HOMEWARD FLIGHT
By JOSEP.H STEELE
HERE was a hint of English austerity before we reached the I airport. From the Air Booking Centre in town we travelled in a brown lorry fitted with rough benches and a canvas tilt, so that the hot, dry afternoon air blew straight through it. Our vehicle pulled up for a moment outside the Continental Hotel, alongside one of the trim white buses of the Misr company—the local Egyptian air line; we could make our own comparisons. Almaza, the civil airport of Cairo, had altered a good deal since I was last there. Per- haps I was unreasonably surprised. But one had heard so much talk about post-war air travel that one hardly expected to find people actually doing things; yet here at Almaza they had put up quite a range of new buildings, and still more were going up. It was too early to say whether sunshades for aircraft were foreseen ; when we got into our Dakota, which had been standing in the full after- noon sunshine, the temperature within suggested how useful such capacious sunshades would be. But if an all-metal aeroplane quickly heats up, it quickly cools off; we had only been airborne a few minutes before I forgot all about temperatures.
We really were following an admirable sightseeing course. You could see the Nile visibly being turned off at the main. Stretching across the two branches of the river, clear in every detail, were the ranges of vast control-works that at this season prevent any drop of Nile water from flowing from the mouths of the Nile into the sea. Soon we could pick out something equally remarkable in its own way. That narrow black line ruled across the desert had been the road to the battlefield; unending streams of men and material had flowed along it. When we saw the road being made ten years before it never looked as though it would stand up to that kind of traffic. Men were pitching sand into a tar-boiler and withdrawing shovel- fuls of a disgusting-looking steaming black porridge which they spread upon the surface of the desert. A pneumatic-tyred roller con- solidated the. mess—and there was the road to Victory. The tale of years continued to unwind backwards. Now I could look down upon a grim square lonely building and then upon three more similar ones ; the four remaining Coptic monasteries of the Wadi Natrun. When we first visited them twenty years earlier we found the way with a home-made sun-compass. Ours were the first cars that some of the monks had seen.
As the Dakota thrust westwards the monasteries soon faded from sight, and there remained nothing to look at but the beautiful patterns Lit the sand below. From above, these almost imperceptible drain- age channels gave the effect of fantastic trees on a Chinese vase—or of the shapes of great spreading flames. When a pale Mediterra- nean came into view far to the north it signified that we should soon be crossing the battlefield of El Alamein. But I already knew that the desert had swallowed this battle almost as completely as t' Mediterranean had swallowed the battle of Matapan. Five weeks after the battle had been won a traveller along the main road could not have said positively where the battlefield was. Now from the air I could only see a few faint vehicle-tracks, a tiny black rect- angle here and there that might represent a burnt-out tank, and little U-shaped markings that showed where men had dug down to make splinter protection for their trucks. Again the desert became blank. Later on there was a much greater confusion of tracks suggesting the ebb and flow of armies across southern Cyre- naica ; and although one might not be able to interpret the tracks properly, one was strongly and gratefully conscious of the forces that had finally swept the desert clear and that had made it pos- sible for civilians to fly comfortably homewards. Benghazi looked very civilised but completely dead. Wrecks lay in the harbour, but no ships floated at the quays. Three great breaches in the outer mole still showed how the angry Mediterranean had ham- pered the 8th Army in its victoricus advance more than the enemy
had in this region. As the machine headed across the strangely dun-coloured waters of the Gulf of Sirte, it seemed more and more to jyave fixed itself rigidly in its own course. Hour after hour, its orientation had not changed : the earth had slipped beneath it : the sun had swung over from the port to the starboard hand, so that now it began to shine into my window. Then the sea extinguished it without fuss or emotion.
Land again slid out of the west, grey and formless now. A few lights twinkled. Away to the north-west a lighthouse flashed. The air suddenly grew hot and oppressive again ; the steel shell of the cabin scorched the hand that touched it. The landing-lights revealed the path of the airscrew blades as a brilliant white arc. Then the wing beneath my window canted steeply into the sky, steadied again, the Dakota bumped on North Africa and came to rest. We walked through an enormous empty hangar to a mess-room where supper was waiting. That is all we remembered of Tripoli; that, and a screen of tall trees, and a full moon, and a wind that seemed hotter than Cairo's summer breezes. Flying over the Mediterranean was like an all-night railway journey when you haven't booked a sleeper—fitful slumber, spasmodic wrigglings to try to regain a comfortable position, occasional unidentifiable patterns of lights out- side. There was a marine lighthouse that kept signalling the Morse letter " B" ; would that be Bizerta? Land ghostly in the moonlight swam beneath us ; Sardinia? With no map and few wits, who could say? At crack of dawn the plane circled down to a range of brilliant lights, we stepped upon the soil of Europe and we sniffed the cool, damp air of France. After breakfast, when the daylight had strengthened, we could see how this airport of Marseilles had been battered.
Perhaps the early morning is not the best time for feeling exulta- tion or for properly appreciating miracles. Our spirits were not encouraged to soar, even if our bodies were borne aloft. Surely we should have been thinking of Marseilles as it was only a year before, or as it was when last I landed there six years before? But here were the Dakota's staff distributing landing-cards to be filled up before arrival in England. The yellow quarantine form was headed " Ringwood and Fordingbridge Rural District Council." It seemed deliciously English, delightfully matter-of-fact ; and the words themselves had a musical lilt. It was ridiculous to try to find any logical connection between the Wadi Natrun and the Trigh Capuzzo and the Ringwood and Fordingbridge Rural Usti' ct Council. Nor were the clouds going to help us to make sense of it all. Now, as we flew northwards, they shone in the early sunlight ; the cloud geography seemed to be moulded so closely upon the un- seen terrestrial geography below that it was easy to mistake the magnificent white shapes eastwards for the Alps themselves. So I had to imagine how closely we were passing to Avignon or Roanne or Nevers ; nothing could be identified through occasional gaps in the clouds. But I had not realised before how tortuous French secondary roads could be.
When at last the cloud-layer thinned we were flying over grey Water. A coaster was steaming stolidly down-channel. One really could feel exhilarated now ; surely England would be in sight soon? There it was, above the starboard wing. St. Catherine's Point? Undoubtedly, for there were the curving chalk cliffs and then the Needles themselves. A ship was leaving a broad wake in the Solent. The sun came out as we crossed the coast of the mainland, and as the Dakota circled for the last time England did its best for a man who had not been there for nearly six years. A tranquil winding river, a water-mill, a horse-plough, shapely and brilliant and varied trees, masses of rhododendron—and not a sign of war. Exactly six- teen hours after leaving Almaza, I stamped hard on the soil of Hampshire.
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