Amazonians and Others
Wai-Wai. By Nicholas Guppy. (Murray, 28s.) TROPICAL scenery, except by a palm-fringed beach, can be profoundly boring. You cannot see the wood for the trees, the form of the landscape for the vegetation which smothers it. Mr. Guppy spent some months travelling in Darkest Ama- zonia, on the frontiers of British Guiana and Brazil—and dark was the word. A botanist in search of flowers, he was continually frustrated by the fact that they grew far out of sight, at the tops of trees often a hundred feet high, which had to be cut down before he could get at them. He writes :
I was filled with a claustrophobia, over- whelming at times, so that I longed to tear the forest asunder, roll it back like the curtains of a stage and gaze upon the scene. I was like a mole crawling underground—but I could not com,e up for a breather if I wished.
Such a landscape offers, all the same, compen- sations to those who care to look for them. The eye learns to observe detail, as seldom in a more open, northerly hemisphere, to see the parts, which signify more than the whole and the sum of which, like bits of a mosaic, eventually add up to it. Wai-Wai describes a world as deeply sub- merged as the bottom of the sea, but in terms of its parts—of the creatures, animal, vegetable and human that live in it—as wonderfully beautiful. Mr. Guppy is an artist as well as a scientist—to say nothing of being also a man of provocative ideas and evidently a born leader of recalcitrant Indians—and he has thus written a book which will open up to those who read it a new field of ;esthetic experience.
His tropical forest becomes a world of extra- ordinary fantasy,. with slithy toves undoubtedly gyring and gimbling in the wabe. The ocelot might have been invented by Lear; so might the trogon, the troupial, the oil-bird, or the coarse- haired peccary. Mr. Guppy's eye can observe, in detached parenthesis, 'a big metallic blue hunting- wasp dragging a tarantula it had paralysed' be- neath his hammock. His ear can detect the distant trilling of a tinamou or 'a little tune like a Mozart minuet, the song of a quadrille wren.' His imagina- tion likens the back of a beetle to the jewels encrusting an ikon, or a clump of yawarda trees to `the resurrections of dreams, fragments of a false nostalgia.' His sense of humour notes otters pro- jecting from the water like immense champagne bottles, trumpeter birds like 'ash-grey footballs wandering slowly along on stilts,' guans like 'the ghosts of primitive flying-machines,' gathering in the treetops.
Imperceptibly the parts in Mr. Guppy's nar- rative come together into a whole in which there is so implicit a unity between man and bird and beast and flower that, it is easy to forget which he is describing. As far as man is concerned, the Indians of the forest have a keen sense of beauty; they have all they need materially; one man among them is as good as another; 'the smooth- ness and pleasantness of life, according to their code, is the most important thing of all, and good manners is the oil that makes it run easily.'
Mr. Guppy's world is one yet to be fully dis- covered; Mr. Bovill's is one discovered long ago, but today becoming largely forgotten. His Golden Trade of the Moors—a new and radically revised edition of his Caravans of Old Sahara—goes back to the days of the Carthaginians and the Romans, when the vegetation and animal life of North Africa was like that of Kenya today, and the Sahara desert was a flourishing trade route, bring- ing the riches of the Sudan to the Mediterranean. This trade, and the consequent prosperity of„ the desert races, continued until the nineteenth cen- tury, when the development of coastal shipping killed it, and the desert sands took control once more. Mr. Bovill writes, as a historian, of the Sahara's golden age, threading his way clearly and with learning through a maze of Berber and Sudanese dynasties, often as powerful and wealthy .as any kingdom of Midas, but remembered no longer.
Mr. George N. Patterson, the missionary explorer, returns from the wilds of Tibet to the bungalows of Kalimpong, and entertains the guests with 'anecdotes of his experiences Up and Down Asia—people he has met, situations which have embarrassed him—together with a certain amount of enlightened religious chit-chat. Some of this talk was worth putting into print, as here; some of it must have sounded better over the dinner table. But the fans of Tibetan Journey will enjoy reading more, in however fragmentary a
form, from his urbane pen. KINROSS
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