The Open Air
Strange Sights
On the Diamond Trail in British Guiana. By Gwen Richard- son. Illustrated. (Methuen. 75. tid.) HERE is a perfectly incongruous handful of books ; yet all deal with experience in tropical regions, fantastically strange to the ordinary European. For instance :
A lady whom the frontispiece shows as a decorative figure in ordinary drawing-room dress stood for long hours under a tropical sun to see fair play, while hundreds of savages hacked into gobbets the reeking flesh of an elephant which she had shot.
An English gentleman, presumably an official and probably a police officer, recounts the practice of head hunting as pursued on the Fly River in New Guinea (occasionally even by native policemen); And produces photographs of the knife used for severing the heads and of the special carrier or satchel used for bringing them home.
An Australian lady, having taken a gang of negroes to try washing for diamonds in British Guiana, is held up by the defection of her " jigger "—the man who works the sieve— and takes on the job herself, successfully.
An American naturalist, also in British Guiana, shoots a rare irulture, and finds that it has been preying on the inter- locked corpses of an anaconda and an owl, which had attacked the snake. Inquiring further, he finds a predatory fish in the snake's belly, and inside the fish a predatory frOg—which had died fasting, but contained the microscopic creatures which Must perish unless one of their germs contrives to be swal- lowed by a tadpole.
Here, plainly; is fine choice for the lover of adventure. But what makes adventurous reading ? Mrs. Strickland not only shot but stopped a charging buffalo with her last cart- ridge fired at two yards' range. Yet her book does not giie is thrills—except at one point which describes the fate of her pet monkey, which ran beside her on expeditions and conversed- with other monkeys, but kept them at a distance. One day its screamed and lay gibbering on a bough : Mrs. Strickland had just time to fire at the poised head of a snake, and then the. monkey leapt back into her arms. Yet.even this she does not tell well. What she writes of Belgian methods of rule is, un-. happily; like what we used to read Of the Congo Free State.. Mr. Riley Is too much of an anthropologist to attempt to • thrill us, but his book is a large contribution to the lore of initiation ceremonies and the like, making one more than ever thankful to be spared anything so complicated as the life: of primitive man. Miss Richardson, on the other hand, has hit on an adventure wholly novel ; the odd thing is that her book does not give us the colour and taste of it, though she has the experiencing mind. What she describes best is the journey for seventeen days up very dangerous rapids and down V same distance in a day and a half. Her months of actually working for diamonds (and getting them, though not enough to pay) she does not cause us to feel : but we do feel that she feels the fascination, even from far-off and through veils of ignorance, of that amazing jungle life which is Mr. Beebe's subject and his adventifre. For instance, she talks with delight of the protective colouring with renders even the most brilliant parrots invisible in a tree, and 'of the song of one bird which composes varying tunes. But he has a whole chapter about these birds, the tinamous, " strange bobtailed game birds, related both to fowls and ostriches, which live on the jungle floor, lay eggs like burnished turquoise and age-purpled jade and call to one another with sweet liquid whistles." He knows that it is the female who does the calling and the courting, and that her business is merely to produce an egg which the male incubates : and he has -watched the females fight each other while the male, prize of the victor; looked on. And for the protective colouring, he has lain in a mangrove swamp watching the life about its roots, observed with the help of electric flash and magnifiers. He has pushed his face— behind a wire screen—close enough to a poison-snake to know why Miss Richardson and others got vague warnings of unseen danger : the danger signal comes through smell, subcon- sciously felt. But there is not space enough to name half the things that are in Mr. Beebe's enchanting book. One can only say that it is a tissue of wild adventures, in great part observed through the microscope—though he makes us also live for rapturous moments the life of sloths, and introduces us to the society of wild orangs. There never was a better gift for the right boy.
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