RISKING LIFE FOR A THRILL

Waikato Times, Volume 124, Issue 20740, 25 February 1939, Page 1 (Supplement)

RISKING LIFE FOR A THRILL

Legitimate and Otherwise : : Useful and Spectacular

(Rosita Forbes in Digest of W T orld News.)

OF COURSE, in reality, I never risked my life “for a thrill.” The thrills have come along while I was risking a good many other people’s lives as well as my own in search of definite information, geographical or political. It has always seemed to me intensely foolish to risk life or health for the sake of a stunt, or a record, unless it happens to be the only possible means of earning a living, because I cannot believe that it matters one atom if X goes faster through the air and Z climbs higher into it than anyone has ever done before. But I do think it is very important to know all that can be known about the peoples on the edge of civilisation, because their actions may affect our own. For instance, when I made an 1100-mile journey on Mule-back Through Abyssinia some years ago, losing a number of men in doing so, nobody was particularly interacted. They said: "Abyssinia’s too far away, altogether too savage—nothing to do with us!” But, to-day, Abyssinia has assumed considerable importance in the eyes of the world, and in years to come this may be the case with a number of other countries that travellers have “risked their lives” to study. There is a definite thrill in the moment when you are going to achieve your objective, but, by the time you have actually done so, you are generally too exhausted, too hungry and dirty and footsore to be capable of any reactions at aIL I remember so well the climax of my first journey, when I was twenty-one. For months, with a party of Arabs and blacks and seventeen camels, I had struggled across the Libyan desert in search of the secret and sacred oasis of Kufra, the headquarters of the Senussi, those savage fanatics on the frontiers of Egypt to whom every crime iD the Sahara was then attributed. I was disgrzised as a native woman, and for weeks, in a temperature of 93 Fahrenheit, I hadn’t been able to wash, or to take off my clothes. We had lost the way in a trackless desert and nearly died of thirst. We had been attacked, betrayed, and finally imprisoned, while outside the fly-ridden tent our captors discussed the Method of Our Despatch. Rescued at the last moment, we had made

a forced march across the great barrier of dunes that guards Kufra and finally, with bloodshot eyes and blistered feet, we dragged ourselves out of the shifting sands and saw below us what for a hundred years had been the dream of every African traveller—an oasis, blood-red, surrounded by battlemented cliffs, and watered by the bluest lakes I have ever seen. All we did was to turn our backs on it, and, putting our woollen robes over our heads, go to sleep in the Shelter of the Nearest Rock. In every journey off the map there must be a certain amount of risk. Last year, while on my way to the closely-guarded Afghan-Russian frontier, I had to cross the snowbound passes of the Hindu Kush. The track is very narrow. In early spring, it consists of two ruts between frozen breakers of mud with a sheer drop into the gorge below. A native lorry was just in front of us. It skidded slightly and went straight over the edge. Our hand-brake broke under the strain and the radiator burst, but we got over safely. And after crossing the Steppes, where herds of wild horses stampeded at our approach, and riding across the legendary Northern deserts, I was fortunate enough to reach the river dividing the most religious country in the world (Afghanistan) from the Soviet Communist republics of Central Asia, where the mosques have become clubs and schools and cinema studios and cotton warehouses. Thereafter the risks were negligible, except that I lingered for weeks on an inadequate transit visa, and might have been arrested at any moment for breach of passport regulations. In such travelling, the risks come naturally. When I went to Mount Ararat in 1931, to see how completely the Turks were massacring the Kurds, I had to cross the Persian frontier with a band of gun-run-ners, and the Only Posible Way of Getting Out again was to accompany a raiding-party on its way South. For five days we marauded along the plateau, generally under fire. The wife of a Kurdish chieftain, who guided us, was killed in front of me, and our foray came to an end when we charged straight into a Turkish maxim. With a solitary pony, I escaped into Iraq, and at the first roadcamp they asked me if I was a missionary!