ARE WOMEN GOOD TRAVELLERS ?

Evening Star, Issue 19918, 14 July 1928, Page 21

ARE WOMEN GOOD TRAVELLERS ?

Miss Rosita Forbes is a great traveller; she has been where no othsr woman has penetrated, but her claim to distinction does not Test upon tho fact that she is a woman. Her keen observation and power to record the essentials of what she has seen would achieve: distinction in any company. Her latest book of recorded impressions, ‘ Adventure,’ deserves its title. It is a great record of adventure, and in the opening chapter the author writes a passage which explains much of her success—her ready acceptance of those hardships which every horn traveller must endure.

“ Habits aro our gaolers and possessions our prison walls,” she writes. ‘‘A wanderer can hare-no household gods, and ho must also to indifferent to such' unimportant. things as food, sleep, and washing. -.1 “ I’ve slept on anything or nothingon a sloping shelf of rock above the red cave city of Petra, in the Hedjaz; on a table in a Tougah shed, on a native mat in Fiji, on an opium couch in Siam, on desert sands in Africa-and Arabia, in the ammunition wagon of a Chinese troop train ; in an armoured car in Palestine, on tl)e decks of innumerable junks, Sampans, and dhows; on tlio earthen floor of as many huts, stables, and caves. “ Once I couldn’t wash my hands for seventeen days. Often T‘haven’t had a bath for months. I’ve lived on dead camel, locusts, sea worms grilled till they tasted like spinach,' octopus, floating in oil, its inside scooped out and filled with garlic, and, once, in-a Samoan, isle, on, what ray . host _ described as a ‘lectle sick horse,’ which lasted like sucking pig.” After reading of Miss Forbes’s amaa

, iug dietary one can agree all the more readily with a later passage in her bobk. “ Women,” she says, “ oudit to make good explorers, because they haven’t enough dull common sense to know when they’re beaten. Their imagination will always show them Just one possible or impossible way out; : “ I think women bear not only pain, but. discomfort, better than men, ur.d 1 agree with a certain traveller who, when asked if her husband accompanied her, replied: ‘Oh, uo! It’s not the sort of country you can take a man to I’ ”