Tuesday 7th July 1942

6p.m. at the dusty con. depot near the Suez Canal. A wind has just sprung up and is hurling clouds of dust in through the doorway. Damned zift wind and dust! It has grown cool since the wind rose though. It has been unbearably hot all day and I've laid uncomfortably on my blankets, spread on the stone floor of this tent, feeling quite licked. Thank heavens, it will be less hot for the lads at the front; they will be near the coast.

The news from the front is still good. We are holding on. American troops are now in action, too.

Postscript to our journey to the Jordan Valley. (Being extracts from a travel book by Cedric Belfrage)

“From the brown hills on which Jerusalem stood we rolled down through desolate, parched desert, past a sign which said, “Sea Level,” with the Jordan Valley 1300 feet below. We stopped once to look across the arid, melancholy gulch at a building that clung to the cliff side in the far distance... almost undetectable from it's background. It was... a monastery built on the place where John the Baptist was credited with having lived for a long time on locusts and honey. Pious monks now lived there, in this barren place...”