"OVER THE HILLS AND FAR AWAY."

Otago Witness, Issue 3832, 23 August 1927, Page 17

"OVER THE HILLS AND FAR AWAY."

By

Lloyd Ross.

I have danced in Mayfair, played tennis at Cannes, sipped tea at Peking, and starved on the Yukon. There seems nothing now to do except travel over the same ground again and again, until I look like G. K. Chesterton’s old man, Dr Quilp, who said that he could travel round the world so fast that he could keep up a long chatty conversation in some old world, village by saying a word of a sentence each time he went round. This experiment was tried on an apoplectic old major, who was sent round the world so fast that there seemed to be (to the inhabitants of some other star) a continuous band round the earth of white whiskers, red complexion, and tweeds—a thing like the ring of Saturn. But I do pot feel like breaking my neck in the interests of the purveyors of benzine. Perhaps one could walk around backwards —I have not heard of this being done—and experience the novelty of seeing how countries appear when receding from them, for travel somewhere I must. I must go down to ’he sea and the ships. I can hear the horns of elfland faintly blowing, and feel the urge that came upon 1115’ Lord’s new-wedded wife: There were three gipsies a-came to my dooi’, And downstairs ran this lady, O! One sang high, and another sang low, And the other sang. Bonny, bonny Biscay, O! Then she pulled off her silk-finished gown And put on hose of leather, O! The ragged, ragged rags about our door — She’s gone with the wraggie toggle gipsies, O! Fortunately, there is no need to move from the cosy fireside, for on my bookshelf are travel books galore, including one very thumbed and damp-smelling old edition of Marco Polo which I picked up in a second-hand bookshop. Here can my' wanderlust be satisfied, for it was sitting over some such copy of Marco Polo’s wanderings that Coleridge fell asleep and dreamt of: In Xanddu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea.

I see unfolding journeys as numberless as those seen in the glowing coals. I hear the mysterious delicacy' of the ocean breathing in a sea shell held to the ear. I go with the Ancient Mariner, Columbus and Mandeville. No more passports. No more hasty dinners. No crying, sticky’ babies, or talkative American millionaires, but an armchair as a transport; a book as a guide, and away!—"where the strange roads go down.” Herodotus, the father of history, took a long tour round the Mediterranean in the fifth century, visiting Babylonia and Egypt. I enjoy thoroughly this trip with such a pleasant, though a little loquacious companion, for the inns are tolerable and the Customs regulations very feyv, until we come to Egypt. The Pyramids of Gaza were visited by strings of tourists, including Greek “nouveaux riches,” who talked very loudly, and scattered money very' lavishly, but most obnoxiously, scribbled their trite inscriptions all over the temples and pyramids. It reminds me of the first sight of the wonderful Alps—a signboard. “Use our oil —it doesn't knock!” Herodotus was a real traveller. He went, not like tired business men, fleeing from their own boredom which returns as soon as they' pay their bills. Nor was he like a trader, carrying gems and precious cloths and shekels of metal, whose pleasure at the sight of a noble crag is dimmed by the fear that some brigand may be lurking to steal his goods and slit his throat. Herodotus sauntered lazily, enough money to satisfy’ his wants, taking notes of everything he saw, enjoying every minute, and boring his friends when he returned by reading aloud his diary. Yuan Chang, in the year 629 A.n., began an enormous journey through Asia from Sian-fu, the Chinese capital, across Turkestan to Samarkand and India. How he bought from a strange greybeard a lean, red-coloured horse that knew the desert paths, how he crossed the desert guided by the bones of men and cattle, and how finally he came to the residence of the Khan of the Turks, a magnificent person in green satin with his long hair tied with silk, I read breathlessly in the “Life” Of Ajanta, with its mysterious caves, of Ceylon, of Samarkand—“a great commercial entrepot, the country about it very fertile, abounding in trees and flowers, and yielding many fine horses”—we hear in detail. A Ford car would not have enabled us to see more.

Leisure is needed for true travelling. With any superficial see-London-in-an-hour trip contrast the eleventh century journey of lugulphus, Abbot of Croyland. With 30 horsemen and the Archbishop of Mainz, attended by a retinue of 7000 persons. he travelled prosperously' to Constantinople. Having escaped Arabian thieves, they entered Jerusalem, where they' were received with a great melody of cymbals by torchlight. Then they' left for home by' way of the Dejd Sea, Italy, and Joppa, but, alas! “out of 30 horsemen fat and lusty, scarce 20 pool pilgrims returned, all on foot, and reduced almost to skeletons with fatigue and hardship.” Yet what an experience! What a knowledge gained! A modern traveller would be whirled by train over the same ground in less than a' week, learning nothing of men except the conductor, seeing nothing of the countryside through the tobaccostained window, bored the whole way—unless he joins in a game of bridge. It is hardly' worth packing a suit case. Some months ago an American traveller broke the existing record b.v speeding round the world in 31 days. It was an insult to the earth. He could have stayed home and worked the trip out by the use of time tables. After all, the world is a place worth seeing!

So thought Marco Polo, who took three and a-lralf years to reach Peking from Venice, and did not return for 26 years. In the thirteenth century, he wandered across the Mongolian desert, and after climbing mountains as high as the sky,

found his way to the court of the great Emperor of China. He took a long time about it, but he did see something—Burmah and its great armies, with hundreds of elephants; Japan and its boundless stores of gold; Sumatra and its strange, costly products and cannibal races; Tibet, India the Great, Peking and Hangchow. When the Polos got back to Venice, no one recognised them in their uncouth, Tartar garb. -So they invited all their kinsmen to a great banquet, for each course of which they put on a garment more magnificent than the last, and, finally, bringing in their coarse Tartar coats, they ripped- open the seams and lining, “upon which there poured forth a great quantity of precious stones, rubies, sapphires, carbuncles, diamonds, and emeralds, which had been sewn into each coat with great care, so that nobody could have suspected that anything was there. . . . All present at once recognised these honoured and venerated gentlemen in the Ca’ Polo, whom at first they had doubted, and received them with the greatest honour and reverence ”! Marco told of the places he had visited—places which were not visited again until our own days,—but the Venetians looked upon him as we might look upon a man who claimed to have visited the moon and was describing its wonders. They' named him . Il Milione,” because he was always talking of millions of people and millions of ducats—which only shows what a good traveller he was!

Many’ others did the grand tour. Ordoric of Pordenone set forth in 1316, and saw, where now is but a waste, the precious cities of Asia. Canton was a “citv as big as three Venices .... and all Italy hath not the amount of craft that this one caty has, ’ while Hangchow was “the greatest city in the whole world.” Odoric. who was both a man and a friar, like Marco, had much to say of the fascination ot Chinese women. “The Chinese are comely enougn,” he writes, “but colourless, having beards of Jong straggling hair like mouse rs—cats, I mean. And as for the "omen they are the most beautiful in the world.”

Such travellers lifted the veil between Bast ano \\ est- for a short- period, but it dropped, to lie lifted again only in our own day. Hedin, Scott, and Wood are members of the same merry company as these medievalists who, loaded, some with holy water and manuscripts, others with topazes, cinnamon, and gold moidores walked between East and West in the despised _ Middle Ages. Travel broadens al) d we realise that the journey then was as peaceful as to-day. The bells of the Christian Church calling people to mass could be heard across Europe and Asia to Peking and all this long track was perfectly safe. Pegolotti, a commercial traveller of Florence, wrote a handbook for the use of merchants about 1346. One proceeded from Tana on the Black Sea, by the overland route across Asia to Cathay and back again with £l2OO worth of silk in the caravan. “The road you travel from Tana to Cathay is perfectly safe, whether by day of night, according to what merchants say who have used it.” Yet we still talk about the Age of Discovery in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries! Then there were Don Juan of Persia, the intrepid Moslem, who became a Spanish Roman Catholic, and meandered around Europe and Asia : the indominatable Jesuists who visited the Court of Akbar in India; and finally Sir John Mandeville, who invented stories of travels, telling of men with mouths in their breasts, men "hose heads grew beneath their shoulders, others, again, with feet so large that under them they took shelter against the sun. Sir John gives a thrill that few’ modern travellers could equal when he tells of a wanderer who did not know the world was round. “It was told that a certain worthy man departed some time from our country for to go search the world. . . . H e passed India and the isles beyond it where are more than 5000 isles, and so long and for so many reasons he went bv sea and land, and so environed the world, that he came at last to an isle where he heard spoken his own language— a calling of oxen in the plough such words, in fact, as men were wont to speak to beasts in his own country. Whereof he greatlj’ marvelled, knowing not how that might be.” For there was the chimney of his own house smoking up into the clear morning air! He stopped. He stared. He became atraid—and turned back I There are enougn experiences—-as many as there are eyes in a peacock’s tail—in these books of travel to occupy many more evenings when the call of the wild comes to me, while I can turn, in addition, to the guide books of the poets: —

“Magic casements, opening on the foam Of .perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.” For instance, there is “Hassan,” into which, as if he visioned he had not long to live, James Elroy Flecker poured all the burning beauty of his soul. Hassan was a fat, dirty old confectioner of Bagdad, who, like Mr Polly, had his dreams that somewhere, somehow, he would find satisfaction for his craving for romance and beauty. Through many trials and pains he suffered, until he passed as a pilgrim along the Golden Road to Samarkand.

The art, now lost, of believing must have made these journeys so exciting. Every hill had a mysterious legend; every river a strange story. Yuan Chang, so credulous and eager for marvels, who jotted down in his notebook everything he was told, is very unlike the modern globetrotter who cannot pass through even the Waimungu Valley without some such remark that his “leg is being pulled.” There is no enjoyment in travelling unless j’our *leg is pulled. Ah! but who would not return to such a home-coming as this of Yuan Chang to the Chinese capital? “Advance couriers must have told of his coming. There was a public holiday; the streets were decorated by gay banners and made glad with music. He was escorted into the city with great pomp and ceremony.” It is time, too, that I returned heme. So many miles have I been, and ,>o many wondrous cities discovered, that the fire in the hearth before me has burned very low. So to bed joyously tired after a long day's roaming and roving.