Travels Far and Near
IN The Flying Carpet Mr. Hallibniton's "Royal Road to Romance " of a previous book gets broader and more flowery than ever. He is a hierophant of the 'Americin cult of going places and doing things ; inspired by a- strong sense of the • spectacular, he directs his aeroplane in turn towards the Oldest . cathedral, the Most Inaccessible city, the Highest mountain. It is all very breath-taking, but somehoW;:like niir travel itself after the first ten minutes, curiously unexciting. One bectsnes so accustomed to expect the adventures that one would be
surprised only if they 'did-not happen VeniCe is the place where he swam up the Grand Canal ; Morocco the place where he acquired a Foreign Legion uniform and popped in and out of the Foreign Legion tents with a fability that is indeed remarkable ; Galilee the lake on which he got caught in a
sudden storm and made an impromptu meal off fishes and unleavened bread ; Teheran the city where he was kept for a week in the local prison, by special arrangement with the Shah. But apart from all these goings-on, he would not have it thought that any beauty spot he visits could fail to evoke : an appropriate response."Indeed no : spending a night of full
moon in the Sahara, he "objected violently'? to his companion playing a vulgar record on the gramophone when " Coq d'Or " had been sending chills and fevers through his blood a moment before ; Teheran he- bought a caged nightingale and set it ' free in Shiraz, with suitable quotations from Hafiz ; at the Taj Mahal he vowed he would " return as often as possible to
- seek refuge from the malice and ugliness of life." And so on all round. the world. By a singularly generous disposition of
Providence, _ fine writing _ seerns to come as easily to Mr. Hallibtuton_ as flying.
The remaining -books . are all to do with Great Britain. Tramp Royfil:is an Old Borroviari ,with the best traditions of the school at heart. though.:he possesses the requisite ardottr, his writing lacks something of the clearness and sim- - plicity...nf description that is suCh a remarkable quality in Borrow.itimself and, _to:a lesser _degree, in Mr. W. H. Davies. Throughout this:account of his manderings up and down the land there is an. unresolved, conflict between the claims of the Tramp (genericaily) on. our,sympathy as a rain-soaked, foot- sore social outcast and the more romantic conception of him as a being absolved from, the responsibilities of ordinary life and free to enjoy a particular intimacy with wind and stars.
True, Mr. Marshall denies this conflict specifically and takes a plunge into the second alternative at the very beginning of the book, but his; denial loses much of its force when he paints a picture of -a London doss house that is something between Hogarth and ,Goya, and. that stays more vividly in the mind than many of-his gentler scenes,: • The book about the Lake District -is a serious study for people who aim higher than the motor- roads. No one could be•better qualified to have.: made: than Mr.. Symonds, for, while he never departs ostensibly from considerations of practical importance to walkers, the profound feeling that he has for these mountains gives his prose a quality that is by no means pedestrian.
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