A Complaint of Travelers' Tales

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB

I AM — or rather was — an inveterate reader of travelers’ tales. But for a slip of fortune I should myself have been a mighty prowler over the earth. As it is, I take cheap, second-hand voyages over a dry sea of printer’s ink; and being thus hardly circumstanced, I am something particular in the matter of pilots.

Fortune, alas! is not so nice; she picks out her travelers with a blundering hand. Curiosity they have, and mettlesome spirit, else they would never set forth; and stoutness of will, else they would never arrive. But why, pray, should they not be dowered further with eyes to see things rich and rare, and grace to speak well of them when they come home again ?

I dined last week with a distinguished traveler just back from Chinese Turkestan. “Here,” I said to myself, “will be the real thing!” and whetted my palate for pungent Eastern flavors. The traveler turned out a silent little man, who dined with his eyes on the cloth, and could not be got to speak of his adventures beyond saying, with a hasty upward glance, “Yes, yes, certainly. It was very interesting.” Might not such a man as well live “dully sluggardized at home”?

Now your traveler, I make bold to maintain, should be a man with a tang to him, an agreeable vagabond, a racy talker. And if there be in his veins a drop or two of the blood of old John Maundeville, so much to the good. But by what right does a fellow of juiceless personality and unready tongue take upon himself the high title of Traveler ?

Yet this peripatetic sphinx, who buries in his inscrutable bosom the rich secrets of the East, is by no means the most culpable of voyagers. Better he who holds his tongue than he who will not hold his pen. I am not ungrateful to those rare spirits who have blessed us with tales of real travel. But I have not always the wit to stick to these springs of perpetual pleasure. I find myself trapped into trying new tales of “sondry londes.” Publishers’ announcements make my mouth water. Such an one has forced his way into the mystic capital of Tibet, or interviewed the Ethiopian King of Kings, or camped with the Berbers of Morocco.

Being a hopeful soul, and a forgetful, I am all agog for the new book of wonders. So I betake myself to a frugal pipe, dropping my cigar-money in a box, until, having amassed the price, I can go out and bring in proudly two volumes of Concentrated Fascination.

And what do I get ? Out of his rich experience my traveler relates how on the eve of setting out he had a painful but salutary séance with a dentist. The very night before the start he went to bed! His trunks miscarried and he had no end of bother hunting them up. On March 9, at 8.45 precisely, he took ship. By May 23, he was nursing a blistered heel. The 25th found him sleepless in Abyssinia. On the 26th he was “off his feed.” On the 29th the gray mule died, and next day was buried.

Ye gods! was it for this I squandered my unsuperfluous coin?

If the man must publish the inanities of his private journal why not advertise the fact? But no! the unconscionable imposter calls it a book, a book of travel, and then he opens his paragraphs with such phrases as these: “ Next day we resumed our journey,” “ Next morning I woke,” “The following day was Thursday,” “The day after that it rained!”

This sort of man enriches his book with portraits of “the author in native dress.” Bald and bearded, he appears in Chinese gown and baggy boots, a parasol balanced over his foolish head; or swathed in the red-and-white toga of Ethiopia, or the bulging bath-robe of Tibet. This view is commonly the first of a series, — a sort of House-that-Jack-built. “This is the gentleman who went to Abyssinia. This is the jackal that bit the gentleman who went to Abyssinia. This is the servant that slew the jackal that bit the gentleman that went to Abyssinia.” And so on.

I cannot, more’s the pity, sue the author for obtaining money on false pretenses. Does not his preface explain that the book was an accident ? He never meant to write it. He just happened to keep careful notes and to collect striking photographs of himself, and he has but yielded to the importunities of his many friends in giving the facts to the world.

How humble he is! He passionately disavows all pretension to authority. His feeble effort lays no claim to literary or scientific merit, being but a plain tale, plainly told. Can I be wroth with such a shrinking soul ?

Again, how conscientious the man! How scrupulous for the truth! Says he, “All I have written has happened, and” — oh Jupiter! — “all that has happened I have written! ” I believe him; he has left nothing out!

However, I’d forgive him his PreRaphaelite non-selection of detail, if he did not fail me at a pinch. I turn his pages hopefully, looking for a tasty bit, and run upon this heading: “A Night in the Monastery of Tashilumpo.” “ Hah! ” say I, “here is the real thing at last!” Page 1 is occupied with details of the journey to Tashilumpo. Page 2 records the fact of arrival, the reception, and the consumption by the author of the inevitable bowl of buttered tea, and his retirement for the night. “On the morrow,” say I, as I turn the page, “he will arise and look about the place.” The page turned, I find these words: “I shall make no attempt to describe the monastery, which abler pens than mine have already made familiar to readers of books of travel.” And I throw the book out of the window.

It must be admitted I afterwards sneak out and pick it up. After all, a book is a book; I despise nothing which wears covers. But I quarantine carefully in a place apart the books which are not what they seem.

Here, for instance, is a booklet calling itself A Visit to Vergil’s Farm. I found that in an old bookstore sailing under the name of a distinguished Latin scholar, and took it home. I opened it, flattering myself I was about to break into the noble Roman’s cabbage-patch. After a lengthy preamble, which I skipped, the author led me up a long hill from which he promised a clear view. When I arrived, out of breath, at the first turn, this was what he showed me: “You cannot imagine how delightful was the sight!” Being but a dull-minded mortal, I could n’t. Something dashed, I followed him up yet another steep, to yet another point of vantage. This time he was more explicit. “From this point,” said he in a burst of enthusiasm, “the view is unsurpassed!”

I know him now, the traveler with the extensive views. I run my fingers through a book and if my eye lights on the words “the former,” “the latter,” and “few persons realize,” I feel confident his view will be unsurpassed; and I leave him without covetousness in the custody of the bookseller.

Here is a whole shelf full of books bearing the sacred name of travel, — books innocent of egotism and as full of matter as a nut of meat. Yet I do not love these books. Here is one, The Land of the Lamas. Run over the chapter heads: “Kushlai to Begumbi; Shaskun to Nikpol; Kara Sai to Yepal Ungur.” Curiously enough I have never progressed beyond “ Kushlai to Begumbi,” and whether that be in Tibet or not, is more than I can tell.

Should I ever really thirst for facts about Tibet, I know I could get them out of that book by giving my mind to it; for it has an index. That is more than can be said of that row over there. Those are the works of British noblemen and officers of His Majesty’s Indian army, and I go to them when in the mood for gambling. They were written, I gather, while their authors were unpacking in London, and facts were jotted down as mementos in the travelers’ boxes suggested them. When, as aforesaid, the grab-bag impulse comes over me, I go and take one down, shut my eyes, and dip in. It is sufficiently exciting. And yet this scarcely appeals to me as the way to make travel.

Now I am not unreasonable. I do not demand that every book which comes off the presses shall have literary charm. Neither do I expect that escaped noblemen and soldiers on leave will prove expert literary craftsmen. But I cannot see why a carpenter should make a box and call it a reliquary, or an explorer a geographical treatise, or an egotist his con fessions, and call it a book of travel. Nor can I see why, when the parts are assigned, the right man should not now and then be chosen to go to the uttermost parts of the earth.