A WANDERER IN THE WILDS

Dominion, Volume 34, Issue 139, 8 March 1941, Page 15

A WANDERER IN THE WILDS

Jungle Adventurer “Southward Ho!” by William La Varre (London: Heinemann). Till one reads a book like this one Is apt to imagine that most of exploring that needs to be done In this world has been done; that there are tew untapped reserves of treasure of one kind or another; and that there are not a great many places where the traveller may not venture in safety and with reasonable certainty of finding, even in the most remote of native villages, somebody busily “carrying the white man’s burden” and accustoming savages to the things which go to make up what we call civilization. These impression Mr. La Varre summarily dispels as he tells bis tales of travel through the jungles of Central and South America, For those who want it there is clearly romance and danger to be found in the quest for the wealth these countries unquestion ably hold. The author has found both in years of searching for treasure -—from gold to vegetable products—in land, that is often virtually terra Incognita. He tells in his book of several places where gold in great quantities exists, where the natives use it for everyday ornament or utensils and bury it with their dead—but where nothing short of a military expedition would stand any chance of taking large quantities of it from those who protect it so fiercely in places where few white men are anxious to go. There is one place where the natives recover gold from the stomachs of the alligators they kill. Every chapter of this book is a story in itself and also adds something to one’s knowledge of an out-of-the-way part of the world. There is the account of how a ruthless man has banded those who have had cause to flee the civilized world into a large organization for the collection of chicle gum from the steaming forests of Guatemala, where people in the camps work in conditions of danger and depravity; of. an island off the Central American coast peopled only by lonely women whose menfolk, lured by the fleshpots of nearby cities and an Incurable wanderlust, journey forth and rarely return; of adventures in Andean forests; of men who have gone there and made a home rather than stay to face the ever-in creasing pace at which modern life must be lived; of the remarkable effect eating the leaves of the" cocaine plant has on the natives in the parts of South America where it grows; and, in lighter mood, of how a bull was carried in an aeroplane to the scene of a projected bullfight, and of how. on an immense banana plantation—a model of American efficiency—the author was unable to obtain the ripe banana for which he craved, just because the staff was efficient and the bananas, since they were required for eating thousands of miles away from the place where they were grown, were never allowed to ripen on the trees.