ERRORS OF GEOGRAPHY

Evening Post, Volume CXXX, Issue 5, 5 July 1940, Page 14

ERRORS OF GEOGRAPHY

Indian geography has often proved a pitfall to English writers, says the "Manchester Guardian." There is, for instance, a glaring passage in the first edition of "Q.s" "Dead Man's Rock," the book which brought Quiller-Couch into notice. One of the characters in that novel is taken to Bombay, where "in the cool of the evening he stopped to watch the sun setting over this glorious Bay of Bengal"—a considerable feat unless the man had in the back of his head eyes that could see across about a thousand miles of land to the east coast of India. And in the "Road to Mandalay" can Kipling be right in making the Burma girl at the old Moulmein Pagoda watch "while the dawn comes up like thunder out of China dross the Bay"? Kipling with his knowledge of the Indian scene may have had some reasons for his picture, but for the ordinary Englishman, a glance at the map of Further India shows that the Bay would be to the west of the girl at Moulmein, and she appears, like "Q.s" spectator, to have been endowed with exceptional gifts of far sight backwards. .