18 NOVEMBER 1955, Page 66

Other Recent Books

THE WHITE LADY OF THE BRANDBERG. By Henri Breuil. (Faber and Faber, £5 5s.) THIS sumptuous and very reasonably priced volume, published for the Abbe Breuil Trust by the Trianon Press and distributed by Faber and Faber, is the first of a series of about ten, which will embody the results of six years' work on the rock paiutings of southern Africa by the Abbe Breuil and his collaborator Miss Mary Boyle. It deals with the paintings on a single rock-face in the Brandberg mountains north-west of Windhoek in South-West Africa. It includes sixteen pages of collotype and hand- stencilled reproductions of the Abbe's draw- ings, traced at the site and afterwards redrawn and coloured in the studio, and also six pages of photographs by Dr. E. R. Sherz. There are thirty-five pages of meticulous analysis and comment.

The interest of this great painted frieze, dating in all probability from the second mil- lennium ac, is very great and will certainly not be confined to the world of professional scholarship. For, the style and quality of the artistry apart, it depicts—here in South-West Africa—a procession of figures, five or six of which are of unmistakably Caucasian type. clad from elbow to ankle in close-fitting gar- ments of apparently ancient Mediterranean fashion, shod in moccasins, and engaged, it would seem, in some kind of ceremonial dance suggestive of the Egyptian and Cretan cults of Isis and Diana.

There are indications in the commentary that subsequent volumes of the series will repro- duce examples of later manifestations of this culture, when it was declining as the result of intermixture with peoples of the Bushman type. This will undoubtedly be a contribution of great importance. It will leave for solution by searchers in the high grasslands of the eastern Congo and in the Great Lakes region of East Africa the supremely fascinating ques- tion of how these early migrants from the Mediterranean area made their way with so little cultural declension across some five or six thousadd miles of primeval Africa.

ROLAND OLIVER