TRAVELS IN THE NEAR EAST.* LORD RONALDIMAY has achieved a

rare success : he has written a good book of travels. The style is simple and well suited to the matter; the interest is not sacrificed to a pretence of fine writing ; and the author has sufficient literary sense to produce the effect at which he aims, whether he writes as a sportsman or a politician. For he plays both parts with equal ease, and even when he is intent upon tracking the markhor or the Thibetan gazelle he still thinks of his country and of its policy in the East.

The first half of the book, in which the author tells a tale of sport, is the more graphic, and assuredly he did not gain his trophies without craft and energy. The palm without the dust was not for him, and he never got a shot at a sharpoo or a, nyfiii that he did not stalk over the roughest ground and with the greatest stealth. Here is his own account, which will prove the merit of his book far better than comment, of the chase of a big markhor. Two villagers had told him the whereabouts of the beast, and he started after him at day- break :—

"My lucky star was in the ascendant, for before very long we spied him in a fairly good place for a stalk. We experienced no difficulty in approaching to within a few •hundred yards, from which point there seemed to be every prospect of a flat crawl bringing me successfully within shot. I had wormed my way along the ground for some distance, when he suddenly appeared at the top of a ridge about 80 yards off. If he only stayed there for a moment I felt he must be mine ; but he unfortunately did not, and moved on out of sight over the far side of the ridge with- out stopping. Slipping off the rope-soled sandals I was wearing, I crept noiselessly on in my socks, and just as I reached the top of the ridge which he had crossed, caught, sight of the tip of a horn immediately in front of me, not more than sixyards off. I kept absolutely still with'my rifle to my shoulder while the horn came slowly nearer and nearer. I hardly dared breathe, and at last it came so close that if i bad stretched out my. rifle I could actually have touched it, but such was the nature of the ground that nothing else was visffde. At this critical moment a stone under ray foot gave way and went crashing down a precipice, the horn vanishing simultaneously. I sprang on to the ridge, to see the beast galloping at break-neck speed down the far side. I fired without result, and he vanished round a. projecting rock. Running on over the most awful ground (with nothing but socks on mY feet!) I reached the rock round which he had disappeared, and saw him labouring up an almost perpendicular cliff opposite us. I hit him with the 200-yards sight up ; but he still went on until • Sport and Polities under an Eastern Sky. By the Earl of Bonaldshay. London: Blackwood and Bona. [219.]

a shot from the Mauser with the 380-yards sight up brought him down just as he reached the sky-line. When he did come down, it was with a terrible crash."

However, his fall was broken by a tree-root, and when found he was a "real beauty," with horns of just fifty inches.

His bag, if small, was various, as he brought back front his expedition the heads of eleven different animals, and the

result is far better than the butchery of those sportsmen who in Africa and elsewhere have extinguished many a. speciep.

And he has something of interest to tell of all the beasts which fell to his gun. The goa, for instance, or ThibetaAn gazelle, exasperates the bunter by walking, just beyond range, and then pulling up with a sort of bored com-

posure. But it was the nyriii, or OViS A111111011, which guite him the sternest chase, for these beasts, unlike the goa, knot slacken the pace of their flight until they have put thirtyor

forty miles between themselves and their pursuer. Once he saw a snow-leopard passing a herd of markhor, but he could not get near enough to have a shot at this rare and beautiful beast.

However, Lord Ronaldshay is no mars sportsman. He not only has an appreciation of the rugged landscape which was the background of his expedition, but he is a keen observer of men and cities. His sketch of Ladak is peculiarly vivid :—

" At last I was in Indalr," he writes, "and what a curious, quaint, fantastic land it was ! I do not inean to say that by merely crossing a range of mountains I had got into a land physi- cally different from the country I had left, for the actual scenery was much the same,—the same gigantic mountains in every direction, with the same snow-clad peaks and sombre black rocks; but their people, and their customs and their religion and their works,—surely they are the quaintest and most fantastic race of human beings in the world!"

So he describes the kasdar, or headman, above whose magnifi- cent pigtail there rose a dome-shaped cap, and the shortens,

or last resting-places for the ashes of the dead, and the prayer-wheels worked by water, and the curious rites of the

lamas ; and he describes them all with the conviction of one who has seen, noted, and understood the strange habits of 'a strange land. Nor is his book without practical advice to the traveller. He who is minded to purchase a camel may get a hint from Lord Ronaldshay "To deal satisfactorily in camels," he says, "requires experi- ence. My experience taught me that it is inadvisable to buy a camel without previously examining his hump. Unless he has a good hump do not buy him. A camel with a good hump will live on it, and at the end of a long journey, unless he has been excep- tionally well fed, the hump will have gone, or nearly so. Then he must be rested and fed up till the hump returns. The Baloochi baggage camel is a curious beast, and of a hardier stamp than the more delicate trotting cameL When kneeling down to be loaded he gurgles, and bubbles, and splutters, and makes all sorts of objectionable noises in protest, and unless carefully watched, will generally seize the exact moment when everything is piled on him, but unsecured, to rise with a snort to his feet, thereby upsetting everything, and breaking anything that does net happen to be made of cast-iron."

Yet this same camel is a useful beast, and Lord Ronaldshay could not have travelled from India. to Persia through the

deserts by Beloochistan without his aid.

Though Lord Ronaldshay is no Ruaaophobe, he has much to say of Russian intrigue and Russian enterprise in the political portion of his book. Yet the difficulties which he

raises are solved by the railway which, he tells us, Lord Curzon will construct from Quetta to Nushki, and from Nushki to Sistan. But this project is still in the future) and therefore belongs rather to journalism than to history. At the same time, the rivalry which exists between England and Russia on the Persian frontier cannot be overlooked, and though no doubt there is room for the trade of hoth countries, the pages which Lord Ronaldshay devotes to Russian• policy

are worth a careful study. In conclusion, we confidently recommend to our readers a book which is at once scholarly and picturesque.