SOME RECENT BOOKS ON SPORT AND TRAVEL.*
MR. AFLALO'S collection Behind the Ranges makes a pleasant introduction to our budget of travel books. He is the true essayist, graceful, allusive, a connoisseur of moods and impressions, full of good books, and quick to seize wayside humours. Also, though he is modest in his claims, he is the true traveller, for in his day he has covered a vast deal of country, and he has the traveller's joy in new sights and strange faces. He has fished in the Bosporus while the Turkish cannon were announcing the fall of Abd-ul-Hamid, and we should venture to guess that few men living have cast a line in a greater variety of outlandish waters. Sometimes be gives us the second-hand stuff of the essayist, but usually his observations and reflections are fresh and individual, and he talks excellent good sense about humble matters like food and creature comforts. We like best the charming paper on "Rivers Running to their Goal why, by the way, among his quotations does Mr. Aflalo not include the one from Rob Roy, when the travellers strike the infant Forth P—the pleasant exposition of the qualities of mountaineering on horseback, and the "Envoi." Among the many passages cited we notice that poetry is not always given correctly—a small fault, but one which a second edition might well remove. We are grateful for one delightful quotation applied to the habits of irate golfers :- " Miscuerunt herbas et non innoxia verbs."
We leave it to our readers to discover the context of the line.
The author of Two Dialuzs in Somaliland has now turned her steps to the Near East. Her Casuals in the Caucasus has all the qualities of her earlier books. It has the same light- hearted, sometimes almost light-headed, good spirits, the same quick sense of humour, the same passion for wild nature and vivid power of description. It is a little marred, too, by the same uneasy desire to joke in and out of season and by the cumbrous form of witticism which consists in references to Shakespeare as " The Immortal One " or " The Bard." Diana is such an excellent companion that we would implore her to discard tricks which should be left to provincial reporters. The party—Diana, a married cousin, and a soldier cousins began by hunting ibex in Dagbestan. Then the two ladies went to stay with a prince in a mountain fortress, where they had a variety of sport, including the chase of the ollen, the great Caucasian stag. These latter chapters are delightful
• (1) Behind the Ranges Parentheses of Travel. By F. G. Ada°. London Martin Seeker. [10s. 6d. net.]—(2) Casuals in the Caucasus. By Agnes Herbert. London: John Lane. [12s. 6d. net.]—(3) By Mountain, Lake, and Plain. By Major B. L. Kennion. London: W. Blackwood and Son. [10s. 6d. net.]—(4) Stalks in the Himalaya : Jottings of a Sportsman-Naturalist. By E. P. Stabbing. London : John Lane. [12s. 6d. net. (5) Climbing Adventures in Four Continents. By Samuel Turner. London: T. Fisher Unwin. [Lis. 6d. net.]
reading, for Diana revels in odd types of sport, and her picture of the outlandish castle and the deep forest-clad glens is in the highest degree vivid and romantic. The story of how the visit ended is too good to spoil by a summary. In addition to the narrative of sport, there is a good deal of interesting descriptions of Caucasian people and manners, both in town and country. We like best the passages where Diana, true to her cult, sings the praises of the open road and the camp under the stars. They are good literature, if only because of the true passion which inspires them.
Major Kennion's By Mountain, Lake, and Plain carries us farther east along the great backbone of mountain which runs from the Caucasus to China. He too is the best of company. He writes vigorously and entertainingly, with a pleasant flavour of scholarship and an ever-present humour. The larger part of the book tells of sport in the curious land of Seistan, where for some time the author was British Consul. It is a dismal country, scourged all the winter by endless winds and parched by fierce summer droughts. Most of the sport was got in the Haman, the great marshy lake where the river Helmand disappears. There he shot endless varieties of duck and organized a novel and sucesaful type of wild-goose drive. In the stony hills, in the company of his hunter " Rahmat," he pursued ibex, and on the sandy flats he had good sport with gazelle, discovering two new species. The most interesting chapters, however, deal with sport in the highlands of northern Persia. In Khorassan he shot wild sheep, and on the north side of the Elburz range found the biggest type of urial he had ever met, which he considers a distinct sub-species. His expedition took him through the Turcoman country to Astrabad, and thence to the Caspian, and in the richly wooded mountain glens be dis- covered a sportsman's paradise. There he shot the great Maral stag, and by extraordinary good luck killed one tiger and killed but lost a second. The country was the old Hyrcania, from which the tigers were brought for the Roman shows, but nowadays the beast is very rare, and Major Kennion's good fortune was remarkable.
Still going east, we cross the Indian frontier and come to the ground of Mr. Stebbing's Stalks in the Himalaya. Books on Himalayan sport are common enough, but Mr. Stebbing has a quality of his own. As in his pleasant Jungle By-ways he is as much naturalist as shikari, and he gives us many delightful pictures of wild life on the Southern Himalayan slopes. The different types of goat, sheep, deer, cat, and bear are described, and the pages are adorned with a multitude of little line sketches by the author. He has no stories to tell of wonderful exploits, for he is very candid, and as often as not a day's stalking ends fruitlessly. Bat he gives what is much more valuable—unforgettable pictures of scenery and weather, camp life, sketches of man and beast, and glimpses into the secrets of the wilds. The manner of writing is like the matter—simple, sincere, and curiously free from false literary artifices.
Mr. Turner's My Climbing Adventures in Four Continents is in many ways the most remarkable book in the batch. It is abominably written, and the spirit is far from pleasant. The author quotes a newspaper description of himself as "the most adventurous living climber," and it is the risk of his feats that he glories in. It is a pity that so fine a mountaineer should show so little of the good taste of the craft. He is always desperately pleased with himself and far too critical of his companions. But there can be no ques- tion of the magnitude of his achievements. After rushing up the Matterhorn and Monte Rosa, he practised on the fan- tastic rocks of Dovedale, and was the first to traverse the Charmoz pinnacles from south to north. Then came his wonderful climbs in the Altai Mountains in winter, one of the most remarkable feats of solitary climbing ever achieved. He has already written of these at length in his Travel, Exploration, and Climbing in Siberia. His next expedition was to New Zealand, where he led the party which accom- plished the first and, so far, the only traverse of Mount Cook. Few expeditions can have been more laborious or more hazardous, for there are 10,000 feet of sheer climbing from the valley. From the first bivouac, 6,600 feet up, the party were at work continuously for thirty-six hours, and the difficulties were complicated by a nasty accident to the leader's head. The last expedition narrated is an attempt to rush Aconcagua, when the author reached a height of over
20,000 feet. Mr. Turner is a business man, who can only afford time to make flying rushes to the mountains in the intervals of his profession. Hence his achievements are the more to be wondered at. He is clearly a mountain gymnast of the first order, with endless courage and an iron nerve. He considers that the highest Himalayas are possible if a man of the right quality is found who specially trains for the task. We hope that Mr. Turner's business engagements will some day allow him to make the attempt.
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