A BIOGRAPHER TRAVELS
The Nile in Egypt. By Emil Ludwig. (Allen and Unwin. 6s.)
A GLOBE-TROTTING philosopher once remarked that he could absorb all that was essential about a major city merely by walking blindfold down its chief thoroughfare. To most people this might seem a pretty amazing statement, providing, of course, that no deception was intended. That is to say, providing that the philosopher was not indulging in a visual yogi peculiar to himself, or registering his polite disapproval of the local architecture. But the statement is not so amazing after all. London streets are full, so motorists aver, of the optically-sound blind, who could swear, every one of them, to their knowledge of the locality of the nearest Post Office, the Abbey and Hyde -Park. And everyone will admit to the psychic blindness of English and American tourists abroad, who, nevertheless, return with quite clear accounts of the food and the sanitary arrangements.
No, the wandering thinker was not a conjurer. He referred to the well-marked deaf-adder blindness which all civilised tourists in half-civilised countries share. (Witness the Russian travellers', tales.) - Who would dream of -taking Dr. Johnson's word for the state of the Highlands where more authoritative documents exist ? Similarly, although Herr Emil Ludwig is better-informed than Baedeker and has a far wider conception of what should interest the- intelligent tourist, his book is not authoritative. Herr Ludwig imported into Egypt all the decencies, aspirations, prejudices and myopias of a North European liberal. His general thesis—the social and economic repercussions of the Nile Flood—is illustrated and decorated by a quantity of divagations—some pointed, some of them debris from Herr Ludwig's previous works, all serious. But the hints and criticisms contained in his digressions, and the implications of his thesis, are seldom allowed to develop. If they were, Herr Ludwig would be writing economic history and not romantic biography. _ Consequently his book is exces- sively tantalising. An interesting black-and-white statement about irrigation is, as it were, presented through a veil of tears, in rainbow colours. A sympathetic account of the Egyptian Nationalist case is as curiously transformed into what seems to be the script of a colour-problem film. And yet the book is not really sentimental nor are the facts wildly distorted. It is simply that Herr Ludwig, although he saw very much more than, the usual traveller, saw nearly everything worth seeing in fact, except the inside of the British administrative machine, preferred to see dramatically and romantically, rathet than statistically or politically. Although the intrusion of local colour ad lib. may discourage those who open the book in order to find out -abotit cotton politics, mixed Courts and capitulationsfor a book about the Nile' is also a commercial history of Egypt-it will delight honest rubber-necking tourists. Herr Ludwig knOws just what they want, short of camels against the skyline. It is a pity that a book which could otherwise be recntrunended enthusiastically to the yearly visitors .to- Cairo should suffer from bad translation and indifferent illustrations. Its publica- tion pt the time of the Montreux Conference should not deceive anybody. It is not a successor to Lord Lloyd's Egypt Since We greatly regret to have to record the death, in a flying accident on Tuesday, of Mr. Peter Burro, a regular and valued contributor to our literary. pages. .
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