ON THE EDGE OF THE WORLD.*
ifit. CANDLER is familiar to the newspaper-reading public as a war correspondent, as the late official "Eyewitness" in Mesopo- tamia, and as a highly efficient journalist. There is another side of him, however, revealed in A Vagabond in Asia and that brilliant study of anarchy in the making, Siri Ram, Revolutionist, and this side reappears in this "book of wayfaring far from the beaten track." The mantle of officialism is dropped, the need of conciliating the prejudices and limitations of the average sensual man in the street no longer exists, and we have the faithful and sympathetic wandering scholar of the East, which he knows and loves without becoming denationalized, the philosopher and moo of letters writing to please himself, and writing with charm sod eloquence of unfamiliar and engrossing scenes. The first two-thirds of the book were written before the war ; the last third in Mesopotamia, where, as Mr. Candler reminds us, every summer the heat is so intense that it compels a natural armistice. These chapters are therefore more in the nature of an interlude than of an account of military operations, 'though mention is made of the fighting at Jebel Hamrin, and there is a vivid description of the Cossack Partizanaki and their leader Bicharakoff, with the face of an " iron dreamer . . . the only man I know who after three and a half years' war still loves fighting." This is in the chapter on " the old Baghdad-Kerman. shah road," which Mr. Candler followed as far as the watershed of the Zagros range in Persia. He found flowers and shade, but could not escape from the desolation and destruction of war. Relief work was started on the road, but it could not meet, the ravages of famine. "Nearly every man, woman, and child begged food of us." Things were bad at Khanikin, where five armies had passed through in eighteen months, living on the country and destroying everything. They were es bad or worse in Kerind and Kernannahab. The valley of the Kara is perennially watered by springs, and if Nature has her own way there" need never be drought :— " The famine of 1917-1918 was man's doing, a ripple of the universal death oozing from its fountain of envy and hate and pride in Berlin. The plague and misery with which the Hun has infected the world is the more manifest the farther one gets from the hub of evil. One expects the routine of Hell at the source of .pollution, in the Continent that conceived it. It is enly when one finds the shadow of the angel of death flung over the mountains and deserts of Asia that one recliner how complete is the sway of the devil raised in Potsdam."
In his trek in the Pir Pinjal, made possible by a generous leave rule in Force " D," the escape was complete, though it amused sonic of his friends that a man released from Mesopotamia, with the comforts of civilization spread before him, should choose to go off into the wilderness and live in tents. But then Mr. Candler is a mountain-lover, if not a mountaineer, mid " the Pir Pinjal is the one range in the Himalayas where the mountain slopes are not always on end, where one can gallop over downs of elosc-bitten turf, and through forest glades." It is a paradirm of flowers, of gentle herdsmen; and he had delightful companions, though one suffered from " oreophobia " while his wife aspired to the heights. When they returned to Gulmarg, Mr. Candler was the most contented of the three :—
" After Mesopotamia I desired Arcadia, and the had weather had driven 119 down into the haunts of pastoral peace. It was like a plunge from Nietzsche to Theocritus, and we had camped among the only people I had met since 1914 who were not
destroying, or directly or indirectly aiding destruction, who were
not even au-are of the disease of war. . . Bare mountain tops will never appear frightful and depressing again as they did to our ancestors. Yet among the changes wrought by the war in the human spirit there may come a preference for the sylvan and pastoral upper places. • We loved wildness when them was peace and sought it. Now we have had our fill of savagery, and it will not be strange if a bias enters our spirit and turns us from what is wild and wasteful in Nature to the old Arcadian haunts of Pen and the shepherds."
"Over the Khyber" is on illuminating study, descriptive, anecdotic, and philosophic, of the tribesmen, their code and vendettas—peculiarly opportune in view of present troubles— and incidentally a fine tribute to British officers and politicals on the verge of Empire. As Mr. Candler puts it : " One feels that the best men get shaken up to the tap of the map, or if they are not the best they soon get assimilated to the type." But the first five chapters are the most refreshing to the war- weary reader. Three of them describe famous places of pilgrim.
age : Antarnath, the sacred cave, and Gangabal, the sacred
• Os the Edge of Me Weed, By Edmond Candler. • London: Cassel and CO. I Ka. So, net.j lake, in the mountains at the back of Kashmir ; and Jawala Mukhi, the goddess of the Flaming Month, a shrine of propitias tion in the Kangra district among the Himalayan foothills. Mr. Candler is not content merely with classifying the pilgrims —professionals, family pilgrims, fanatics ; he essays with retrospective imagination to picture how the first wandering accede penetrated into the wilderness to commune with the Eternal, moved by the Oriental's recognition of God's hand in what is marvellous or supernormaL He contrasts the indomitable belief of the lonely Brahmin—an old soldier who remained with his wife at Amarnath after the seven thousand pilgrims had gone—with the indomitable cheerfulness of a young subaltern who had joined forces with the writer on his way to shoot markhor in Ladakh. On the road to Gangabal, the lake into which the Hindus of Kashmir throw the knuckle-bones of their dead left over from the funeral pyre, the peculiar gait of the men, and even of the yaks, intent and sure but never hurried, in a Yarkandi caravan prompts him to a striking observation : " I often think that it is the great distance of places from one another in bleak countries as much as the climate that gives the Asiatic his air of fatalism and repose." We have spoken of Mr. Canffier's love of flowers : but he holds that trees are even a truer expression of the mood and spirit of the earth, and of all mountain trees regards the silver birch as the most spiritual. "Minerva and the House-Boat" is a light-hearted chronicle of a water-trip in Kashmir from the Woolar Lake to Srinagar, and Nisbet and Shalimar Bagh, paradisiacal gardens, steeped in romance, which furnishes Mr. Candler with occasion for some amusing comments on "Lelia Rookh " and apt citations from Vigne's account of his visit in 1838.
The longest and most fascinating chapter in the book tells of Mr. Candler's pilgrimage, in the spirit of the true and devout mountain-lover, round Nanga Parbat. Apart from his skill in conveying the peculiar magic and majesty of Himalayan scenery, the narrative is enriched by the intensely dramatic personal reminiscences of Mummery gleaned from two native guides who had been with hint, Collie, and Bruce on the expedition which ended in the tragic disaster of August, 1895. The natives in Chiles say that "Mummery Sahib is still on the mountain among the fairies. The Djinns have kept him there." On the question of Hima- layan nomenclature Mr. Candler holds strong views, set forth with eloquence and unanswerable force in the following passage :— " An emulous man on a mountain is a profanity. He should be there as a worshipper, impersonal, a pilgrim without a name, lost in the quest. A boast is unthinkable. One likes to dwell on these lonely soaring peaks in their true human relations, as lying between distant habitable regions, viewed by the shepherd as the seat of his brooding divinity, beckoning to him or repelling him, filling his imagination as they glint in the moonlight through a chink of the rude stone but which he has built round him like a cairn. Shepherds and goatherda should have the naming of the mountains, or the nomads, the Kirghiz in his wicker-built kibitka with its felt roof, or the Chang-pas who live in black tents and hunt the wild yak, or the Tartars
' who from Bokhara come And Khiva, and ferment the milk of mares.'
The Asiatic has an instinct for sound in a name a.v unerring as Milton. . . . The names of some are so apt and representative that they might conjure up a true impression in the mind of a mountain-lover who had never seen them. Take the three main peaks that are to be seen from the vale of Kashmir Nanga Parbat, lifted above the clouds, wraith-like, ethereal; the rugged Minotaur face of Haramokh ; tapering Kolahoi. . . . Or the giants of the Sikkim group—Kanchenjunga, Pandim, Kabul, Siniolchum, the first three massive, buttressed, four-squaw under the tent of heaven ; the last mystic, faylike, of a rarer mould. And Chumulari, most divine of all, a present deity whose image sleeps in the turquoise water of the Barn-Teo- but for the grace of God she might be named Mount Young- husband, or MacDonald, or Curzon, or Brodrick, or King Edward VII."
The photographs, numerous and often beautiful, add greatly to the attractiveness of the book.
Previous page
