LIFE IN PALESTINE.

Taranaki Daily News, 16 October 1917, Page 2

LIFE IN PALESTINE.

NEW ZEALANDERS' LETTER. DUST AND INSECT LIFE. A description of life in Palestine is ■given by a Now Zealand soldier in a letter to his relatives, The writer says:— "I have been in Palestine for over a' month now, and, although it is in many ways preferable to the desert, I have had enough of it. This part of the country .consists of a great rolling plain that extends from Rafa to Jaffa. It is, or was, covered by immense crops of barley, which with those parts covered, with grass and gardens, makes a great change ■after the endless, glaring, barren sand dunes of Sinai. The green trees, hedges, and plants of the gardens not only form a relief to the eyes, but also their pro-' ■ducts bring relief and variety to our rations. Dates, figs, apricots, tomatoes, and watermelons are to be found in nearly every garden. These gardens are surrounded by the prickly pear hedges. These hedges, which grow from 10ft to •16ft thick, and about 12ft high, have proved formidable obstacles to the progress of our troops. The great thick fleshy leaves are covered with spines that at the slightest touch seem to spring at one, and stick into one's skin. causing much irritation, even after the spines have been withdrawn. Tobacco ■ and maize are grown in fairly laroe ■quantities. I have seen some of the Egyptian native labor corps collecting and drying the leaves and smoking them in roughly-formed cigars. "The Bedouins seem to be a harder working class than those further back on the deßcrt, and live under far better conditions. They live either in villages of mud-walled houses, or in single, scattered dwellings of the same material; whoreas, further back, a ring of brushwood was the only pretension of a dwelling that I saw. Certainly in one room are crowded six or seven Bedouins with all their donkeys, goats, sheep and; poultry, but this seems to be universal throughout the East, even in the larger towns. The roofs of most of these hovels are made of brushwood, supported on logs, which in their turn are supported by a central pillar of stono. and by the tops of the walls. In soma cases the roofs are topped with a layer of mud, hut in most are loft open, but in these cases all the rubbish and filth collected in the last hundred years or so is thrown on top—-broken jars, bones, cloth, anything at all that the native has ho further use for goes on to his roef. In his harvesting operations ftho ißedouin is careful that not a grain oi barley is wasted, that not a stalk of it is nob. made to serve some purpose. If the stalks are not cut and converted into dibbin—iv kind of chaff—or cate:i off by their camels, they »re cut and mixed into the mud, with which the Bedouin makes his sun-dried bricks for building his dwel-ling-places. The grain is ground into a fairly good .flour 'between two discs of .•stone, and made into a stodgy kind of bread. Granaries are very simply made jby ifei'ig a hole in the ground, placing [the grain in the hole, covering the grain with stalks, and finally covering the stalks with clay.

"Two days ago I saw one of the prettiest air fights I have seen. It was between a bhtcktailed Taube and three of our machines. Our battery opened fire suddenly, and then ceased fire, and I looked up to see the Taube being chased by three of our aeropjanes. Streaks of smoke, the trails of explosive bullets, seemed to join the machines like so many pieces of tape. Early in the fight one of our men was hit, and his machine had to return, but the othe,,- two kept no their fight, circling round the Taube, dashing at him, sweeping away again, and returning to the attack like so many starlings .■attacking a hawk. The rattle of the machine-gun fire from aloft and the smoke trails gave the grim reality of what was otherwise like a dream picture. In spite of numerous attacks.from our machines, the Taube flew on apparently quite unconcerned, and returned to his own lines, and ours to theirs."