South American Mixture
More Profit Than Gold. By Joan Arbuthnot. (Cape. 10s. 6d.) Hasta la Vista. By Christopher Morley. (Faber and Faber. 6s.) Paraguayan Interlude. By C. W. Thurlow Craig. (Barker. 8s. 6d.) Green Havoc. By C. W. Wardlaw. (Black-wood. 12s. 6d.) Snake-Hunter's Holiday. By R. L. Ditmars and W. Bridges. (Appleton-Century. 15s.) A DESERT country such as Arabia imposes certain of her own characteristics on strangers who visit her, and only those who have an affinity with her flourish in the austerity of her sands. There is therefore a striking resemblance between all the great Arabian travellers and the books they have written. The exact opposite is true of South America. She welcomes every type of traveller, just as her undiscriminating soil nourishes
every sort of growth, native or imported. And there is as great a diversity among books about South America as among all her other products.
The present five books have nothing in common except that they each give the impression that the writer has had his
personality flattered and stimulated by the easy; if laconic, way South America surrendered to him. For she is the sort of hoitess who gives you the run of the house, but expects you in retium to run it. As Miss Joan Arbuthnot and her -friends discovered, you may look for gold, but you must not expect
any assistance. Finding native- carriers and guides was almost as difficult as finding the gold itself. -
More Profit Than Gold is an irritating book z: it might haVe been so much better than it is. It is a good story, telling =of
an expedition which was really a sort of large-scale lark, for none of the five members knew anything about gold-mining, except Mr. Maurice Blake, who had tried his hand at every- thing. The • author was described in a newspaper heading as a Mayfair Girl Tired of Parties, and the expedition as Snei(tty Gold Rush. But unlike most larks of this sort, it actually was carried through, and even though the gold they found in the forests of North-West British Guiana was negligible, they had the unusual and doubtless profitable experience of running a store on the frontier between Guiana and Venezuela, fifty (lays by river and foot from the coast. An amusing book is
rat her spoilt by being told in a style which, attempting to be of the blasé pseudo-simple variety, succeeds only in being simply pseudo-blasé.
Mr. Christopher Morley radiates the well-being of a man fortified by a successful holiday. He admits that when he set off from New York for a holiday with his family in Peru, he had qualms about the adventure. But, of course, South America soon put him at his ease, and supplied him with just the sort of scenes which sets a journalist's pen running over the paper. Rasta la Vista has a kind of " family party " atmosphere. We seem to see Panama, Callao and Lima and the other places through the candid eyes of children. Readers who take their travel-books seriously may sneer at the " jollier " passages, but those readers who can appreciate candour as distinct from the more common " brutal frankness " will find reading it an unusual and pleasant experience.
There is plenty of brutal frankness in Mr. Thurlow Craig's autobiographical Paraguayan Interlude. It describes his life as stock-yard manager and buyer on an enormous ranch in the Chaco so vividly that cowboy films seem tame by com- parison. His style is as tough as the life he lived, and exactly suited to the story. Even if at times one feels that the yarns he spins rattle a bit too much, it must be allowed that they are entertaining. This is certainly the best cowboy book for a long time.
Mr. Wardlaw is a plant pathologist and Green Havoc is a sober, painstaking account of his experiences in the banana plantations of the West Indies and South America. The green havoc of the title refers to a mysterious epidemic which regularly devastates banana crops, and which it was the author's job to study and cure. His book is for those who prefer information to excitement.
Finally, for the reader who demands both, there is Snake- Hunter's Holiday. Dr. Ditmars, snake expert, went to Trinidad and British Guiana to catch snakes, vampire bats and other deadly creatures for the New York Zoological Park. Mr. Bridges describes the expeditions with the typical gusto of the American journalist.
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