A FLY TO INDIA

Hokitika Guardian, 4 October 1929, Page 8

A FLY TO INDIA

LOOKING DOWN WHERE ALEXANDER MARCHED. (By MAURICE FAGENCE in the “Daily Mail.”) One day, when flying becomes the most popular way of travelling .to India, you may make the journey. You will then understand the particular form of desperation that aftiliets mt when I am asked, “What was it like?” One’s mind ' sorts out the 10,000 mental pictures taken during 10,00 l miles of such flying and can find just one general impression—that if a scientist on another planet has been able to look at us he has surely decided that ours is a dead and barren world. Wherever there is water, however, there are people. A desert trickle will surely lead you too the first habitation for hundreds of miles. And wherever there are people there are impressions. .• * : * ' • * • A handful of British people live besit|e a salt lake in'the Egyptian desert. The India air mail, passing over theliheads, drops theuji a bundle of newspapers which tell them all they ever hear of the outside world. Their messages to the world are scratched in the sand on a special square of desert. When we skimmed over them the message was just “Thank you.’-’ We pass over grim trenches in the desert where the British fought the Turks, and land at Gaza to meet lonely Englishmen thirsty for news. In return they tell us that members of the War Graves Commission were there a fortnight before Mr Rudyard Kipling among them, and that the poet, coming back from the trenches, recited a poem, a new one they believed, which moved them greatly.- ■ ■ * * ■ # « In the heart of the great Syrian desert there is a petrol pump, hidden beneath a manhole which is kept covered with sand. I will not tell how pilots can find it. Headwinds made it necessary to draw on this concealed i,boo gallons, and we ( dropped our receipt into the pump. Landing in this barren desert we met an Arab, armed to the teeth, who told us through the Arabian shiek who was a passenger that he was a Fancy Man. I will never know what he meant, because even the shiek was perplexed. He salaamed at the news that we would be in Baghdad in three hours, and explained that he went once by camel, and it took him five weeks. We descend beside an Air Force machine that has damaged its tail, it had been taking three sergeants to Alexandria on a few days’ leave. Hot and rueful sergeants they were, their visions of a holiday fading. Flying on, we passed a relief aeroplane that was on the way. How those sergeants must have smiled. • » * * * • We are alarmed at Jask, on the Persian coast, when the Customs official stands beside the cabin door with a rifle. He slept beside the machine, fully armed, all night. We went to the village, where a crab was caught for our supper. Here an aeroplane attempting a direct England-India flight in 1923 came down near the village street, and, fast decaying, it still lies where it descended. At Jask there is a Baluchi boy whose fame as an excellent batsman has reach the cable station at Karachi. Although he is never bowled, he never has a long innings, because another boy owns the bat. ******* The pilots look forward to Lingeh, on the Persian Gulf, because they can descend beside a well in the desert. Imperial Airways keep a stock of mineral water deep down in the well water. Although you can get a batch of bottles by tugging at a rope, no thirsty desert traveller has ever been known to steal one. But no British schoolboys have yet gone that way! We met two Air Force sergeants wending their way along the sandy coast on camels. They pointed out angrily that they were compelled to have an armed escort, a burly Bialuchi who was armed to the teeth. Then they pulled the lead out of his bullets to show that they contained no powder, let us peer into his pistol so that we could' see that the bore was rusty, and finally proved that in any case the bullets would not fit the pistol. The escort took his “ gun ” back and moved on with intensified fierceness. ****** The last 700 miles to Karachi is over a mountainous, achingly desolate coast along which Alexander’s army marched. One looks down and feels no march in history can ever have been more awful. Many more impressions there are — among them that of our mechanic finding a - piece of hoop iron in a native village and spending all night to make it become part of our oil cooler. Every hour of every night these mechanics work on engines that are already running perfectly. Thev sleep, as we fly, and we forgive them their snores. There was no sadder moment than when in mistake, a Greek passenger ate the pilot’s Hindi when we were flying over the Mediterranean. We could hear llis hoot of dismay over the roar the engines when the news was

broken to him, and be sent us back a message of ■ deep gratitude for half a roll, the fragment of cheese, and tlie portion of peach that we were able to save from the wreckage. In gratitude, he circled us in the actual crater of Vesuvius, having first obtained the necessary permission. Our wing-tips pointed down to tlie hot lava that fills the crater. ****** How utterly baffling is that inevitable question at the end of the journey “Well, what was it like?”