Getting About

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32298, 16 May 1970, Page 4

Getting About

Travellers' Tales from "Blackwood." Blackwood. 259 pp. This latest collection of true-life stories from a world-famous periodical consists of a dozen contributions covering the events of over a century. All are excellent in the matter of literary style but vary enormously in other ways. The earlier tales, beginning with an experience in Zanzibar by Sir Richard Burton in 1858, and including an account of one of the first penetrations into Japan by a European in 1861, are written in the rather heavy phraseology common at that time, but once into the twentieth century we can follow with interest or amusement the adventures which befell the writers. Eric Linklater’s “Under the Hammer and Sickle,” written in 1927, and describing , the anxieties and discomforts of three hapless English travellers exposed tq the vagaries of transport and general inconsequence of life in the Soviet Union at that time, is hilariously funny. Gordon Meyer’s “Visit to Corumba” forty years later was equally trying for the writer but from a different cause—this time the deep unpopularity of all English-speak-ing travellers in a smouldering South American republic. Matt Marshall (“Tramp Royal”) took himself on foot up “The Arctic Highway” in 1955 and gives a most graphic account of the adventure, and the very likeable qualities of the Finns. John Buchan’s “Evening on the Veld” should be read for the austerely beautiful prose which is the hall mark of his work, and Hugh Clifford’s “The Quest Of The Golden Fleece” is calculated to make the firmest flesh creep. Altogether an ideal bedside book.