SKETCHES OF CENTRAL ASIA
Karavan. By Nils Ambolt. Translated from the Swedish by Joan Bulman. (Mackie. i5s.)
DR. Nils AMBOLT is a Swedish scientist who for five years, from 1928 to 1933, worked in Chinese Central Asia as a member of Sven Hedin's " travelling university." The great explorer, in a short preface, pays tribute to the author's high achievement in astronomical and meteorological observation, and we are given to understand, on the same authority, that the fruit of his research is a very much fuller and more truth- ful map of a large remote region. Few works of man are built on nobler foundations than is the classic map of the world : the mathematics of this science are voluminously dis- proportionate to what they yield ; if a very high standard of painstaking accuracy is lowered for one moment, huge errors creep into the work immediately, and in more than half the world this work can only be done surrounded by hostility and every ingenious device to prevent the geographer's success. Five years of such toil must have demanded the maximum of this remarkable man's capacity to endure and concentrate.
But willing as he may be to applaud such firmness of character and action, the average reader might shrink from the prospect of having to share the surveyor's burden in read- ing of his endless tribulations. On this occasion, however, the average reader may put by his fears, for Dr. Ambolt has, in an extremely enjoyable book, only given him the very cream of his experiences. He is an able story-teller, and his short chapters, which touch an an immense variety of adventures, are always furnished with a story's point. Being those of a trained observer, an expert on Central Asia, and, evidently, an unusually good linguist, his accounts, while appealing most frequently to the reader's sense of humour, are not superficial, and have none of the traveller's silly waggishness and implicit boast. There is depth in many of his pictures which owes something to the modesty of his manner.
He was in Chinese Turkestan in 1933 when the Turkestan revolution, of which no one knows very much beyond its
impermanence, took place. Presumably he has written else- where a full report, which should certainly be of unique value. The light, anecdotal account he gives here is for general readers, providing, among other things, an interesting note on the anatomy of revolutions. How they follow a uniform pattern of which Paris in 1848 remains the classic example! The sudden surprising success, the glow of joy and a few reprisals, and then the comedy vanishes and the serious business begins. Qf the latter, Dr. Ambolt mentions an incident at Yarkand more horrible than can be imagined. The Turkestan rising seems to have been tribal and Moslem, and although Russian influence is potent in Sing Kiang, it neglected to trick itself out in modem disguise, nor adopted the jargon titles which can arouse such respect in the outside world. Such are a few thoughts which occur after reading this part of the book, and it is to be hoped that Dr. Ambolt will make a closer record of this obscure movement accessible. Quite rightly he mainly confines himself here to humour and thrills.
The translation is good, representing, ' I presume, an easy colloquial original, without over-anglicising it. The best description in the book is of a leap over a gorge after which many readers will suffer from vertigo on the firmest stairs.
CHRISTOPHER SYKES.
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