FIERY SUMMER

Wairarapa Times-Age, 19 September 1941, Page 3

FIERY SUMMER

CONDITIONS IN EGYPT NEW HEAT RECORD IN CAIRO. COOLER PERIOD AT HAND. CAIRO, August 2G. With sufnmer drawing to a close, soldiers of the 2nd N.Z.E.F. in the Middle East are looking forward with no little pleasure to the advent of cooler days and nights. For summer in desert conditions in North Africa is something to be experienced to be believed. It is not so much in the actual height of the temperatures that the real discomfort lies, but in the steady consistency of day after day of broiling sun, with the scorched sand throwing back the heat, making the air for miles around a shimmering concertina of haze. Night blings a short period of respite, but as the darkness deepens a stifling warmth creeps over the desert, making sleep, except for the experienced soldier, something to be eventually accomplished. New Zealanders who have spent their second summer in the Middle East agree that the season now concluding has been somewhat cooler on an average than last. Even taking tempeiatures for the succeeding months there has been a considerable difference. Last year the greatest heat was experienced in July and August; m fact, August has for years been notorious as the hottest month of the twelve. This season, however, the heat came with a rush—in May—and gradually dwindled, so that August, to date, has been actually the coolest summer month. Early May brought an all-time record temperature for the city of Cairo, when in Helouan on the tenth of the month 119 degrees Fahrenheit was recorded in the shade. A recording at Heliopolis on the same day gave 118 degrees, while in other parts of the city the mercury wavered at about 116. Out in the open sun it was well over the 130 mark. The previous May record was attained on May 24, 1939, when

temperatures of 115 degrees were recorded at Cairo and Helouan, and 113 at Heliopolis. Before that the highest officially noted temperature had been 117.5, on June 13, in 1933. How hot those early weeks of May must have been out in. the Western Desert can be gauged from the reports of German troops giving themselves up to escape from the maddening glaie of ' the sun. Records kept at a New Zealand base - camp showed the highest figure for May < of the present year to have been 114 , degrees, the lowest 84, and the average 102 Figures for June were 105, 92 and ■ 99 for July 104, 95 and 97, and for August, to date, 104, 94 and 98. The above are all shade temperatures. The big problem, of course, is how to keep cool. This problem so occupies the minds of even natives of these paits that the leading morning paper saw fit to devote a leading article to it. As far as the N.Z.E.F. and other army units are concerned, however, a sensible tropical dress of shorts and shirts have gone a long way towards a general solution. Still, there are times when even silk would feel like the coarsest flannel. Compulsory siesta periods, carefully balanced rations and cold showers Mter route marches have done a great deal to make a soldier’s life much more bearable. Heat brings thirst, and to meet a • huge and almost unquenchable thiist : canteens and messes handle enormous, in fact, unbelievable, quantities of minerals every day of the summer period. In the evenings the main taste is for a light lager beer, and this, it is declared, is the only real remedy for a parched desert throat. The prospect of winter with its crisp, bright mornings and overcast afternoons is certainly quite a refreshing one. It will signal a return to normal working hours and to conditions in which training is a much more attractive proposition, than during the four blitz-heat months of a Middle East • summer.