From the Library

[Biggles]

Even before dawn the next day the temperature was already at a ferociously high level and the glowing red bail of the sun gave us the impression of some dreadful scourge. We made ourselves face-masks out of linen which we wore under the front of our tropical helmets, hanging down to our chests, with big round holes cut out only for the eyes. Short trousers and sleeveless shirts also proved an agony in the midday heat. Long trousers and long sleeves would have kept off the heat better.   
Seeing the Bedouin going about muffled up to their noses like skiers in a snowstorm, we realised that warm clothing, especially wool, gives protection against heat as well as against cold. That's why in the heat one should put clothes on rather than take them off, but we were not yet wise to these desert tricks.
India The Shimmering Dream  Max Reisch p48

[Biggles]

It is an error to think of the pillion rider solely as a passenger. Much depends on him and on his state of alertness. Just like the man in front, he has to be constantly aware of the state of the ground. He must know by the sound of the engine how hard the machine is working in the sand, and whether it is going to make it or is liable to get stuck. The main thing when riding through sand is to keep up the momentum. The watchword is "Don't stop!"
Whenever Herbert noticed that the engine was straining at its last gasp, he would nip off behind and get pushing. He did it so neatly that I often didn't notice that he was no longer on the motorcycle. This resulted in half comic, half tragic situations. When the surface eventually grew better and I chanced to turn round for a quick word with Herbert, he would have disappeared! This meant that the good chap had been left standing far behind in the desert, sometimes many kilometres back, all alone and callously abandoned by his friend. As far as road conditions allowed, I would ride back, but Herbert had many a long walk through the desert. Then he would begin to revolt and say, "Why don't you let me have a go up in front for once? Then you can see how you like pushing and being left behind and having to traipse along on foot..."
India The Shimmering Dream  Max Reisch p51

[Biggles]

Besides this, our hearts were set on actually sleeping in the desert. Night in the desert is overwhelmingly beautiful and can be described only with difficulty.
We stopped just where we were. The last explosions of the engine died away and an uncanny silence descended, but soon we got used to the lack of sound and enjoyed it. The ground was dry and we laid our sleeping bags in a hollow in the sand. A thin linen sheet was the only covering needed, not so much as a protection against cold as against venomous insects. Then we lay still. The sky was a gigantic hemisphere above us, the stars were brighter and more radiant than at home and the moon was almost painfully white.
The silence was so complete that we could almost hear it - paradoxical, but true.
India The Shimmering Dream  Max Reisch p60

[Biggles]

We had scarcely left the last workmen's huts of Hadithah behind us than we became aware that the storm was still too fierce for the safety of our two-wheeled vehicle. Things had not looked so bad from the window of the cosy bungalow.
It took all the power of the machine and my sense of balance to brace ourselves against the violent squalls that came at us sideways and several times forced us to the ground. Sand got into our clothes, mouths and noses and behind our goggles. It was a most unpleasant ride.
We struggled on for eighty kilometres to the oasis of Hit, in the course of which we frequently lost our way and because of poor visibility made several long detours. In Hit we stayed overnight in a miserable caravanserai and were thoroughly unhappy with our wretched surroundings. After abandoning ourselves to luxury with the British in Hadithah, we were bound to be discontented. There is nothing harder to bear than a run of good days...
The following day, to our enormous relief, the storm dropped, and high time too, for our eyes were sticky with sand and sweat and our bodies in torment from the thousand pinpricks of lashing grains of sand.
Our clothes were heavy as lead with huge deposits of sand in every pocket and fold. I had burned my left leg badly when the exhaust pipe came down on top of me in a crash. Because the machine was so heavy, it had needed all Herbert's help to get me free again.
India The Shimmering Dream  Max Reisch p65

[Biggles]

I had got as far as picking up a pair of pliers, ready to prise the seals apart and dismantle the gearbox. I feared that the awful nerve-racking judder would start happening in first and second gear as well, and then it would be 'curtains'. All the same, I couldn't quite pluck up courage to undo the seals. Perhaps a miracle would happen after all. So we crawled all the way to Baghdad in the two lower gears. There was no miracle, but we did find the solution to the mystery. This solution was ludicrously simple and lay in a completely different area from the one I'd suspected. I'm almost ashamed to have to tell the story. As I was giving the machine a thorough check and clean-up in the yard of the Tigris Palace Hotel, I noticed that the back mudguard was bent and was clearing the back tyre by only a few millimetres. It must have happened as we were crossing an area of scree and had several collisions with large stones. At any normal speed it did no harm, as the back wheel could still move freely. However, when the tyre expanded in the heat and when its circumference was further enlarged at higher speeds in third gear by centrifugal force, then the blocks of the tyre tread caught intermittently on the bent end of the mudguard.
India The Shimmering Dream  Max Reisch p78

[Biggles]

While in Baghdad we had heard of another motorcyclist somewhere ahead of us who was also intending to get to India. This made me a bit uneasy, because can honestly say, hand on heart, that competition is welcome? I would not have been too pleased at arriving in India in second place.
I was naturally all agog to find out more. Who was it? What country were they from? What machine were they riding?
At the border between Iraq and Persia, where we were held up for a whole day, I had plenty of opportunity to make inquiries. From the local records I was able to make out that the man's name was Walter Tonn from Hannover, riding a 750cc Indian-Mabeco with a sidecar. He had crossed the border five weeks previously. He had a massive start on us. Would I ever succeed in catching up with Walter Tonn? It seemed unlikely. Our light motorcycle compared very unfavourably with his heavier machine.
I confess that this business irked me very much, but in the meantime things turned out very differently and I am sorry that I grudged Walter Tonn his five weeks advantage. We did indeed catch up with him, and soon. We found him, and yet we didn't. In Kermanshah we stood by his grave - he had died here of sandfly fever and typhus about two weeks before.
India The Shimmering Dream  Max Reisch p86

[Biggles]

The crisis affected us in various ways. We asked ourselves why we were subjecting ourselves to all this physical strain instead of staying comfortably home. Instead of risking our lives here under the burning sun in Persia, we could have been lying on a beach by a lake in our own country, with a nice girl. That would have been vastly preferable!
Thoughts like this are dangerous. Fortunately we recognised this in time and took counter measures to beat the crisis. This usually took the form of swearing at each other very violently by mutual agreement. We gave each other a thorough psychological shake-up: there was to be no weakening. Life must go on. Getting our grand destination was worth our best efforts. Gradually the fairytale quest cast its spell over us once more.
India The Shimmering Dream  Max Reisch p87

[Biggles]

I never cease to marvel at these Semperit tyres. It must not be forgotten that our 'pantechnicon' was being carried on the pneumatic tyres of a light motorcycle. We were really a couple of irresponsible idiots, running heavily overloaded tyres on Asian roads, but these were pedigree tyres! The inner tube on the back wheel was constantly getting holes because of all the nails and we worked hard patching it, but the outer tyre suffered no damage at all.
It seemed very odd that we did not get a single puncture on the front wheel, considering we went thirteen thousand kilometres through Asia. Whenever Herbert felt homesick, I used to advise him to take a lungful of Viennese air out of the front tube! He actually did this on one occasion, in the Baluchistan desert when we were finding the salt dust and the heat so oppressive. "That's better!" he said. I fetched the pump in order to refill the tube, and as I looked up I saw Herbert staring happily into the distance, under the calming influence of home. "You try it!" he said, and so I took a lungful of Viennese air too and all the hardship of our journey suddenly became easier to bear.
India The Shimmering Dream  Max Reisch p98

[Biggles]

A few days later the pernicious sandfly fever laid hold of me too. I felt as if my skull were full of hot molten lead. The optic nerves were affected and I saw everything through a red haze. Far off, everything was a mess of bloody purple.
 We often fell off and stayed lying there for hours. Once a Persian came by and helped us up. I was so feeble and was trembling so much that I was totally unable to pour petrol from the reserve drum into the main tank. The Persian helped it, then I just sank back into the roadside ditch. Thinking was a terrible effort, but sometimes I saw in my mind's eye that grave in Kermanshah where Walter Tonn had made his last stop on the road to India.
No, no, no, the blood seemed to hammer through my brain. Somehow we managed to pull ourselves together and ride on. I can't explain how, but we did. We ate nothing, sometimes drank nothing for a whole day and then frantically lapped up another salty puddle. We seemed to be becoming less than human, but we rode on and on, as if in a dream, because we felt that it was only by constantly moving that we would beat the crisis. If we lay down, we were lost. Somehow, almost unconsciously, we even took a few photographs.
India The Shimmering Dream  Max Reisch p106-7

[Biggles]

What takes only a few minutes to read here lasted in reality for many weeks. I have been unable to give you such a detailed picture of this part of the journey as you might have wished, simply because this great crisis took us so close to the next world. There are borders with the hereafter which no pen can describe.
The missionaries looked after us and got us well again, except for the sal jek sores which take a whole year to heal; and then came the day when, full of hesitation and expectancy, I felt able to set my foot to the kick-starter.
Together again, dear little motorcycle! If it had had any idea how much it meant to us! I believe it did know and was overjoyed to have us back. Fate was being kind to our bike too, kinder than to Walter Tonn's Indian-Mabeco in Kermanshah. So, I thought, sing us your steely song again, carry us onward, on to the south, on to our heart's desire at the end of the trail. Now, thank Heaven, we were back in the saddle. The sandfly fever had been a bad business.
India The Shimmering Dream  Max Reisch p107-8

[Biggles]

It may have been some small consolation to our faithful machine to be surrounded by people whenever we halted at a Persian oasis. Here, the clean-up routine was completed without difficulty, since the strange vehicle was explored all over wherever the human hand could reach. What a wondrous race are the Persians! Their joyful child-like curiosity soon made us forget all our tribulations. They were particularly taken with the lovely red-enamelled Tyrolean eagle which I had mounted on the petrol cap as a mascot. They couldn't keep their fingers off it, and it really is a miracle that the Tyrolean eagle stood up to all that pulling and tugging.
During the Second World War the Tyrolean eagle and the motorcycle with it lay in safe keeping in the Technical Museum in Vienna. It remained under the museum's protection throughout the confused years of the Occupation, when some Russian or American might well have taken a fancy to such an unusual machine. My sincere thanks are due to the head of the Mechanical Engineering Department, Hofrat Dr Seper. These days I have the India Puch at home with me. It stands in my garage alongside eighteen other veterans. As anyone will understand, this motorcycle my favourite and the one I carefully maintain and keep in running order. It has to start on the first kick, as I have often claimed (and won bets with some who wouldn't believe me!). I ride out on the India Puch several times a year and it simply changes my outlook. As I like to say on returning from these excursions, "It keeps me young!"
India The Shimmering Dream  Max Reisch p115

[Biggles]

We spent the night of 7th to 8th October in the shelter of a deeply eroded wadi. Our larder was looking distinctly bare, for we had been so well-fed at Badi Massud's that we had quite forgotten to stock up on provisions. You don't think food on a full stomach. We made supper off a tin of sardines from our iron rations and for dessert we swallowed a couple of quinine pills, just for luck. Quinine gives you buzzing in the ears, so you can't hear very well, but the stars in the southern sky made the night so magically beautiful that we were yet again perfectly happy in that lonely place. We didn't bother to pitch the tent, but just spread it on the ground and lay down on it, with the power of almighty God above us and the silence of the desert round about us. It was indeed a wonderful life, and how we thanked our stars for the privilege of such a great experience when we were so young. To be sure, there were many things on our journey which we could take in only superficially, but we did so with wholehearted enthusiasm. I do not envy Americans who slave away their entire lives in order to go round the world in their old age. 
For them, such a journey is the fulfilment of a life, but for us it was an education. It is only today I realise how much we unconsciously learned which can never be learned in school or college.
India The Shimmering Dream  Max Reisch p134

[Biggles]

Going by our maps and the distance we had covered so far, we estimated about another four hundred kilometres. That was going to be another hard slog and the motorcycle was giving me plenty of cause for anxiety. Because of our wild ride along the railway track and the constant bumping over stony ground, spokes in the back wheel had been snapping, one after the other remorseless regularity. Every morning I had a tricky time fixing the remaining spokes so that they were spread evenly around the rim, until my fingers were scratched and bloody, but it was no good. The back wheel was no longer round but was becoming more and more of an oval. 
Eventually I took nine spokes out of the front wheel and fixed them in the back. That was all right for another half a day but what would we have given for a few dozen spokes! We would have exchanged everything we had on board, valued at several thousand Schilling, for a handful of spokes costing one or two Schilling, if only we had been able to buy them. But any shop selling spares was too Far And Away to be accessed.
We did not talk much during this time. Death was breathing down our necks, for, if the back wheel collapsed, we would be done for – finally done for. Herbert dragged himself for long distances on foot in order to take the weight off the machine. I drove as carefully as if I had had enormous eggshells on the axles instead of wheels, but it was all no good. The wheels went on getting squarer, and we waited from one hour to the next for the final collapse.
India The Shimmering Dream  Max Reisch p149-50