ENDS OF THE EARTH
Nolan in Africa
FLUSHED and hot with joy at the sight of Mount Kilimanjaro, flushed and hot with discomfiture at being addressed as `Bwana,' the Australian painter Sidney Nolan makes his explorations of Africa—as years ago of the Outback—in the lively recording of his wife. One Traveller's Africa, by Cynthia Nolan (Methuen, 42s.), would persuade us by its title, either that the two are mystically one or that one of them is all- important. But what comes through in the writing is the exposure of two different temperaments and physiques to a succession of travel experiences that seldom provide quite what had been expected of them.
It is easier, on the whole, for Sidney, tougher under climatic strains and relatively free to fol- low his own inclinations. In certain circumstances the male prerogative still favours him: in look- ing for dangerous gorillas (after some instruc- tions to his wife about the disposal of his paint- ings in case he should not return), Cr in a clamber with Eric Shipton to an Ethiopian monastery; and he has an additional and sometimes trying facility for vanishing for many hours without trace or notice. And for those travel hazards that have increased while so many have diminished he has his own techniques. Among so many things that delighted both travellers (and Mrs. Nolan has a talent for making things visible in short sentences), the unendurable was any- thing that came between the artist and his vision. It isn't easy to be sure what that was, but the dreamy animal-paintingi, .well reproduced in this volume, give a clue. For the 'essential Africa' is a good deal mare cluttered with un- assuaged human need and controversy than was the essential and empty Australia which the artist could people. with his own myths.
If Mrs. Nolan emerges as the liabella Burton , .
of an age when wives do more. than 'pay, pack and follow,' M. Michael Llewellyn .Smith takes the. unattached road 'Of a young man to whom travel is both liberation and initiation. The Great Island (LOngmans, 30s.) is a book about. Crete, or rather about the Cretans. It comes but of an expedition with 'a tape-recorder and a serious intention to avoid the impiessionistic travelogue. Mr. Llewellyn Smith even avoids the Minotaur and Linear B, so clearly does he see a neglected theme of European history in Byzantine' Crete's seven centuries of sporadically fierce resistance to domination, and more especially in the Dark Age of Ottoman rule. Only after we have been refreshed on the history of an inextinguishable enosis movement can we relax among the pagan survivals and the rich folklore of a people that first showed a genius for heresy by claiming the site of the death of Zeus as well as his birth. The author has done what he wanted to do for Cretc in a thorough, self-effaeing and very engaging manner.
`Almost as lovely as the Attic coast,' is the tribute of Mr. Arthur StrattOn to a stretch of the south-east coast of an island dimensionally much larger, and much less well-known. In The Great Red Island (Macmillan, 36s.), Mr. Stratton celebrates Madagascar. A New Englander who, as a volUnteer with the Free French, first saw the name Madagascar on a can of singe doing duty for corned beef at Bir Hakeim in 1942, was perhaps the right man to convey the bizarre appeal of this vast mass of red laterite, fringed by coastal rain-forest, where vanilla is big busi- ness and a line of fantastic dynasts lies entombed among the thorns of a taboo forest; where the giant aepyornis was not extinct until historical times and the seventy-million-year-old coelacanth declines to be extinct at all; where a pirate estab- lished his utopian Liberlalia and a creole keeps the appalling Hotel des Orchidees; and where succeeding invasions of pygmies, Polynesians, French bureaucrats and ill-briefed Allied libera- tors were pushed into the past in the quietest of awakenings to national independence. There is a place called Fianarantsoa and another that is 'pronounced with a sigh—"Ee-oosh!" ' And for all this Mr. Stratton has a baroque turn of style that offers in the first few pages words like `struthious,"rhipidistrian' and `xerophytic,' and runs a single sentence for twenty-one lines of print.
Apart from a tendency to ease himself of some general opinions on negroes, Communism and so forth, he works his discursive pattern suc- cessfully enough; and he has 'a great deal of in- formation to convey, with a flavour that might be suggested by imagining John Gunther writing Jesting Pilate.
To find the Co-operative of St.-Gilles it is. only necessary to follow one of the carts laden with tubs of grapes, that stream at intervals of minutes down the main street.' And to find, in answer to invitations as irresistible as that, all that one could want to know about Languedoc, Roussillon and the Massif Central. it is only necessary to get hold of West of the Rhone, by Freda White (Faber, 30s.). Readers of the, same author's Three Rivers of France already know her talent for combining a thorough historical exploration with the small, but far from trivial, travellers' talk of off-track routes, out-of-season facilities, and all the variables missed by the starred. guides., And besides the illustrations there is a real map..
For Japan. Wim Swaan provides in Japanese Lantern (Bles, 45s.) something at least as de- serving of the title `Unusual Door' as the Emergency Exit which he found to be so named in one of the fabulous new Tokyo stores. We are getting to know it all, Zen and pin-tables, the Hiroshima Membrial and the tiny transistors, all the miracle and all the" schizophrenia. But Mr. Swaan, with a knowledge of Japanese, an un- sentimental 'synipathy, 'a mastery of the camera and an unimpeachable introduction from Bernard Leach, makes it fresh and intriguing again.
Nobody really wants to deflate Japan. But, El Dorado, always misapplied, loses some more of its stuffing at the hands of J. H. Moore in Tears of the Sun-God (Faber, 30s.), an account of 30,000 miles of travel in Amazonia and the Andes. This is in the new vein popularised by television docurnentaries, packed with the find- jugs of university geographers and' biologists and the pains of obtaining them, with Conan Doyle's Lost World, Cnlonel . Fawcett, Mato Grosso missionaries and Machu Picchu of the Incas fading steamily into futility. In its strictly contemporary mood it helps to explain the dif- fidence of Jocelyn and John Baber, who in Castello, Portofino (Batsford, 35s.) chronicle for what they feel to be a Square circle the adven- turous purchase of an Italian castle in 1949, the labour to make it modestly habitable and to uncover its neglected history; the happiness of extending a hospitable, dinner-dressing way of life for a few more anachronistic years; and at length the impossibility of explaining to the de- voted man-and-wife staff that this too is at an end.
Finally, two expertly written and carefully produced volumes introduce a new series. Nevill
Barbour's Morocco and Phyllis Auty's Yugo- slavia (both from Thames and Hudson, 30s. each) are designed to supply the purposeful traveller (with the export drive not far from mind) with as much essential information on `new nations and peoples' as he can absorb in an air- journey, assisted by ninety or more illustrations, several maps, a bibliography and a Who's Who.
FRANCIS WATSON
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