Five Travel Books
JuDGFD by their narratives, today's travellers into strange Ian& Fan be set in two categories—the seekers, and those who find what Is already obviously there. The first sort travel with few pre- Conceptions, gather a variety of disturbing experience and return, sometimes sadder, always wiser, and with news worth telling. If the other kind ever discover anything new about Man and his °Id thways they rarely manage to pass it on through the pages of e:_ ir journals, which too frequently read like the dialogue aPPended to the glossier sort of travel-film. High Places of Africa, by Jean-Claude Berrier and Raymond zet (Robert Hale, 18s.), tells of a group of young Frenchmen mnying cars over the Sahara, through the Belgian Congo and 'Quad about to Ethiopia. Their healthy curiosity about Saharan history, ruined cities, rock carvings, Coptic churches, is tempered with civility to their several kinds of host. Obeying local custom `Ind making fun of most of their doubles (usually self-created) her produce a first-rate travel diary, recording what they saw of _Primitive monuments, modern life, the changing pattern of the uesert tribal world; the trip, nicely balancing adventure and research, turns out to have been worth while for the reader as well as the travellers. Mr. Schuyler Jones (author of Under the African Sun: Hurst dud Blackett, 21s.) takes the Sahara in his stride four times before and during his wanderings for three years in Africa, ometimes With a colleague, always with a camera. Too much of itsre ads like a Personal diary (details of weather, routine camping chores, unin- sDirl 18 conversations), but he makes a vivid picture of his 111"i-ills with the impressive American, Colonel Putnam, among the PYgmies of the Ituri Forest; of his solo climb of njaro; zind 4 of his service with the Emergency Forces in KenyaKilim during the Mau Mau troubles. These are the most individual, and best rte of his very varied experiences.
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InTe Buried Pyramid, y M. Zakaria Goneim (Longmans, Green, 4 1h1 )1 is the raw stuff of b arclueology in which the author—scarcely stirring off his own doorstep, as it were—conducts us on a com- prehensive tour of pharaonic history, the technique of pyramid- building, and his own discovery of a complete, unknown, buried 1)1, , rainid at Saqqara: pure 'shop' throughout, but fascinatingly told. 1, With A Fool in the Desert (John Murray, 18s.) Miss Barbara a cp. Y records seven months' Land-Rovering in Libya; searching German corpses, diving in Benghazi harbour, or crossing the cesert with an impromptu caravan, she seems to have had an hsi0Yable trip, but cannot bring her 'adventures' to life on paper. A travel-book in a category of its own is the work of Claude
Art
wineries and Francois Hebert-Stevens, The Andes: Roof of and rlea (Thames and Hudson, 50s.), in which the authors' pens him,,Cameras.record with harmonious sensitivity the landscape, `irY and ethnography of a region absolutely unique in every Particular as one of man's dwelling-places. The pictures are each either awesome, thrilling, or lyrical in quality; the text, a mode of clear-eyed yet imaginative appreciation; the result is world every bit of its price, and the better sort of school library canoe afford to dispense with it. Its one shortcoming (microscopic) I an inadequate map as frontispiece; but in this respect it better the four African books, whose maps are all either incomplete ar too small in scale. Does no publishing house employ a good
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