TRAVEL OF THE FUTURE

Evening Post, Volume LXXXVII, Issue 78, 2 April 1914, Page 2

TRAVEL OF THE FUTURE

"THE NEW FREEDOM" MR, RUDYARD KIPLING'S VISION. (PROM OtR OWN CORRESPONDENT.) . , LONDON. 20th February. A striking speech on travel was delivered by Mr. Rudyard Kipling before the Royal Geographical Society the other night, when the famous author, speaking ot travel pictures of the future, said.— " Naturally, so long as we travel by sea w a must embark from a. port and look out for the land falls. But the time is not far off when the traveller will know and care just as little whether he is over sea or land as we to-day know and care whether pur steamer is over forty fathoms or the Tuscaroia Deep. Then we shall hear the lost ports of New Yorkand Bombay howling like Tarshish and Tyre. Incidentally, too, %\e shall change all our mental pictures of travel.'' The men of the present were already scouting and reporting along the fantastic skyline of the future. Nearly all that could be accomplished by the old means of exploration had been won. The old mechanism was scrapped, the moods and emotions that went with it followed. Dealing with the conquest of air, Mr. Kipling said .' — Up to the present we have been forced to move in two dimensions by the help of the three beasts of burden and a few live coals in a pot. Now we perceive that we can move in three dimensions, and the' possibilities of our now freedom distract and disturb us in all relations. This is because our minds are still hobbled and knee-haltered by inherited memories of what were' held to be immutable facts — distance, height, and depth, separation, home sickness, the fear of accidetit and foul weather. Month by month the earth shrinks actually, and, what is mote important, in imagination. For the moment, but only for the moment, the new machines are outstripping mankind. We have cut down enormousiy, we shall cut down inconceivably, the world's conception of time and space, \vluch is the big flywheel of the world's progress. What wonder that the great world engine which we call civilisation should race and heat a little?" TWO GREAT SMELLS. Mr. Kipling then spoke of the travel pictures conjured up by some chance smell. "Have you noticed wherever a few travellers gather together one or other is sure to say : 'Do yon remember that smell at such and euch a place? 1 Then he may go on to tspeak of camel- - pure camel — one whiff of which is all Arabia; or of the smell of rotten eggs at Hitt, on the Euphrates, where Noah got the pitch for the Ark ; or of the flavour of drying fish in Burma. I suggest, 'subject to correction, that there are only two elementary smelk. of universal appeal— the emell of burning fuel and the smell of anelting grease. The smell, that is, of what man cooks Jiifi food over and what he cooka his food in. "A whiff of wood smoke can take us back to forgotten marches over unnamed mountains with disreputable companions, to halts beside flooded rivers in the rain ; wonderful mornings of youth in bril-liantly-lighted lands where everything was possible and generally done j to un* easy wakings under the low desert moon and on top of cruel, hard pebbles ; and, above all, to that God's own hour, all the world over, when the stars have gone out and it is too dark to see clear, and one lies with the fumes of last night's embers in one's nostrils, lies and waits for a new horizon to heave itself up against a new dawn." Next to wood smoke for waking rampant "wanderlust" came the 6mell of melting grease— such a smell or bouquet of smells a& one might gather outside a London fried 'fish shop. It was less sentimental and vague in its appeal' than wood smoke, but it hit harder. (Laughter-,) It was an opulent, a kaleidoscopic, a semitic smell of 'immense range and variety of colour. (Laughter.) To him a fried-fish shop could speak multitudinoualy for all tho East from Cairo to Singapore. SPIRIT OF DRAKE AND OATES. Coming to the choico of companions, Mr. Kipling observed that a man had been asked why he universally followed a well-known man into the most uncomfortable situations, lie had replied: "All the years I have known So-and-So I have never known him to <,ay whether he was cold or hot, wet or dry, sick or well, but I have never known him forget a man who was." Self-sacrifice, loyalty, and a robu&t view of moral obligations^ went far to make «, leader, the capacity to live alone and inside himself being taken for granted. But then came the accidents for which no allowance -could be made. A good man who had held a disorganised crowd together at the expense of his own vitality might be tried, slowly or suddenly, beyond hie limit till he broke down. There was a limit for every man, an edge beyond which he must not go. But at home only the doctors, the nurses, and the clergymen saw what happened next— not the caravan, not the grinning coolies and the whole naked landscape— and afterwards all the world. However, these things, and worse, were part of the rule of the Toad. They had never hindered men from fteading or following. Even in these days a man had but to announce he was going to gamble against death for a few months on totally inadequate cover, and thousands of hitherto honest Englishmen Would fawn and intrigue and, if necessary, lie, in order to be allotted one life share in the venture. "Only the spirit of man carries on unaltered and unappeasable There will arise— -they are shaping themselves even now — riskfi to be met as cruel as any that Hudson or Scott faced : dreams as world wide as those Columbus or Cecil Rhodes dreamed, to be made good or to die foV: and decisions to be taken as splendidly terrible as that which Drake clinched by Magellan ov Oates a little further south. There is no break in the line, 110 loads are missing. The men of the present have begun the discovery of the 'new world with tho same devoutly careless passion as their predecessors completed the discovery of the old."