Five Adventurers
WILD ADVENTURE. By Howard Hill. (Robert Hale, 165.) FIvE adventurers, and the least flamboyant has written the best book. In Between the Elephant's Eyes an American colonel des- cribes his arrival in Africa soberly, almost stolidly, and his early Pages are not promising. But we are soon drawn in. It is character- istic of him that he can make an engrossing chapter of an afteroon spent in a museum drawing a bead on an elephant skull with a broomstick. On safari, the impact of a majestic country on an appreciative man is cleanly described. There is no bwana attitudin- ising: some acrid pages on the vultures, the sight of a ,dead lion, the gory celebration over the first elephant killed, prepare us Psychologically for Colonel Scott's curious final scene, which is 80 good that he should be left to tell the end of his search in his own way. Enough to say that the reader is oddly moved. A fine, heartfelt book, with good photographs.
Mr. Howard Hill's book lacks this personal flavour. We gallop through the Everglades in 1926; next it is 1933 and we are in Wyoming with a camera; then separate chapters on meeting bear, alligators, and so on. The effect is jerky, like short film sequences spliced together, and not as interesting as Mr. Hill's own remark- able movies. Over-modest, or inarticulate, about himself, he says nothing about how he became the most celebrated bow-and-arrow hunter living. Plenty of practical information about individual animals and types of cameras, which one receives with respect.
An old man told Mr. Phair about Inca treasure, and he slammed off into the jungle with a Danish friend. Penniless in America, sizing up candidates for the trip and being let down by a couple of Californians, his energy and impatience come across vividly. He is a sloppy writer, but he has guts and the knack of making us care.
Mr. Powell writes plush prose about a vanished world. A mellow old American snob who has been journalist, sightseer, and celebrity-hunter since Edwardian days, he breezed around the world in a blizzard of letters-of-introduction and met numerous bigwigs. His eyes tend to glaze over at the sight of crowned heads— all we learn about Bombay, for instance, is that he saw a German Crown Prince there. This gets tiresome. But on the Zeppelin bombing of Antwerp or entering Russia without a passport, he is good. An exasperated narrative of a camel journey ends in a scrape with a grim Arab chieftain whom Mr. Powell converted into a party-giving motor-car fanatic. When he met a cannibal, he had the sense to ask an interesting question, 'What parts do can- nibals like best?' and got an answer I have been brooding over for days. Now he lives in Connecticut: 'The villagers are friendly and I notice that I am frequently addressed as "Squire." ' One Only Lives Twice has a wonderful section about roughing it in Western Canada forty years ago. Pegleg Lowe, a yelping mob of Alaskan whores, and Jake, who fell foul of a travelling hypnotist are fun to meet. A post-war Pacific journey is tamer;
the book is uneven. But Mr. Stanton Hope is charming company; a man with a flair for sketching people, and the only one of these writers who will make you laugh.
WALTER CLEMONS
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