Trails to Inmost Asia
by
[Yale University Press, $7.50]
YOUNG Mr. Roerich has soberly recorded the course of this colossal journey in admirable fashion, avoiding all the unamiable traits of the ‘writing adventurer. It was a five-year trek through inmost Asia — and that is enough to make you read the book. The author’s academic training fitted him to take to the field, and his knowledge of Tibetan must, by this time, be superior to that of any other active traveler, bolstered as it is by Sanskrit and by Chinese, and paralleled by other tongues, like Mongolian, However, this account is written for the layman, and the native word is added only where it seems necessary.
The whole thing is an expanded diary with all the merits and demerits of that artless form of narrative. It is a blessed thing, of course, to be spared pages of description of mountain scenery which inevitably fail to arouse the emotions in the reader that they did in the traveler. But when the writer confines himself to the statement that a Himalayan mountain torrent filled with boulders and edged with thick ice ‘made difficult crossing for the ponies’ one has a right to feel cheated out of both description and narrative. Harassed, overworked, often underfed, half-frozen, cheated by the filthy villagers on those barren heights, Ihe little party — including four women—made head against that truly awful country without gayety and with no reported humor. Tibet is not gay, nor are the endless salt marshes of the western Gobi Desert. Still, for spice, I would provide every traveler with Owen Lattimore’s sudden bursts of the ridiculous or Doughty’s sounding periods.
The author’s father, Professor Nicholas Roerich, painter and mystic, was leader of the expedition, and in his book, Shambhala, we get perhaps more humanity and philosophy than in his son’s. But the son was wrangling, by pony messenger, with village chieftains two mountain peaks away. He was busy doctoring diseased yaks, doling out reluctantly the dwindling stock of silver, and making vocabularies of rare dialects with numbed fingers.
The arrest of the party, the 108 days when, ridden with scurvy, and with a failing food supply, they were held prisoner and forty-five camels died, the daily unending senseless bickering with the few officials whom they were allowed to interview, were a strain that must have been prodigious. In spite of it all, the observations went on. Weather, temperature, geology, ethnology, folklore and the religion of Ihe region were noted with scrupulous care. A modern ‘animal style’ in decorative art, kin to the work of the ancient nomads, was established. The hopelessly intricate pantheon of the debased Buddhism of Mongolia and Tibet was studied. So too was the little understood Bön-po worship of the Roof of the World.
This book must possess enduring value. Among other reports of that far country the account of the Ja Lama is one of the most fascinating. It rounds out the rapidly growing folklore of the amazing character who perished a bare nine years ago. Ossendowski introduced him to us, and the Western world jeered. This reviewer substantiated Ossendowski’s accounts and secured, near the Sinkiang border, a photograph of the Lama. Owen Lattimore passed the ruins of his fort and was at some pains in gathering his story. Now comes Mr. Roerich with still more dates and facts. What a pity the Lama was murdered in his yurt! What a loss to the twentieth-century priesthood is a clergyman who could ride his horse beside a racing Mongol to reach over and strangle him, a general who revived the corpses of his men after an action! I love that man’s memory because he met and put to flight Little Hsü, the most cynically cruel Chinese bandit who ever wore a general’s uniform. My snapshot of the Lama shows a muscular young priest with a gentle oval face, and it is on my table as I write.
Among the discoveries in this book one little sentence sticks in my head that may be very significant. ‘Old caravan routes connecting Tibet with Mongolia and Chinn are losing importance; Kalimpong and Calcutta are the main outlets to-day.’ If that is indeed the tendency, as it seems, the whole hinterland that depended on caravan traffic will dry up, tribes and small nations must migrate or die. The flight of a Tatar tribe was caused by precisely such a happening, so too were the world conquests of the Scourge of God and Timur the Lame. A few millions of simple people will be profoundly affected, certain great houses anciently established in the City of London will fall abruptly or more likely crumble slowly. The Orient will have readjusted itself, and the Occident will be unconscious.
LANGDON WARNER