29 OCTOBER 1954, Page 6

School), sometimes led members of the foreign community to mistake

him for an Englishman. He was a remarkable traveller, and his wide knowledge of Asia and of Asian languages wag gained in the remoter parts of that continent. He once very kindly took me on a short journey in Inner Mongolia. It was mid-winter, and we adopted the practice—which would have proved expensive elsewhere—of filling the car radiator with the hard liquor drunk in those parts to prevent it from freezing. One night we shot a wolf. Chinese knowledge of natural history is often surprisingly shaky, and next day, coming to a little trading post where there was a detachment of Chinese soldiers, we heard the men discussing the strange animal whose frozen corpse was lashed, upside down, to our bonnet. When wq drove on again Lattimore asked one of the soldiers if they had decided what the animal was. ' The corporal,' this youth replied, says that it is an elk.'