A LOST ARMY.

Thames Star, Volume LVII, Issue 15113, 23 December 1921, Page 2

A LOST ARMY.

MYSTERY OF THE DESERT. AWAITING THE PROOF. 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 Cambyses of Persia invaded Egypt he dispatched a body of 50,000 men to the oasis of Amnion 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. Ammonians, who were its intended victims, declared that the Persian troops -had covered half of •the journey to their oasis when, as they made a halt for their midday meal, a wind came 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 desert, the 50,000 warriors who, two and a half millenniums ago, were the shining sword of a Persian Kaiser.