TANKS IN THE SAHARA

"Five French caterpillar tractors have arrived in Timbuctoo after a two thousand mile trip across the African desert, accomplishing in twenty-one days what takes a camel caravan three months."

So runs the cut and dried despatch announcing one more conquest of nature, opening up a new era for trans-Saharan travel and trade, and connecting the French of the Mediterranean with the colonies of the West Coast.

If the picture is one to fire the imagination, it also touches the funny bone. The Conquest of the Sahara, the Desert giving up its Secrets, Months of Careful Planning and Preparation,--and five earnest-faced Frenchmen sitting stiffly at the wheels of their caterpillars, staring straight ahead and bumping over the sand at ten miles an hour. It is a delightfully incongruous blending of poetry and prose, of the sublime and the ridiculous. Phineas Fogg himself, with all his mathematical intensity of purpose, would never have girdled the earth from North to South instead of from East to West; and if he had he would never have entrusted himself to a tractor as a means of locomotion. Phineas had a sense of the proprieties!

The French achievement does not mean a macadam highway within the next decade, of course, and anyone who has ever had more than a passing acquaintance with tractors is unlikely to choose them for pleasure-driving. Supply stations have been established for the first six hundred miles, but after that everything must be carried. Fourteen hundred miles, as the illustrious Governor of North Carolina might remark with justice, is a long way between drinks.

Tugurt-to-Timbuctoo may never become as famous as Berlin-to-Bagdad, or even Cape-to-Cairo, but it has justified itself in the eyes of the press, if only because it has provided the headline: "Caterpillars Conquer Camel Caravan".