Travelling golden roads

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33869, 14 June 1975, Page 10

Travelling golden roads

To The Back of Beyond. By Fitzroy Maclean. Jonathan Cape. 140 pp. N.Z. price $10.90.

Some travel books galvanise within us an instant. restlessness, an answering urge to be off tomorrow, today even, to sample for ourselves the delights detailed therein. Sparing time only to decide if we will travel by camel or troika and whether we will need a snake-bite outfit, we drink in every mesmeric sentence, all the while wondering what can have prevented us until now from visiting this obviously matchless part of the world.

Such a book is Sir Fitzroy Maclean’s “To The Back of Beyond”, a spellbinding mixture of history and personal experience in Central Asia and Mongolia, a book which the author modestly describes as being “the result of a certain amount of desultory reading and a good manyyears of equally desultory travel anil photography.” However, even the browsing reader will realise that the quality of the 200 photographs alone puts the book on a special plane. Sir Fitzroy Maclean, a Member of Parliment for 15 years and Parlimentary Under-Secretary for three was the brigadier in command of the British Military Mission to Tito's Partisans. He first visited Samarkand as a young diplomat during the 1930 s and during the last. 30 years has been back to the Soviet Union a dozen times. His favourite area is south-eastern Turkestan, with lengendary cities of Tashkent. Samarkand and Bokhara “remote and mysterious behind their barrier of deserts and mountains.” Central Asia is bounded by the Caspian Sea in the west, Lake Baikal in the east, the Arctic Ocean in the north and the massive mountain ranges of the Elburg, Pamirs,

Himalayas. Tien Shan and Altai in the south. Records ■ concerning the wandering, semi-pastoral, semi-military people of early Central Asia have been erased or lost during “dynastic and racial convulsions”, but Sir Fitzroy Maclean has gleaned much from his “desultory reading” and quotes' freely from the writings of early European travellers who penetrated this wild continent on diplomatic, religious or merchant projects. He himself seems part of this tradition of constructive curiosity.

The first known rulers of Central Asia were the Persians who dominated the continent from 500 B.C. until they were decisively defeated by Alexander the Great. The empire that Alexander established survived for a century and a hall' after his death in 323 B.C. and was then over-run by the Tartars. “Once again.” Maclean writes, “marauding nomads ranged a.cross the steppes and fought among themselves, and whole provinces changed hands at frequent intervals.” About 430 A.D. a Turko-Mongolian tribe, an off-shoot, of the invading forces in Europe under Attila the Hun. dislodged the Tartars. In 632 A.D. the Prophet Mohammed launched Arab armies that were to bring a great part of the then known world under Islam. By 800 A.D. a vast Moslem empire stretched from the frontiers of China to the coast of Spain. In 1155, Jenghis Khan was born and Asia shook with the impact of his conquering Mongols. One of Jenghiz Khan’s grandsons, the famous Kublai Khan was the first, “foreigner” to rule all of China, adopting the way of life of those he had conquered and receiving the Venetian traveller Marco Polo in his court.

Two other European travellers have left records that tell of the great Tamerlane — Clavijo, an emissary from Henry 111 of Castile, who visited Samarkand in 1403. and Johann Schiltberger who has written of Tamerlane’s death from grief at the infidelity of the youngest of his eight wives.

After the reign of Ivan the Terrible, Russia strengthened and spread into Central Asia, completing her conquest in 1884. Maclean says: “When we speak of the Soviet Union, most of us are inclined to call it Russia and its inhabitants Russians. But more than half its territory lies in Asia, and although admittedly the largest and most important. Russia is in fact, only one of the 15 different Soviet Socialist Republics of the Union.” The last half of this delightful book details the more recent history of Asia and Mongolia, the political implications of the present situation there, and the adventurous wanderings of Maclean himself. We assimilate facts and figures painlessly, interwoven as they are with author’s doings and opinions, “On the way back to Ashkhabad we drove past the race-course. “Races this afternoon,” said my Turkman friends.

“You shouldn’t miss them." But the Aeroflot, time-table intervened, and by the time the Turkmen jockeys with their fur busbies and vicious-looking whips were under starter’s orders. I was airborne and soaring 30,000 feet above the green metallic waters of the Caspian.”