Where Alexander Marched.

Stratford Evening Post, Issue 15, 3 October 1929, Page 4

Where Alexander Marched.

|) (By Maurice Fageuce.) l p

One day, when flying becomes the most popular way of -.ravelling to India, you may make the journey. You will then understand the particular form of desperation that afflicts me when I am asked, “What was it like?” One’s mind sorts out the 10,000 mental pictures taken during 10,000 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 solely decided that ours is a dead and barren world. Wherever there is water, however, there are people. A. desert trickle wall surely lead you to the first habitation for hundreds of miles. And wherever there are people there are impressions. A handful of British people live beside a salt lake i»n the Egyptian desert. The India air mail, passing over their heads, drops them 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 w r e 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 new r s. In return they tell us that members of the War Grave s 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 r 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. Head winds made it necessary to draw on this concealed 1000 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 sheik who was a passenger that he was a Fancy Man. I will never know what he meant, because even the sheik was perplexed . He salaamed at the news that we would be in Bagdad 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 it*? tail. It had beeo. 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 aero'plane that was on, the way. How those sergeants must have smiled.

We are alarmed at Ja.sk, 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 to, 1923 came down near the village street, and, fast decaying, it still lies where it 'descended.

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 sa the well water. Although you can get a batch of bottle 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 Baluchi 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 ou with intensified fiercoiness.

The last 700 miles to Karachi is over a mountainous, achingly desolate coast along which Alexander’s army marched. One looks down and feels that 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. They sleep as wo fly, rind we forgive them their snores.