The Four Kings in the Street of Gold. By F.
Horace Rose. (Duckworth. 8s. 6d.)
THERE is a weird magic as of King Solomon's Mines about the almost Chinese landscapes and Byzantine manners of the Ethiopian high lands. A lot of history lies forgotten in the hinterland of Punt and the mountains where the Blue Nile takes its source. It should be an attractive field for the writer of fiction. Mr. Rose has written a good straightforward adventure story. At the same time, it is no mean literary feat to have recaptured a little of the delight and of the nausea which the stranger must experience in Abyssinia. The author's soldier characters—both British and Dutch —are entertaining, and he has a gift of dialogue. He has, too, in- ventiveness. But he falls down badly on characterisation. The hero, Captain Norman Coulshard—surely an old school-fellow of Big White Carstairs—is pathetic: "What would his men think and say? What would his commanding officer say? What would his people at home say when they heard the story of their son and heir, and the prith of the village, the only officer it had pro- duced, philandering with an Italian woman, and getting captured and imprisoned in consequence?" The *book is a long way from the standard of Greenmantle or Lost Horizon, but at the same time Mr. Rose has distinct possibilities as a writer in this genre.
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