The book, however, is intensely interesting, considered merely from a
popular point of view, as a tale of travel. The careless reader who finds too many scientific statistics in the earlier ch Apter,', and puts the volume aside as "dull," makes a great mistake. The author, or his translator, has no graces of style, and the few passages in which he allows himself to indulge in rhetoric or characteristically Teutonic sentiment would have been better expunged. As a whole, the book is quite artless, and in this lies one of its chief attractions. it is obviously the frank, unstudied, and truthful record, day by day, of the writer's experiences, and the lack of elaboration, the total insensibility to the art of effect, only make the reeord more vivid and convincing. There is no attempt, for example, to write picturesquely about the Kirghiz tribes, among whom the author lived on terms of easy familiarity ; but the simple accounts, scattered throughout the book, of haw they lived, what they did, how they spoke, give a far better idea of the people than the most finished "word- pictures." In the same way, Dr. Hedin's repeated attempts to reach the summit of the Mustagh-ata (he did get as high as 20,000 ft.) are related in saber detail, and he only allows himself a little rhetoric by moonlight. But the greatest triumph of simplicity in narration is the story of the terrible twenty-three days' journey across the Takla-Mak tn sea,— the south-west corner of what is geuerally known as the desert of Gobi. Oa April 19th, 13)5, he went into the desert, with eight camels, four men, and two dogs. "A strange and inexplicable feeling came over ms, wuen I encamped for the first time in the dreariest desert there is on the face of the earth. Tne men spoke but little; not one of them laughed. An unwonted silence reigned mound the
camels. Two or three stray moths fluttered around my candle inside the tent, but no doubt they had travelled with our caravan." The desert was one long succession of rolling sand dunes, often as much as 100 ft. high; it was very heavy going for the camels; the water in the tanks stood at 85°; there were no wells, and by stupidity and knavery the store of water ran short ; on April 30th only a tumbler- fal remained ; on May 1st there was not a drop. Camel after camel fell exhausted, and had to be abandoned. Unutterable expedients were tried to quench the thirst which tortured the men, of whom two were left in a dying state on the burning sand. Everything but the absolutely indispensable was abandoned to the engulphing desert, and the explorer with two men and the surviving camels struggled on. "I understood now how thirst can make a man half insane." "I dressed myself entirely in white from top to toe. If I was doomed to die in the sand I wanted to be properly attired ; I wanted my burial clothes to be both white and clean." Five days of tor- ment and incredible labour followed, and at last, on May 6th, a solitary man in torn clothes crawled on all fours through the forest growth to a pool in the bed of the Khotan Darya. and (after feeling his pulse) drank immeasurable draughts of water after six days of raging thirst.
How Dr. Hedin's courage and resolution bore him through that terrible week mast be read in his own moving pages. Once began, these chapters cannot be put down till the end is reached. Nothing more painfully fascinating has been written on the torment of the desert. Fortunately he was able to recover and revive two of his four men ; but only one camel came out of the wilderness of sand-dunes, and it was little short of a miracle that man or beast escaped. Nevertheless, hat dly had the explorer got back safe to Kashgarir when he set out again, made a thirty-three days' march from Knotau over another part of the same awful desert, discovered GP moo- Buddhist remains of two buried cities, and successfully surveyed the lakes of Lop, wnich had lung been his goal. Those same buried cities, about which the desert legends have long told mysterious tales, are worth a review to themselves ; but we must wait until De. Hedin publishes fuller details of his remarkable discovery, the romance and mystery of which stir the imagination strangely. As we have hinted, the explorer's scientific equipment was weak in the archesological and historical departments, and do collaboration of a specialist will probably be needed to co-ordinate his notes. His Persian and Arabic also stand in need of revision, and we should like more precision or explauation in the use of such terms as Sam, Tajika, Mongols, and above all that ambiguous name "Tatar." One other criticism, of a different kind, may be hazarded. If it was absolutely necessary to abandon men and beasts in the manner related in these volumes (a question we do not venture to judge), surely it would have been no more than ordinarily merciful to have put the poor camels and dogs out of their misery. Dr. Sven Hedin had plenty of cartridges, and it is his own fault if the tortured deaths of the animals who patiently served him rise like a nightmare in our memory. He evidently felt their sufferings acutely, and he shows many marks of tenderness to his dime comrades; but this makes his neglect of an obvious duty only the more inexplicable.
We must add that Dr. Media's sketches are often admirable, especially his portraits of Kirghiz and Tangut old men and children. His cameras were lost in the desert, but the earlier part of his journey is well photographed. The drawings by Swedish artists made at home under his directions are pretty, no doubt, but are obviously of no value as records. The volumes are produced in a very handsome form, though the paper necessary for the illustrations makes them incon- veuieniiy heavy. The illustrations should not have been irregularty included in the paging, to the distraction of the bibliographer.
HENRY REEVE*
How rapidly in this crowded and hurrying age do reputa- tions pass away ! When those of us who consider the "usual age" to be about fifty-five first began to take note of what was passing in London, the name of Henry Reeve was
about as familiar as the Duke of York's Column. Yet even before he died, a young diplomatist, member of a profession which is nothing if not well informed as to persons, and who was assuredly at least as well informed as most members of his Service, nearly threw an elderly relative into a fit by asking, "Who is Henry Reeve ? " Professor Langhton's book, which is most conscientiously executed and extremely full, will carry his friend's name into many circles in this
country, in America, and in the Colonies which could not be
expected to know what was "common learning" in Pall Mall or Mayfair. It will do more than that,—it will add several features to his portrait which were not visible to some people who knew him rather well for more than a genera- tion; and all of those features are agreeable. We allude more particularly to certain indications of poetical and religious feeling, in this typical man of the world, which were not known to the world, though they may have been known to a few of his closest friends.
Previous page
