A quiet place.
Many of the photos in my father’s album are unique, and though I’ve posted most of them over the past year, a few remain. I like this one because of the stepped heads: a soldier’s head above a camel’s head above a soldier’s head. Repeat.
I once posted a photo of a clock tower in Beirut, taken from up high.
But here it is again, from an even higher perch. We can see over the rooftops and beyond to the mountains of Lebanon.
Since the day Ailsa suggested a theme of multiples, I’ve been noticing them here and there.
Tuesday, lunchtime in the city: I saw 3 people wearing sunnies in 3 different ways: one wore them on the back of his head, another had them across her forehead and a third had them under her chin.
Wednesday, 3.30am in bed: I couldn’t sleep for worrying about the 140 fires burning in NSW.
Wednesday 4.30am in bed: The 5 stars of the Southern Cross and its 2 pointer stars were so bright I could see them through sheer white curtains without my glasses.
Wednesday 2pm, arriving home: I received a postcard from a French friend that’s identical to the postcard she sent me last year.
Thursday 9am, my room: A string of 4 Indian elephants, their rumps decked in bells, a Christmas present I bought for an elephant-loving student before the lessons were cancelled, hangs on the wall and drifts in the breeze, its tinkling bells disturbing the dogs next door.
Thursday 9.30am, my desk: I remember this photo in my father’s war album of 5 beautiful boys. I’ve never posted it on this blog because I’ve seen it in multiple places. It was probably a postcard the soldiers bought as a souvenir.
Ailsa’s photo challenge focuses on travel, http://wheresmybackpack.com/2012/12/21/travel-theme-festive/, and most (if not all) my contributions have been of photos taken far from home. Usually, travel is for the fun of it. But occasionally, throughout history, people have travelled to far-off lands to help defend them. For soldiers, travel is small compensation for a life that is dangerous, short on comfort and long on discipline. Christmas, for those raised in countries where it is celebrated, is a time when they feel particularly separated from their countrymen back home. For the A.I.F. (Australian Imperial Forces) in the Middle East in WWII, some comfort was offered in the establishment of a newspaper, the A.I.F. News. It was not only the first army newspaper for Australian troops, but the first in any theatre of war. Initially it was printed in Jerusalem, and later transferred to Cairo. Here’s the Christmas issue for December 1941.
Another form of comfort was writing. So far away from home at Christmas, the soldiers didn’t feel festive or joyous, especially if they’d seen horrors and lost companions in grim battle scenes. Many wrote poetry about the separation from girlfriends and families; the following poem, Christmas Bells, expresses both kinds of grief, separation that is temporary and the other, which is for ever. The poem is in my father’s poetry anthology, but it was written by Spr. E. Locke and was published in the A.I.F. News Christmas edition in the photo above. I’ll add my transcription after the image.
Christmas Bells
“Say, cobber, did you hear a sound
above the battle’s din?
A sound as sweet as music
that awakes response within;
I’m sure I heard it clearly,
above the bursting shells,
I’m sure the sound was happiness,
the chime of Christmas Bells.
“It wasn’t on the battlefield,
but came from o’er the foam,
from the land of joy and sunshine,
and the folks we left at home;
It seemed to hold a note of peace,
to tell of joys to come;
of many happy Christmases,
when fighting days are done.
“And now the dust of battle
and the torn and broken ground
have changed into a happy scene
and friends are all around;
How strange! The noise of screaming
shells has changed, and now I hear
The merry laugh of happy friends
That I hold ever dear.
“The scene is fading fast, mate,
But the Christmas bells ring clear,
and they’ll miss us over there, mate,
when they greet the newborn year;
But yet we will be there with them,
to give the year a start;
For though we’re miles across the sea
We’re always in their heart.”
You might think all the men in these photos are Arabs. Surprise! One of them isn’t. It’s my father in disguise.
The names are taken from the photos in his war album.
Someone is going out in style in what must be a Christian funeral, the carriage decked with a cross and angels, moving past a mosque! This is the first mosque built in Heliopolis, the present-day outer suburb of Cairo which the Belgian Baron Empain built out of the desert in the early 1900s. The mosque was built in 1911 in Mosque Square (Midan al-Gami).
The photo shows a pretty blend of Islamic and Christian ‘architectural’ embellishment, particularly the rooftops, the parts closest to heaven… I also couldn’t help noticing the Egyptian religious tolerance of the 1940s.
Thanks to Ailsa for proposing this transportation theme for a photo challenge this week. Everyone should see her fantastic shots taken from plane windows: http://wheresmybackpack.com/2012/12/14/travel-theme-transportation/
Ecclesiastes 3:3,8: To everything there is a season … a time to kill and a time to heal … a time for war and a time for peace.
Ailsa wants to warm up by looking at photos of hot things: http://wheresmybackpack.com/2012/11/30/travel-theme-hot/
Here in Canberra the temperatures have been in the high 30s lately, but rather than shooting this summery city for the photo challenge, I’ll draw on my father’s pictorial resources from Egypt.
A photo of a kind of swimming competition in the river – it looks a bit painful, and I’m not sure how you win:
And a drawing of soldiers under the blazing desert sun, probably up to no good:
Ailsa has been in some pretty rainy places recently and had no trouble finding reflective puddles of liquid: http://wheresmybackpack.com/2012/11/23/travel-theme-liquid/
But since my source of photos is from Egypt, an ancient country where rain falls little and seldom, I thought of the two photos here below that show ingenious methods of sustaining life in a dry land. During the Hellenistic era (333 – 30 BC) two technological devices were invented to transfer water to farmlands from the Nile or from underground wells fed by the Nile. The first photo is of a saqiya or Persian water-wheel, a machine which freed up human labour for tasks other than manually carrying buckets of water from the Nile to the crops, or lifting buckets of water from the river and pouring it into a channel. The saqiya uses animal power: bullocks, buffalo, donkeys, camels or cows, which tread circles around the horizontal wheel, turning the vertical wheel connected to the clay-pot laden wheel. The pots are positioned on a set of ropes so they tilt forward when they rise out of the well and empty into a trough before descending into the well to fill again.
Thousands of saqiyas are still in use today in Egypt.
In the second photo, a device called a tambour, or Archimedes Screw, consists of a large tube inside which a spiral chamber turns and scoops up water when rotated by a handle. The water travels up the length of the screw chamber and is poured out the top of the tube into irrigation channels. Its inventor, Archimedes, is said to have been the first to use the water screw, in 230 BC. This technology is now rare in Egypt but is still used for irrigation in other parts of the world.
Ailsa has posted some photos of misty, mysterious and mystical forests that stopped her in her tracks: http://wheresmybackpack.com/2012/11/16/travel-theme-mystical/. She succumbed to the temptation to capture a scene that can’t quite be explained, as did the man behind the camera in Fort Capuzzo, below.
In 1940, when Libya was still an Italian colony, this frontier fort on the Libyan-Egyptian border was bombarded into the pitiful state you see in the photo below. In 1940 and 1941, Fort Capuzzo changed hands seven times back and forth between the allied and axis forces, finally falling to New Zealand troops who captured it for the last time in November 1941.
In the little grotto, a statue of Mary survived the beatings. Whether the photographer was Catholic or not, he evidently found her survival mysterious, hard to explain. So do I.
