Beasts, Men, and Gods
by . New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. 1922. 12mo. xii + 325 pp. $3.00.
THERE is nothing in the world so wholesome and satisfying as a melodrama, and to know that life itself has provided the thrill is a matter of completest pleasure. Merely to look at the chapter heads of this amazing chronicle is enough to start a shiver. ‘The Mysterious Lama Avenger,’ ‘The Breath of Death,’ ‘On a Volcano,’ ’Three Days on the Edge of a Precipice,’ ’Before the Face of Buddha,’ — what normal mind could resist such an array? And so, while the orchestra performs on Mongol drums and strange Asiatic instruments, and a concealed somebody turns a wind machine that cries out of the wild Siberian wastes, the curtain rises, and . . .
We discover a Polish professor who formerly held an important official scientific position in Russia, fleeing for his life from the inquisition of the Reds. To the west behind him lie Bolshevism and the tortures of the ‘Extraordinary Commission’; to the east opens the vast Mongolian land of mountains, swamps, perils, and darkest mystery. The adventure begins, as all adventures ought, with a rush; the Professor fights his way to the east; presently the river of narrative is tearing along with the reader in a grip which, in spite of careful but painfully dull English, holds him to the last word.
One would wish to know more of Professor Ossendowski. What was his ’important official scientific position’? In what language did he write the book? The jacket, retreating into what may be French, calls him ’Offiner d’ Académic Fntngaise,' which is impressive but vague. What was he studying at Krasnoyarsk when the Bolsheviks spread their net for him? In Peter and Alexis, Merezhkowsky speaks of a character whose countenances as somewhat marred by ’the Polish expression of self-esteem upon his face.’ There are turns and incidents in this book which bring the phrase to mind.
On, then, he goes, this learned Pole, this scientific realist, now neatly putting a bullet in the heart of a deadly enemy, now swimming his horse at night through the rushing ice-laden depths of some giant river, now drinking tea with a wanderer of the frozen plain, now standing with amazed eyes before the miracle magic of some lonely temple in the wind-swept hills. Those who forget how civilized man may be said to civilize nature by weeding out the most ferocious scourges of his environment may shudder now and then at the picture of a land where nature is under no rein and completely pitiless. Indeed, the men for whom death and nature do contend in these extraordinary pages are as wild as the animals they slaughter, and as pitiless as the cold which kills them in the night. And while they die, the lamas m their temples speak with the Living God, and the George F. Babbitts address boosters’ conventions.
At length the perils and adventures fall behind, the Professor reaches Hailar on the Chinese railroad, the drums of the orchestra cease, the howls die away, and the curtain descends. Can such things be? They seem to have happened to Ferdinand Ossendowski, Officier d’ Académie Frangaise, in I lie year of grace 1920.
A stirring book this, and, when one is in the mood for it a book without a peer. A man’s book. A book to be read at a sitting; a book for all lovers of the adventure and variety of life.
HENRY B. BESTON.
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