A LOST ARMY

Otago Daily Times, Issue 18443, 3 January 1922, Page 2

A LOST ARMY

MYSTERY OF THE DESERT. The announcement, of the War Office that the British soldiers’ still . officially missing constitute an army of some 93,000, recalls another vanished army whose fate remains a mystery. When the -mad Oambyses of Persia invaded Egypt he despatched a body of 60,000 men to the oasis -of Ammon with orders to enslave the inhabitants and destroy the temple at which was the famous oracle of Jupiter, visited later by Alexander the Great. The army set out from Thebes, and reached an oasis about seven days’ march from the city. It was never afterwards heard of, but the Ammoniane, who were its intended victims, declared that the Persian .troops had covered half of the journey to tjicir oasis, when, as they made a halt for their midday meal, a wind oamo up from the south, raising from the sand the equivalent of waterspouts at sea, under which Saharan deluge the army was buried, never to emerge. Professor Elliott Smith, when lecturing in Sydney some time ago, remarked) on the fact that the dry and heated sands -of the Sahara had preserved as mummies unembalmed bodies buried in them thousands of years since. The shifting, of the sand by winds may yet reveal, as it has revealed and'hidden again, the lost cities of the desort, the 50,000 warriors who, two and a-half millenniums ago, were the shining sword of a Persian Eaieor.