AFRICA

Press, Volume LXXI, Issue 21656, 14 December 1935, Page 19

AFRICA

Arabian Adventure. By Douglas Carruthers. H. F. and G. Witherby Ltd. 200 pp. (8s 6d net.) Quest Romantic. By F. H. Mellor. Selwyn and Blount Ltd. 288 pp. (15s net.) Through Whitcombe and Tombs Ltd. In Lightest Africa. By H. T. Kenny. John Murray. 196 pp. (10s fid net.) Galilee Galloper. By Douglas V. Duff, John Murray. 297 pp. (10s fid net.)

Africa and Arabia have been providers of travellers’ tales from the days of Herodotus and beyond. Other lands not known to the ancients took their place beside these after the days of Columbus; but lately, since Abyssinia found a place in the world’s news, there has been a renewed interest in the northern and arid parts of the Dark Continent and its near neighbours across the Red Sea. The story of a hunting trip with no less a beast than the unicorn itself—the Arabian oryx—as its quarry, “Arabian Adventure” is the only one of all these books that captures the compelling atmosphere of the true traveller’s tale. Reading the others, it is difficult to feel any real contact with what is described, even though that is sometimes adventurous. In this book, however, the reader identifies himself with the writer, and penetrates with him further into central Arabia than any other European of his time (1909), goes with him among men who are really remote and romantic, and greets places aptly named—the jagged ridges of the Jabal Tubaiq, the quiet palms of Taima, where water flows in the middle of a dry land, and the drifts of the great Nafud, the desert of red sand. Always beyond beckons the white form of the oryx, whose straight horns made him the unicorn of the ancients, to be captured only when the return journey has begun. “Arabian Adventure” is one of the best tales of wandering in strange lands. It is simply told, deals with surroundings of which few people have been able to write well and in which most are interested, and is made attractive by the directness of its treatment and its construction about a kind of plot—the search for the oryx. It is hard to understand why its author has waited 25 years before publishing it; but the story is undoubtedly better for being without the diffuseness of most travel tales. A contrast is provided by “Galilee Galloper,” the biography of an Englishman who proved himself strong in controlling native peoples in Palestine when Great Britain first took over her mandate of that country. It is more than anything a tribute to the man himself, quick of temper, hard on wrong-doers, and fretting at interference by his superiors in matters of which he alone has direct knowledge. At the same time it gives an understanding of the complex situation existing in Palestine when the flare-up of religious hatred between Moslems, Jewish settlers, and Christians produced the serious revolt of 10 years ago. The other two books are about the French possessions in Northern Africa—Morocco and Algeria. “Quest Romantic” belies its title, for it is as informative as a guidebook, but as unadventurous. The author travelled widely in Morocco, but never used any other means of travel than train or service car, so that he was confined to very welltrodden ways. It contains in handy form a good deal of useful historical and tourist information about a part of the world of which New Zealanders frow little. “In Lightest Africa” describes the inland parts of Algeria, as seen by an Englishman who spent a year or two living in the oasis of Laghouat on the edge of the Sahara. It is good in a plain way, and interesting more for the strangeness of its material than for any liveliness of incident.