BY CAR ACROSS THE DESERT

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLV, Issue 21180, 29 October 1938, Page 9

BY CAR ACROSS THE DESERT

A black man came into my bedroom at 4 a.m. with a cup of tea. The stars were shining and the waves

were falling on the sand below the window. It was cold, and I hated the idea of getting up. In the darkness below two cars were waiting to set out across the desert, a Ford V 8 fitted with desert tyres and driven by an Armenian called (like most Armenians) Michael, and a military patrol waggon driven by a smart Sudanese soldier. There were two other figures wrapped to the eyes in drapery who, I learned, were also attached to me: one was a Sudanese cook and the other a young Egyptian servant. I was surprised, and pleased, to discover that all four men were genuinely excited at the prospect of travelling to Siwa. That lonely oasis far out in the Libyan Desert was as strange to them as it was to me. "Have any of you been there before?” I asked. The driver of the patrol waggon suddenly sloped arms, brought his hand smack down on the butt of his rifle and said: “Sir, I was there once before.” Some old memory came to me across twenty odd years and I said in a kindly civilian voice: “Order arms, stand at ease. Stand easy! When do you think we shall get there?” He cast a reproachful look at the Ford: “If no breakdowns,” he said, “we shall arrive to-night.” “Right. Let’s go.” The patrol car roared off in the darkness and we followed its tail lights into the desert. In two hours the sun came up and we looked out over a high tableland as bare and featureless as the sea. The Libyan Desert, or rather that small part of it between the coast and Siwa, must be among the most monotonous portions of the earth’s surface. It is unlike the conventional idea of a desert. There are no picturesque, undulating hills of golden sand. No palm trees strike the horizon. As far as you can see, there is nothing but a brown plain like the bed of an ocean scattered with millions of stones. It is a dirty khaki colour. At first camels are seen grazing on the thorn bushes that grow here and there, then, as you go on into the wilderness, life ceases; and there is nothing but the sun beating down on thousands of miles of brown sterility. The road, if you can call it a road, is merely the sign of lorries that have passed that way. These wheel ruts turn and twist among boulders and run off at apparently Impossible tangents to avoid dips in which water gathers in the rainy season. At Inore or less regular intervals you come across hard sandy stretches as flat as a race track on which it is possible to travel at sixty miles an hour for a minute or so before the track begins again with its bumps, jolts and sudden crashes on axle springs. At first you look forward to the crest of ridges, hoping that when you reach them there will be a different view, something—anything—on which the eye can linger with Interest, but the view is always the same: the stone-scattered khaki plain lying to the sky, treeless, shrubless, lifeless. The fate of the 50.000 Persians wM

perished in this desert on the way to Siwa is too awful to contemplate. They were sent out by Cambysses in 525 B.C. to sack Siwa and wreck the shrine of the Oracle of Juoiter Ammon. They never arrived there and were never seen or heard of again. It is conjectured that they were either overwhelmed in a sand storm, or, losing the way, wandered over the desert until they went mad or perished of thirst. Will some fortunate archaeologist, one wonders, ever solve the mystery of this lost army? Somewhere along the road to Siwa 50,000 Persians lie beneath the sand with their armour and equipment, just as they fell five centuries before Christ. Noon came . . . one o’clock, two o’clock, three o’clock, and we continued to journey through the same nightmare land. I called a halt so that we could eat our sandwiches at one of the five wells that lie at distances of about 40 miles along the “road.” Although there is water, there is no vegetation.

As my driver, Michael, stepped from the car, he gave a howl of real terror and, looking through the window, I saw that he had almost stepped on the most deadly snake in Egypt—the homed viper. It is a long thin snake almost the colour of sand, with a flat, small head and a tail ending in a thin pale point. I have been told that its bite can bring death to a man in twenty minutes. It is one of the snakes that will deliberately attack a man, and among its horrible peculiarities is the speed with which it can travel not only backwards and forwards, but either to right or left. Fortunately for Michael, the reptile had been driven out of its hole during hibernation by an overflow from the well. It was consequently in a comatose condition. We shouted to the soldier to bring his rifle, but he did not understand. So, taking the first thing that came to hand, which happened to be my photographic tripod, we took our courage in both hands and killed the viper. We then congratulated Michael on being alive and had our frugal lunch in the shadow of the cars.

As the sun was setting, we left the plain and entered the most fantastic bit of country I have ever seen. I think the mountains of the moon must look like this. It seemed that Nature, conscious of the bleakness of the past 200 miles, had crowded all the fantasy of which it is capable into a small space. The valley was surrounded on all sides by weird dead hills, each one carved into some improbable shape, a cone, a cube, a queer isolated pinnacle, a ridge that from a distance looked so like a battlemented castle with turrets that one could imagine men moving about on it. Others rose up like the ruins of old cities. In this weird valley we cried out: “Look! A bird!”

It was the first bird we had seen since early morning, and a sign that we were approaching Siwa. Fon an hour or so we travelled slowly downhill, through the moon mountains, then, emerging suddenly from the «torge, we saw, miles away on flat

land, thousands of date palms standing in the pink flush of the sunset. As we drew near, the superb fantasy of Siwa itself came into view, a rock covered with mud dwellings piled up like skyscrapers—like some queer African Manhattan Island. The date-palms formed a green sea from which this improbable hill of houses rose against the sky. Soon we were running in the shadow of this hill, and we realised that there was something uncanny about it. It was a deserted city. No people came out on the rooftops to look at us. There was no movement at the hundreds of small square windows which pierced the high walls. We learned that the old town had been declared unsafe some years ago.

and the inhabitants have built new Siwa all round it on the sand. After reporting our arrival at the police station, we were taken to the Government rest-house, a large, gaunt native building on a hill about a mile from the town. The late King Fuad had stayed there years ago. and the only surviving relics of the royal visit are a rope, hanging beside the staircase, covered with now frayed blue velvet, and a bathroom whose capacities would not deceive the most optimistic wanderer. I chose the royal bedroom, a large dark apartment whose narrow windows were covered with mosquito netting. The royal four poster was decidedly rickety. And before I went to bed I took care to isloate all my belongings on a high place, for I remembered the warning of a man who had once been in these parts: “Look out for the white ant,” he said. “They swarm out in battalions and eat anything but metal. They always build a tunnel towards their objective and work under cover. I left my boots on the floor once, but in the morning there was nothing left but the nails,"

BARBARA STANWYCK’S CHANGE OF HAIR COLOUR

Barbara Stanwyck has changed from a red-head to an amber blonde, and her new shade of hair w’ill be seen on the screen for the first time in RKO Radio's “The Mad Miss Manton,” in which Miss Stanwyck stars with Henry Fonda. Amber blonde is a light golden brown with red glints in it. Miss Stanwyck as a child was a natural red-head. Then, as she grew out of her ’teens, her hair changed and became the amber blonde that it is now. But Miss Stanwyck has become identified as a Titian-haired star and so kept her hair that shade with hair cosmetics. In “Stella Dallas” she was required to bleach her hair to a pale blonde. She kept it that way for her next film, “Always Good-bye,” but decided to allow it to return to its natural shade for “The Mad Miss Manton.”