MOTORING ITEMS.

New Zealand Illustrated Sporting & Dramatic Review, Issue 1260, 11 June 1914, Page 30

MOTORING ITEMS.

Damascus, where Paul sojourned after his conversion—perhaps the very road on which he travelled when "suddenly there shined round about him a light from heaven” —is shortly to witness the coming of the British motor omnibus as part of an important scheme for a motor service between Bagdad and Beyrout (over 500 miles). Messrs, Alexander Behm and Company, a London firm, are sending out shortly to Syria a member of the firm with half-a-dozen specially-con-structed F. W. Berwick motor omnibuses to run between Bagdad and Beyrout, on the coast, as the first step in an important enterprise for developing the motor industry in Asiatic Turkey and Persia. At present the Turkish mails from England and the Persian Gulf ports are sent by horse carriage along the ancient road across the Syrian Desert to the Mediterranean, at the mercy of bands of marauding Bedouins. The desert road is excellent, being of hard-caked mud. The mails now take twenty days for the journey from Bagdad to Beyrout; the British motor omnibus, it is anticipated, will do it in six. Messrs. Behm calculate that when the service is running the length of the journey from Bagdad to London will be reduced to twelve days. Bagdad will be the headquarters of the service.