STRANDED IN SAHARA

Wairarapa Times-Age, 21 July 1938, Page 9

STRANDED IN SAHARA

ENGLISH WOMAN’S EXPERIENCE. An English woman artist owes her escape from a typhus-stricken area in the Sahara Desert to men of the Foreign Legion, one of whom was an exburglar from London. The artist, Mrs Mary Gordon West, was staying at Erfoud, a remote mud village near the Sahara in South Morocco, and was about to return to England for the British Empire Art Society’s exhibition at South Kensington when an outbreak of typhus cut her off 1,300 miles from home. Natives were dying in hundreds and her only chance was to cross the wild Atlas Mountains' by dangerous tracks and so reach Tangier and a boat on another route. Men of the Foreign Legion formed an escort. . “One of my worst experiences,” Mrs West said this week, “was the journey from Rabat, headquarters of the Foreign Legion, to Kingahir, the legion post, where I stayed two months. My. quarters were a mud hut, and I was not comforted by the thought that visitors who stayed there the previous year had been massacred’by wild tribesmen. One of the legionaries deputed to look after me was an Englishman of good family, who had taken to crime and fled from England to escape the police. He told me he used to specialise in cat burglary—visiting large London and country houses when dances and parties were being held. He made a lot of money out of his last haul, fled to Paris, where he spent it recklessly, and then joined the legion under an assumed name.”