p.

2.
have to go off or you will be wondering what has
happened to me. but three people have now had cables
from home, so I am hoping again.

As you will have seen from my address & so on, I am
in Egypt - which is more or less as expected. But that is
as much as I can tell you - & if I told you the name
of the place you would not know it. But this is a
Base Depot, & therefore you can gather I am in a pretty
safe place at the moment, we arrived in the country
on exactly the same day on which I had to report
to Rossett last year - which is a coincidence. We
dropped anchor fairly early in the morning, & my first
sight of Egypt was incredible to me. You know those
coloured pictures we used to have in our Bibles, of
Palestinian countryside. They alwasy looked rather improbably
& essentially biblical to me - but not at all; they
are quite correct, down to the smallest detail. I stood
& gasped for a long time & felt very young again, &
remembered many things from long ago - & then began
to realised for the first time the nature of the
part of the world I was coming to. There was a
great deal of sand, of course, - as somebody said,
this bloody sand business has been rather overdone
here - but the incredible part was the hills &
mountains. They were all shades of mauvish, even