53 



Sharp: Very fast and reckless? 



Reveller Yes. Well, the roads were essentially one-way, paved roads, just 



wide enough for a car. Two cars would approach each other on this 

 road playing chicken, and one of them had to give. They were both 

 going about fifty miles an hour. One of them would pull off to 

 the side, and they would invariably pull off on the windward side, 

 with the result that after they got by there was a cloud of dust 

 on the road, and if there was another car coming you couldn't see 

 it. It was awful! [laughing] 



And as I said earlier, we were lucky to survive. We stopped 

 for water after an hour or so. John Isaacs and John Blandford 

 came up to me and said, "Can't you do something about these 

 drivers? We're scared to death." [laughing] They were green 

 around the gills and white as sheets. 



Sharp: And you were scared to death as well? 



Revelle: I just assumed that was the way it was. I wasn't going to do 



anything about it, but when they said they were scared too, then I 

 had to be a leader and I had to do something about it ! So the 

 driver slowed down a little bit after that. 



Sharp: You talked to him or did he figure it out by the way you 

 looked? 



Revelle: We talked to our Pakistani guides and sort of mentors, and they 



talked to the driver. But literally this cloud of dust would just 

 completely obscure the road from the driver that turned off. They 

 would always turn off on the windward side. 



Then the other thing, which was much more important and 

 really this was the fundamental discovery we made, we stopped at a 

 farm and Charlie Bower, the director of the Salinity Laboratory of 

 the U.S. Department of Agriculture at Riverside, picked a leaf of 

 corn, which they call maize, because the British word corn means 

 simply grain of any kind, and he studied this leaf for about five 

 minutes . 



He looked up finally and he said, "This corn is not 

 suffering from salt in the soil; it's just not getting enough 

 nitrogen. The leaf shows that it's very deficient in nitrogen." 

 Well, that was really the payoff for the whole project, as I 

 realized as time went on. 



Most of the rest of the panel took the waterlogging and 

 salinity problem very seriously. These idea men — Gomer, Katz 

 and Isaacs particularly — had lots of ideas for getting rid of 

 the salt, like sucking it up with porous sheets. 



Sharp: And the tube wells and all the rest of it? 



Revelle: Well, not the tube well. The tube well is the way to do it, but 



they had lots of other ideas, like sucking it up with plastics or 

 with special salt-loving plants, various things like that. 



They were full of interesting and useless ideas! They were 

 all just a bloody nuisance on the panel, even my friend John 

 Isaacs, because they thought there ought to be a lot more research 



