Nancie flies to Baghdad with the Holts

During their stay in Haifa, Nancie befriended an Italian family called Campaneilla, a Colonel and his very attractive wife and their ten children. It must have been at this time that she swam in the Dead Sea which she told us was so salty, that it was impossible to sink when you swam in it. Oddly she doesn't mention this in her own memoirs.
After spending the month of May in Haifa, they drove to Gaza, also on the coast, where they were to board the plane to Baghdad. They stayed for two nights, in huts, on the airfield, with huge planes taxi-ing just outside their windows. The seashore at Gaza was just miles and miles of sand and rolling waves with not a soul in sight. Nancie thought it was probably very different by the time she was writing about it more than forty years later.
They boarded the Imperial Airways bi-plane which was called The City of Jerusalem. Nancie was as she puts it 'over-awed at the immensity of it'.

Nancie was sitting towards the back of the plane and after about ten minutes of flying a pair of legs appeared through an aperture further forward and a uniformed figure dropped down and walked up the aisle to Nancie. "You're weighing the tail down," he told her. "You'll have to come and sit further forward." At first she thought he was joking but he directed her to a seat in front of everyone else. She didn't like the sensation of walking up the plane as she felt she might go through the floor.
She then had to sit, looking at a notice, right in front of her nose, which declared, "No smoking. Not even Kensitas!".She could see the propellors, right outside the window, and the noise made it impossible to converse.I still have the note that she exchanged with Mrs Holt on the flight. The motion of the plane was 'like going over waves'. This was due, someone told her, to the 'desert pattern', presumably caused by the contours of the dunes below. After a few hours they landed in the desert at Rutbah, to refuel. The passengers and crew all had a picnic lunch together and Nancie enjoyed getting to know them.
The above photo is from an amazing collection of old photographs at The Library of Congress, in the USA. Despite some damage they are a wonderful record of aviation in the 1920s.