Travel books

Ten for the road

Philip Glazebrook

Amusician, if his sensibility is enough refined, will prefer the inner harmony of reading a score to the imperfection of any human performance. Similarly, the imagi- native traveller loves most of all to be alone with his atlas: it is the unwritten book of travels. There lie the names of cities, forests, borders, contours, ruins, the thin line of march across unknown terrain; essentials which nourish the imagination.

There lies the port: the vessel puffs her sail: There gloom the dark broad seas.

That is one extreme, the map of travels unperformed. At the other end of the spec- trum stands a Murray Handbook, one of the 19th-century ones describing, say, Asia Minor. Here nothing is left unsaid, no monument left unmeasured, no note of the score unstrummed. The reader's stance is assumed, an attitude suggested to him the Preliminary Advice alone is like a Vic- torian traveller outfit which the reader is obliged to put on before proceeding to the Channel ports — and in this straitjacket, force-fed with factual details of every edi- fice visible from the Route, supplied with suitable thoughts on every subject, the reader is marched round the Ancient World.

It is because of the straitjacket that I love an old Murray Handbook. Out of the thor- oughness, the emphatic self-assurance of the editor's hand, there arises a traveller with a very definite identity. For you see in Murray's glass as clear a picture of the Imperial Englishman on his travels as you see of the countries he examines; and the depiction of vivid character in the protago- nist — the creation of a hero — is an ingre- dient essential to the making of a memo- rable book of travels.

Indeed, the purpose of a book of travels, perhaps the purpose of travel, has always been to define and test the character of the man whose journey is recounted. At the end of the Odyssey we have an unforget- table picture of the character of Odysseus as Homer meant to display it to us: such was the purpose of the poem, to invent sit- uations in which escape depends on the resources of the hero. Call the journey a Quest, put the traveller in armour, and the same design of ordeals overcome by knightly strengths is what enthralled medi- aeval Europe. Malory is a collection of picaresque tales in which travel is always the mainspring. Subtler than Malory, a mediaeval story which rises above the picaresque, is Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In this short work there is the intri- cacy and balance of perfect art. The sense of a hero isolated amongst strangers, in a land reached by a desperate journey through the wastes of Wirral and the cold grey woods of Logres, puts the wonderful story for me into the category of travel. Indeed it puts it at the top of the category.

Sir Gawain aside, the travel book written before the novel had developed lacks the craft and artifice which travellers learned from reading fiction and seeing its possibil- ities in shaping their own writing. Travel writing went through a tediously literal patch. Men made journeys of extraordinary daring, but wrote accounts of them merely to satisfy curiosity, their own and their readers', without having the art of the thing in mind, and their writings consequently are of less general interest than either the earlier fictional odysseys and quests, or those of a later age whose travellers had digested a good many novels. Thevenot, for example, who travelled across Asia to India in the late 17th century, must have had formidable powers of patience and courage, as well as a capacity for intelligent observation when ill and frightened, but he does not depict himself with any distinct- ness, and his journey consequently is a cat- alogue of information which, though curi- ous enough, is not sufficiently lighted by `incidents of travel' to make the book or its author memorable to the general reader. You have to make too many allowances before the book can be appreciated, which puts it in a specialist category, amongst works read for information rather than amusement.

It was Defoe, in the dawn of the novel, who saw again what Homer and the Gawain poet had grasped in exploiting the possibilities of a journey, whose course and incidents could be designed to test the resources of a man by such trials as would depict his heroic character against an out- landish background. Robinson Crusoe has this quality, vital to a travel book, of estab- lishing for the reader an isolated world which he believes in both as a place and as the shadow of reality. Events resound. Situ- ations are memorable. Actions are signifi- cant. This is what the art of fiction can do with fact. Defoe took the factual story-line of Selkirk's adventure and made it into a work of art; travellers learned from novel- ists the advantage of transmuting their own adventures into art by keeping in mind a novelist's preoccupation with narrative, with design and purpose, and with the illu- mination of character by carefully chosen incidents. The proportion of truth to fiction in Trelawny's Adventures of a Younger Son was never known. Morier wrote a novel, Haji Baba, which teaches the reader more about Persia, and more vividly, than either of his books of travel. With the golden age of the novel came the full development of the possibilities always inherent in the description of a journey.

The first true book of travels which enthralled me as thoroughly as any novel was Layard's Early Adventures in Persia, Susiana and Babylonia. How I loved open- ing it up in the garden that summer, paus- ing at the frontispiece of the author in Bakhtyari costume, plunging into that clear, far-off world once more; and how glad I was that there were two thick vol- umes of the treat. That book fulfils all the conditions of a masterpiece in the genre: a never-flagging narrative which leads us from what is familiar into what is increas- ingly perilous and strange; an adversary who has power of life and death over the traveller; and a traveller, the narrator, who reveals with every incident, and by every insouciant response to mortal danger or misfortune, his heroic character and his charm. Above all, his charm. Now Layard published this book in 1887, 45 years after the events he describes took place, when he was an old lion, famous for his Assyrian discoveries and for his political career. He published it in response to the interest taken in him by the public, and we may be sure that such a character would produce `early adventures' worthy of his fame. It is the best book he wrote, and it excels because you feel you are getting to know a remarkable man through his own lively company and graphic reminiscences. You don't have to be interested in the back- ground (I knew nothing about 19th-century Persia before I was captivated by Layard), but the background will become interesting as an extension of the personalities depict- ed. And then what a world of romance is opened up by the glorious number of trav- ellers in Asia in the 19th century! Barnes, Vambery, Wolff, Macgahan, O'Donovan a whole library of delightful books, each one of them creating a heroic character for its author and a vividly coloured world for his setting. It is a prejudice, but as a back- ground to a journey I prefer the ancient place-names of Asia to anything Africa or the New World can offer.

Of all the wealth of Asiatic travel books the one I would put top of the list is James Abbot's Journey to Heraut and Khiva, which appeared in 1843. Abbott reveals the whole nature of his pre-Mutiny generation of ide- alistic Indian travellers and soldiers: their tenderness and their fears as well as their courage (Abbott takes pity on a starving bird in the frozen wastes); their sentimen- tality beside their strength. His narrative suggests too a connection between the benighted regions of his ordeal and Europe in the Middle Ages, so that a romantic light glimmers round his head — it is not sur- prising that Abbott went on not only to knighthood as a soldier (a frontier town was named after him) but also to write nov- els and poems. The men and women who wrote great travel books were people of capacity who succeeded in other fields. But, whatever the ostensible reason for their journey, above all they loved adventure.

Abbott's book shares with many others (and with the mediaeval romance) a central characteristic: the traveller's fear of falling into the power of some ameer or wuzzeer of horrible malignity. Those who did suffer such a fate rarely survived to write down their experiences — though Arthur Conolly's Bible, in whose margins he recorded the ago- nies of his imprisonment before execution by the Ameer of Bokhara, would, if his relatives had not lost it, be travel writing's most touch- ing relic — but there are notable public dis- asters, the British defeat in Afghanistan in 1842, for example, of which we have accounts kept by the sufferers which display, in response to catastrophe, a capacity of charac- ter matched to the terrible occasion. Lady Sale's Journal of the Disasters in Afghanistan is a book of horrors and fortitude. Another disaster which occasioned a good many Indi- an books is the Mutiny, which, by turning upside-down a world thought (by the English) to rest on mutual trust, inspired pas- sion and outrage. Mark Thornhill, a magis- trate, wrote a brilliant and graphic account of the danger and treachery of that time, and he wrote a further book, Haunts and Hobbies of an Indian Official, which opens a quieter field of travel literature, that of natural histo- ry. It is a subtler book — from tart and disen- chanted descriptions of human affairs he returns always to watch with absorption the ants working in his garden — and contains no exciting events, but it paints for us against a picture of provincial India the portrait of an interesting man, a man of depth and charm, who was able to restore with India by way of its ants a relationship violently rup- tured by the Mutiny. Allied to natural history is sport, and travels in search of sport are numerous. Some are a delight: Negley Farson's Going Fishing is a collection of snapshots of the world through the eyes of a fisherman which I've loved since I was a child. But sport, alas, offers an author the chance to reveal a truly appalling self. Hunting Grounds of the Old World, by the Old Shekarry, is a book which, if written as a novel to present at its most hateful the Vic- torian upper-class male, would be thought a masterpiece.

But they are positive, these books; all of them create character, and whether or not you care for the character created (the bombast of Burnaby in Ride to Khiva) the book is absorbing because the form of jour- ney beset by ordeals has enthralled the human mind always. Fashions change, the Old Shekarry goes out and Abbott's vulner- able agonising comes in, but the form is adaptable and has survived. I think of Newby's matchless Short Walk in the Hindu Kush as being the prototype of post-war travel by amateurs — 'Berrie Wooster Climbs Mount Everest' — and of his meet- ing with Thesiger at the end of that book as the modern world's encounter with the ghost of travellers past. The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks. . . . Ulysses again, not this time Homer's bald two-timer, but the enigmatic spirit of Dante's and Ten- nyson's Ulysses, who expresses that central weakness in the traveller's character, that he cannot quieten his own restlessness by enumerating past journeys:

Yet all experience is an arch where thro' Gleams that untravell'd world, whose margin fades For ever and for ever when I move... There lies the port: the vessel puffs her sail.

What ten books for the voyage? Sir Gawain, an atlas, Murray's Handbook to Greece, Turkey and Asia Minor for 1840, Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Abbott's Heraut and Khiva, Lady Sale's Journal, Layard's Early Adventures, Newby's Short Walk, Thornhill's Haunts and Hobbies, Ten- nyson's Ulysses.

Tho' much is taken, much abides.

`We'll have you up and about in no time.'