Mystic gleam

Jan Morris A Far Off Place Laurens van der Post (Hogarth Press £2.75)

When Francis Younghusband left Lhasa at the end of his mission to Tibet in 1904, in the course of wilich rather more than a thousand Tibetans Were killed, he looked back from a hill outside the city and saw the golden form of the Potala

Shining tremendously in the distance. A kind of vision seized him, an inner radiance and exhilaration, and he resolved there and then that he could "never again be at enmity with any man."

People who have experienced moments ot ecstatic revelation, of which Younghusband's Was a classic example, are inclined thereafter to be smug. They feel themselves invulnerable to the world's pricks or prizes, for they have

glininsed other dimensions and enjoy a particular kind of self-sufficiency. Younghusband, who soon abandoned all worldly ambitions, W as described at his death as one of the happieSt men who ever lived: and even those Who progress into fanaticism, who gleam at us With pamphlets on doorsteps or declaim the ,°,hly way to patriotic unity, evidently feel mernselves satisfactorily privileged. Colonel van der Post is an exception. His ,moment of ecstasy has lasted longer than most, !or it has taken the form of a lifelong Infatuation with the life and magic of Africa: he heard no single voice on his road to Damascus, but instead has listened for more than sixty Years to the cries of the African birds, the roar of the night lions, the proverbs of primitives, the hum of the stars which has accompanied and haunted him since boyhood. He has had time to interpret his revelations in a dozen books, and to enlarge it into a profound ympathy for everything that is still simple and Innocent on earth, nearest to nature and to nature's further mysteries. In the persons of the Most primitive Africans he has shown us how man might have retained his old relationships With the rest of creation: in his prose he has sometimes brought the magic literally down to earth, and embodied it in his celebrated descriptive style. Yet he does not seem to have achieved that serenity. There is a wistfulness to his vision, a sense of might-have-been. "Only one heart," he suggests in A Far Off Place, "has to find its own true position and travel on from there...for in the deeps of life all are united, and no one can move accurately without all ultimately moving With it": but he seems to offer this philosophical cOmfort more as a hope than a conviction. His Y,Ialon is full of beauty, but is tinged with nesnair and disillusion: his heart knows its own course, but when will the world follow?

A Far Off Place, the concluding sequel to A, tory— Like The Wind, is itself the tale of a Journey, physical and allegorical, but it reaches no very convincing destination. On one level, as Its author hints in his prologue, it tries to do for Africa what Kim did for India. It is a yarn, no Other word for it, about a young European couple who find themselves orphaned and Made homeless by a Communist-led nationalist rebellion somewhere in southwest Africa. Accompanied only by a Bushman couple and a clpg., they make their way with appalling difficulty to the coast, where they are able to break the news of the conflict to a NATO fleet Which is conveniently exercising its marines at the very point of their emergence, and are Subsequently presented to the Emperor of Ethiopia, who talks to them in French and °ffers the apologies of Africa for their discomforts.

In many ways it is preposterous. Colonel van

der Post's characterisation is embarrassingly jejune. I don't know if Bushwomen really do say things like this:

We who feel that the clouds in the sky are feeling themselves to be the hair of the people who have gone before us, gathered by the wind that breathes also in our bodies, know thus all the more now for seeing hairlike yours, that clouds and hair feel themselves to be forming always together from one into the other by the same wind on account of it.

But I am quite sure that spirited European girls, even if they are daughters to Sir James Archibald Sinclair Monckton, KCMG, DSC, BA (Cantab), don't say things like this:

Oh yes, please, Coiske. Yes, you will decide for me, and I promise to obey. ' Nobody was ever quite so wise as Mopani, alias Colonel H. H. Theron, an elderly and sententious conservationist whom I take to be an image of the author, and Henty himself would have thought twice before having the NATO South Atlantic Fleet, dressed overall, firing our young couple a twenty-one gun salute as it sails away into the sunset.

It is an old man's book. Exercising warships are no longer, alas, painted a tropical white. Naval officers no longer introduce themselves as "Michael Featherstone, Commander, Her Majesty's Royal Navy sir". Cockney seamen, if there are any, certainly do not observe "Cor strike me pink". I cannot believe that mercenary officers of revolutionary armies habitually address each other, even in irony, as -My guid gentleman of France" or "Mon cher Ecossais", and I have severe doubts about the high-born Portuguese lady who, tied to the Makoba Tree of-fife, is obliged to sing a fado every night to satisfy an Old Prophecy of liberation. Never mind, in this book the message is the medium. The story does not matter, the characters are mere instruments, and the true fascination of the work is the spectacle of Colonel van der Post trying to come to terms with a world apparently determined to block his every path of enlightenment. He is such a good man, so kind, so right, that the failure of this attempt, which is really a life-long dedication, provides a sombre conclusion to an exciting adventure — even perhaps, if it is not impertinent or premature to say so, to a noble life.

Mopani says somewhere in the book that one of man's troubles is his obsession with the power of ideas. Colonel van der Post is constantly up against ideas which confuse his own convictions. He loves the innocent African, but he knows that given a machinegun or a battery egg farm, the African becomes as awful as the rest of us. He feels a true brotherhood with wild creatures, yet he accepts the need to kill and eat them. He responds to the ancient unity of Africa, yet cannot stomach the methods of the African insurgents. He hates industrialisation, but warms to the splendour of a ship or the elegance of a good rifle. He loathes war but is a soldier born, distrusts power yet responds to it, searches always for an absolute which does not exist, except in the ideal.

Julien Benda used to argue, in the 'thirties, that the status of the intellectual in society should be that of the mediaeval clerk, detached from the world's contagion, dedicated to the life metaphysical, impractical, contemplative. It seems to me that this is Colonel van der Post's true vocation. He is a mystic, disguised as a novelist and man of action, and he is here in the world to ponder its incalculables', and allow us to share his conjectures. Yet he seems dissatisfied with the role, and wishes always to translate his long ecstasy into something more positive, some plan of action, some practical purpose. It is as though a sense of guilt, inherited perhaps from the Calvinist conscience, drives this inspired dreamer into a closer involvement with the world's reality: as though the dream, and the vision, is not reality enough.

It takes a very special kind of yarn to invoke these speculations in a reader. Kim itself, the yarn of yarns, hardly does as much. If I have laughed at A Far Off Place, and probed

insolently into Colonel van der Post's privacies, I have done so only with respect and gratitude.

I think I See sonic of the quandaries that lie behind his contradictory epic, and I certainly recognise the grandeur of its conception, and the love that lies between its every line. Laurens van der Post's absurdities are other men's achievements, and one of his doubts is worth a dozen of our poor certainties. .

Jan Morris has most recently written Conundrum, a memoir.