FIFTY THOUSAND MILES OF TRAVEL.* IF the literary shortcomings of
Theresa the Pilgrim were ever so much more numerous than they are, her readers ought to pardon them, in consideration of the extraordinary spirit which pervades her book, and the rare courage which carried its writer through so many adventures to the uttermost ends of the earth. In point of style, more refinement and less confusion are to be desired. Grammatical accuracy is not among the at- tractions of this very interesting record of travel, in which one has occasionally to try back for a nominative case to the middle of the preceding page, and relative and demonstrative pronouns are employed with a superb disregard to their antecedents. But no one could be so cold-blooded as to count up these defects against a lady who has interviewed, and evidently captivated, the remotest sovereigns, explored unheard-of places, and dwelt peacefully in huts mounted on poles in the villages of the most ferocious savages in the world—always excepting Dr. Schweinfiirth's friends, the Monbuttoo. She has not travelled as any other lady travels, and she does not write like any other writer, male or female, but as Harry Lorreqner might have written, supposing he had done fifty thousand miles of outlandish journey ings with " go " of the same quality as that which carried him through his Irish exploits. She goes into no preliminary details ; avoids the statistics of travel in which books of this kind commonly abound ; does not explain how she had herself conveyed from " here " to "there "; is vague and circumstantial, generalising and egotistical. She blunders egregiously in her French quotations and interpolations,—indeed, they are usually erroneous in idiom, and frequently misspelt —she is now oddly grave and sententious, again genuinely humorous ; as deficient in sensi- tiveness as any one could wish a woman to be who was exposed to so much that is calculated to offend sensitiveness ; but always original, amusing, surprising. Though Theresa the Pilgrim assures her readers with much iteration that to tell her an enterprise is dangerous is the way to make her resolve upon carrying it out, and to assert that a certain place is un- attainable is to induce her immediately to start for it, there is much less braggadocio in the book than this perverse preliminary boasting leads us to expect ; and her narrative is so interesting, that we regret the excrescences of bad taste which are irritating, and divert attention from the real merit and the unflagging liveliness of the book.
If there be a topic and a locality which may be said to be "played out," Mormonism is that topic and Salt Lake City is that locality, and yet we read the sketch of both, touched off in the light, bright style of the writer, with quite a fresh interest, as if it were all as novel as she makes it amusing. From Utah we are carried, without any tiresome particulars of transport, to the Valley of the Yo-Semit6, shown the sublimity of the Falls, and introduced to a very funny group of tourists. Then we are popped off to the Sandwich Islands (with no more notion of the • Teresina Peregrina; or, Fifty Thousand Miles of Travel Round the World. By Thdrese Yelverton (Viscountess Avonmore). London: B. Bentley and Son.
how and the when than is conveyed by a vague, incidental men- tion of San Francisco and a Dutch steamer),.and have a charming account of their beauties, animate and inanimate, compressed into twenty pages. The King, tersely described as "six feet two, and weigh- ing three hundred pounds," offered the pilgrim a thousand acres of land in the most picturesque part of Hawaii if she would settle there, and in other places she received similar offers. From a royal repast with the bachelor King (since dead) the transition to a typhoon in Hong Kong harbour is severely sudden, and the description of the elemental war, during which the writer—who was the only woman on board—was forgotten for nine hours in the cabin of a Dutch bark, with battened-down hatches, is admirable, though it includes a misquotation of one of the most hackneyed lines in English poetry.
Then we have some chapters on China, as unlike any other travellers' tales of the Flowery Land as China is unlike any other country in the world. They treat of being there as a matter of course, and without any superfluities give us the oddest little bits of description. Here is one of them ; the thing described is not new to us, we all have a general notion of the Chinese houses, but the way of putting it is novel :—
" The Chinese habitation is all outside and nothing closed in. No windows to shut ; no doors to open ; no hearth round which to congregate and realise the blessed feeling of home ; no bedrooms and no beds. The Celestials repose their bodies on a wooden tray, and put their heads in a box. A tray full of condiments is all that denotes the speciality of a dining-room. The drawing-room is any nook or corner where a person can lounge, without any definite locality. It is quite possible to walk a mile in a Chinese mansion without being able to find where the house is. You may be escorted through granite courtyards, with solid columns fifty feet high. You may ascend a flight of steps, and find yourself under a roof, turned wrong way up at the corners, of handsome fretwork tiles supported by columns and one wall. There is a table on which incense is burning, flanked by small cups of tea. Tablets and hat,chments are hung around, pro- claiming the family glory ; gorgeous silken banners are sus- pended. In this hall, or rather piece of one, are decided all the family disputes and business of the clan, consisting probably of four or
five hundred persons Leaving this ancestral hall by the side steps (for there is no door), you fancy you are approaching the family home. You squeeze through a narrow passage, and find yourself in the open air, upon a bridge of zigzag construction, exactly as seen upon our blue plates and dishes, over a mud flat, growing the taro-plant, and an exquisite creeper, the morning glory,' the white bell of which is as
large as a goblet At the end of the bridge you walk on to a verandah with another turn-up roof, and two larkish fish of green crockery, standing on their heads and flourishing their tails. At the corner of the coping-stone is a dragon with a red mouth, and equally frolicsome tail. 'This roof is supported on fragile, transparent, carved pillars, and has no wall whatever, unless a handsome screen of oyster- shells, set as a beautiful mosaic in the centre of the place, may be so termed. There are no ceilings anywhere ; the roof, with its painted or carved rafters, is exposed to view. The whole of this verandah is a mass of rich carving and gilding in wood and ivory, and mouldings in cement. Upon it were five seats in ebony, and a lounge resembling a sideboard with the legs cut short."
How none of the people belonging to this magnificent establishment seemed to live anywhere, how the whole 'residence' had the un- substantiality of theatrical scenes, and how, when the lord of the mansion "in flats" presented the pilgrim with a rose, it turned out to be a French artificial flower, dew-dropped with glass beads, and cunningly perfumed by means of a tube, the writer narrates amusingly ; also her interview with a Chinese child, who looked like a dwarfed man, with his green satin drawers fitting to his little legs, and his wadded black satin coat made exactly on the pattern of the grown-up coats.
Her distinguished reception by the King of Campuchia, Cam- bogia, or Cambodia—for she uses the three names indifferently— gives the writer a great advantage over other travellers who have visited the extraordinary country between Cochin China and Siam. Her friends (she does not say where) predicted every kind of horror and danger from her resolution to go to Saigon, and to visit the rains of Angkor Wat, by junk or sampan on the whim- sical Mekhong, "which flows for several hundred miles, then turns half of itself back again, turns itself into lakes for six months in the year, and finally empties itself into the Chinese Sea." But their fears were dispelled by an intimation that the King would send a steam yacht to convey her to the capital, Phoutn Pengh, or Mountain of Gold, where there is no mountain, but an immense quantity of gold. Daring her residence in this extraordinary city she was entertained right royally, supplied with carriages, horses, and escort, and invested with the privilege of driving unquestioned over his Majesty's subjects, a privilege of which the officials appear to avail themselves pretty freely. She had a noble elephant to ride, and she describes the vivid pleasure of seeing the country from his back, "being so high up, and dashing in among the banana leaves, the mango bobbing into one's very mouth, out of the dust and heat, and seemingly above the cares of life, while the good-natured brute regaled himself with a pull at some of the trees on the road." All the portion of the book which concerns Cambodia and its queer King is eminently interesting, and the writer keeps clear of extraneous matter as cleverly as Mr. Vincent avoids.
it in his account of the same place and people. She experienced some difficulty in getting away from her royal host, who promised her a junk for her journey to the ancient and mysterious temple, but
who had an inconvenient habit of occasionally going to sleep for two or three days "right away," and was not very trustworthy. The- author gives an amusing description of the efforts that were made to.
deter her by the French Commandant and others (though we do not quite believe in a Count quoting Moore's melodies), and of the desertion of her secretary, which obliged her to go with a cort6ge of natives only and her page, Nam. The junk—for she got it at last—was a wonderful craft, forty feet long by seven wide, with a bamboo awning, and pointed ends like a gondola, and it displayed the King's flag, which had on a blue ground, in a pink centre, a three- towered pagoda, with a bunch of peacock's feathers on either side, and was surmounted by a fabulous animal for a weather-vane. That river voyage is delightfully described, with true poetical feel- ing and intense enjoyment of the lazy, sensuous charm of the scenery,. and of the oddity and humour of the incidents. No description, within our knowledge, of the Angkor Wat (or Temple) is so striking, so full, and so little tedious as this one, the out- come of much silent and solitary meditation within the- precinct of the immense ruins, and by the side of the quadruple sleeping Buddha, 2,000 years old, whose gilded) surface is yet untarnished, who lies there "typifying perfect quietude, which never has been and never can be disturbed," in stillness so deep that one hardly dares to move or raise one's voice, The writer gives a vivid description of the famous sculptures, especially of the bas-relief which depicts the desperate strife of the monkeys and the men ; but she tells us nothing about the Leper King, concerning whom Mr. Vincent gives such interesting parti- culars. Of the white marble ruins of Bakink, situated on the only rising ground within 20 miles, the remains of the great Wat constructed to cover and enshrine the foot-print of Buddha, a yard and a half long, —the author says :—
" I do not think there is in the world so beautiful a building, with such a lovely surrounding ; every shade of green viridifying the silver stems and trunks of the trees; and here and there a mass of the crimson-flowering cotton-tree, and the flamboyant, with its torch-like flowers, and others of golden brown. For twenty miles we could see- the circle of the horizon around. No wonder the Cambogian believes. in nothing so much as in his own forests. So far as his eye can see, be- beholds trees, and more trees, and trees beyond. As far as he can. walk, ho treads for ever under the shade."
And yet this is not primeval forest, but overgrowth, hiding ruin as it bides the ruined cities of Central and South America. This now deserted country "must once have been thronged with cities, temples, and highly cultivated inhabitants, warriors,. sculptors, artists, mechanicians, fine workers in gold and jewels, and men of letters." So long did the Pilgrim linger in this enchanted land that the Governor sent couriers to ascertain what had become of her, and her train of natives, elephants, oxen, dogs, and drivers. They found her living happily in her hut mounted upon poles, among objects which might have belonged to the time of the Pharaohs, and she was sorry to leave them ;. • but she had still to make her way along the widely-ramifying rivers of the Annam kingdom, touching at all the French posts in Cochin China, before reaching Saigon, en route for Singapore. She went to Johore, and became thoroughly at home at Sarawak ;. she visited "the Sago City of Muka " (which must be a charming place. to keep religiously away from) ; she inspected the antimony mines of Borneo, and studied the Mountain Dyaks in the district. of the cinnabar mines ; she went to Chindras, among the gold-mines. of the supposed Ophir, —perhaps the only woman who has been there since the Queen of Sheba ; was lodged in the police-station for safety and the best accommodation ; saw millions of wondrous fireflies all showing their lights and then shutting the slides of their lanterns simultaneously ; was disgusted by real flying-foxes, and rather fascinated by the notion of tigers, but did not see any. She went to Malacca, and saw the hideous monkey-like Jackoons,. explored the Indian Archipelago, made the acquaintance of the Battaks, reached Ceylon in time for the great feast of Buddha's tooth, and returned to England via Spain. Her narration of these manifold journeyings is given in a most entertaining style.
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