issue 73, 1 April 1901, Page 2

Death in the Desert.

NINETY MEN PERISH MISERABLY

OF STARVATION.

A terrible story of suffering and death in the desert comes from Baluchistan, writes the Bombay correspondent of the Express. A party of 100 Baluchi traders, with a long camel caravan and a quantity of valuable . merchandise, travelled into Afghanistan to trade.

They fell into the hands of a band of Afghan marauders, who stripped them of all their possessions, deprived them of their food supplies, and after beating them with spears, drove them out of the Ameer’s territory.

In the cflort to get back to their own district the unfortunate traders lost their way in the desert between Kandahar and Peshin. They wandered about for five weeks suffering tortures from hunger and thirst, and when they had killed their last camel many of them went mad, and all but ten died in terrible agony. The survivors arrived at Peshin in a most pitiable condition, with hands and knees terribly lacerated, and it appeared that, no longer able to walk, they had crawled the last twelve miles of their terrible journey.

Sir Rupert Clarke to Mr Abbott, one of the owners of Advance : “ You had better sell me that horse. You won’t win a race in New South Wales. I shall have afresh one at you every time.” Mr Abbott to Sir Rupert Clarke : “ You may want them all. You haven’t one now that can beat Advance when he is well, and never owned one so good.” Speaking at a dinner in Wellington, Mr Murrell, manager in New Zealand for the Huddart - Parker Company, said that though he had heard it stated that his company now went “ hand and glove with the Union Company,” he considered that it paid New Zealand to have two companies, that they might keep each other civil. Either would be " cheeky ” if allowed monopoly.