CAMERA AND PENCIL IN AFRICA
Far Away up the Nile. By J. G. Millais. Illustrated. (Long.
mans. 30s. net.)
The High Grass Trail : Being the Difficulties and Diversions of Two • Trekking and Shooting for Sustenance in Dense Bush Across British Central Africa. By Frank Savi le. Illustrated. (Witherby. 15s.) Fresh Tracks in the Belgian Congo From the Uganda Border to the Mouth of the Congo. By Hermann Norden, F.R.G.S. Illustrations and 2 Maps. (Witherby. 18s.) THOSE makers of film pictures who seek their subjects in remote places are bringing the outside world nearer to us stay- at-homes, and they are doing it doubly. Every one of them is a trained observer, and so has one of the essentials that go to make a good descriptive writer. Just because they are bringing back records, in a certain sense mechanical, which are intended for the widest public, they feel the craving to explain and supplement. An artist who draws or paints is less liable to this impulse : for he has put himself, his emotion, into his work ; the man with the machine cannot so control his machinery, and he wants to add and humanize. The writer of this notice has never before read a book by Mr. Cherry Kearton, but henceforward will never leave one unread that comes in reach of his hand.
Even with the pictures left out, The Shifting Sands of Algeria would be a delightful volume ; and, of course, they help out the text enormously. Yet they are secondary to the text. To judge Mr. Kearton's art as a photographer one would need to see his film displayed ; for motion is essential, if photo- graphy is to have life, except in rare instances. There is a picture here of a mother camel beside her baby which is a living thing—even more than that of a baboon with her you aster, though the baboon has something near to human expression. But word pictures arc plenty in the pages of this trained observer, who came back last year to Algeria, after twenty years' absence, and set down what he noted and what he enjoyed. He can make us believe that sunset on the Sahara is worth going all that way to see : he paints the contrast between cosmopolitan tourist,trodden places. like Biskra and the extraordinarily unchanged life of desert dwellers only a short distance from them. Mixed in through all this are admirable studies in natural history, observation of the processionary caterpillars, and of the trapdoor spider (with whom Mr. Kearton became intima te), and of jerboas and desert rats. They fall easily into their place ; but in the main the book is a very acute study of this ancient Mediterra- nean land, with its so lid remains of Roman occupation, among the early work of Mohammedan conquest, and the new and great work of its present masters, the French—to whom as colonizers this volume pays a most notable tribute.
Major Dugmore is another film hunter, and like Mr. Kearton a good observer, though without the writer's gift. But his experience has been interesting and at times sensational ; for example, when he found himself in jungle in the midst of hundreds of elephants, yet unable to get a clear view, till finally when he did see a female, she also saw him and charged. Even more dangerous, perhaps, was a charge of Sudanese cavalry on the camera and its operator, for they overdid the thing and charged home. But on both occasions the film survived. The chief interest of the book as a historic record concerns the making of the great dam on the Blue Nile and the laying o f rail across the desert, with a heavy train coming up behind the laying crew and passing along as the rails went down. Here, also is tribute to British colonization—to set beside Mr. Kearton's to the French.
It is reinforced by Mr. J . G. Millais, the first part of whose book gives an account of Sudanese history, and appreciation of the work. But the second half, with its account of hunting in the Nile swamps, far out among Shilluks, Dinkas and the rest, vastly exceeds the first in interest ; and what Mr. Millais tells us in print is a pale thing beside the reproduction of his drawings. Were there ever such records of swift and enchanting observation ? The movement of antelopes, the heavy gallop of buffalo, the wild scattering of a herd of giant eland, are got by something like magic on to a printed page. And here are also the strange,naked-peoples with their g,estures-
caught and reproduced--the Dinkas, whom an earlier traveller described as being among humans what flamingoes or herons are among birds : moving so constantly in swamp that all the walk of their lean, long legs is high-stepping. No, the machine is beaten ; you may turn it as fast as you like, but it will not give the sense of arrowy speed that Mr. Millais gets in a study of Mrs. Gray's Kob.
Mr. Hermann Norden adds to our visual knowledge of tropical Africa by many photographs, but the value of his work lies in its record of a journey through the Belgian Congo, from the headwaters of the great river to its mouth. lie writes as an American experienced in African travel, and he met many of the deux Congoluis who had served under the Conga Free State, and could contrast its methods with those now employed, which are more conciliatory. Yet he was given authority to flog, and he saw flogging sharply administered— with results that seemed to justify the process. But the impression that he gives of Belgian posts on the main river does not differ greatly from that of Joseph Conrad's terrible studies : the loneliness and gloom still make it a prison for white men. And incidentally Mr. Norden narrates how on board a river steamer the captain's wife knocked the hats off black travellers who approached Europeans without un- covering. One was the fez of Mr. Norden's Swahili lot vant, who, being Mohammedan, never uncovered. At Kinshasa, the Chief Belgian settlement, he noted much intercourse with French Brazzaville :-
" In the French possessions most of the blacks enjoy the privilege of citizenship and are less subservient to whites than in the other colonies. Their independence of manner has been caught by the natives of Kinshasa. Some do not even step off the side walk to mako way for a European lady. One notes it as a symptom, and wonders."
Others will wonder whether the absence of colour - feeling among the French may not account for much of their success in Africa.
Mr. Savile's book, The High Crass Trail, is merely the record of a shooting trip, distinguished from many others because it was in British Central and not British East ; also because the sportsmen went in the season of high grass, when the chance of a shot in the open scarcely exist&L The power of large animals, even in herds, to be invisible at close quarters is strongly brought out, and the book makes good reading.
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