LONG-LOST DOG
ANCIENT LEBANON IMAGE. RECOVERY BY AUSTRALIANS MELBOURNE, December 14. Australian railwaymen, working in the Lebanon, found the long-lost dog of the Dog river, writes Mr Ken Slessor, the official Australian wai’ correspondent. It was thrown into the river by the Turks (whose religion frowned on images of living things) during the Ottoman invasion in the sixteenth century. Cut from white stone, the dog is nine feet high. The image was set on a crag over the river more than 1000 years ago to commemorate the original dog whose bark was said to have warned of an enemy’s approach. The stone dog contained a hollow-sounding device, and, according to legend, when this was blown the echoes Could be heard in Cyprus. For generations this forerunner of the modern air-raid siren remained on the cliff over the river, which formed such a barrier to invading armies marching north or south that conquerors from Nebuchadnezzar and Napoleon 111 to last year’s British and Australian forces of occupation have left their inscriptions on the rocks. For more than four centuries after the Ottoman ihvasion, Dog river (or Nahr el Kelb. the Lycus of the ancient Greeks) preserved its legend in name
alone. Then a few weeks ago Australian engineers, .peering from the cliffs into the transparent green water, discovered the dim shape of a stone object, half-buried in the sands. Investigation showed that it was the carved figure of a dog, without any doubt the original statue. The Australians, who belonged to the A.I.F. Railway Construction Group building the rail link between Beirut and Tripoli, decided that it would be a pleasant gesture to give its dog back to the Dog river and set about restoring it to its old pinnacle above the river.
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Wairarapa Times-Age, 14 January 1943, Page 4
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292LONG-LOST DOG Wairarapa Times-Age, 14 January 1943, Page 4
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