A Conquest of Tibet
THE MAN of the MONTH
SVEN HEDIN
[Dutton, $5.00]
ANYONE who, with his ears, has heard Sven Hedin the explorer telling of his travels has come away with a knowledge of how the sagas sounded to the rapt group round the fire in the great hall hung with shields. The Swedish tongue as a background for English uneducated speech is an uncomely thing, with tiresome singsong emphasis, ill fitted to our cadence; but Dr. Sven Hedin, as he talks, gets himself into a long swinging various rhythm which, coupled with the magic of his adventures, keeps the listener quick and eager for more. The translator of this book from the Swedish has lost his great chance. His sentences bump along, stubbed by the curb, till the mind is lame with the spank of iteration.
But everyone must reach For such a book; the title and the author are enough to make it necessary to this generation. Few of us can resist an immense curiosity that crops up at once with the name of Tibet. And here we have, added, the discovery of the sources of the Indus and of the Brahmaputra (no less), the filling in of white spaces on the map, and the crossing and recrossing
of such heartbreaking mountain passes as the world does not know elsewhere.
I belong to a very small group of persons who dread and dislike Tibet and the little we know of it. Tibetan art is foul, as are the persons of the poor monks who mechanically trace the misbegotten deities of a diseased imagination. For the lamasism of Tibet is as close to the gentle Law of Buddha as the High Mass of Haitian Voodoo is to the Sermon on the Mount. But for all that, when Dr. Sven Hedin comes along with a record of his travels, or Madame David-Neel describes hers, or the Roerichs — mystic father or scholar son — try to convey some hint of it all, I pay my money for the books and build up the log fire to spend an evening with them. I have a drink at my elbow and warm slippers to my feet, and I deliberately lay down the book, in the midst of sleet storm or just when the wild yak is charging, to contrast my comfortable state with theirs, The Japanese priest Kawaguchi, with his quaint English and his unconquerable faith in the mercy of the Lord Buddha, is probably better than any of the others — better than the Abbé Hue or our own Rockhill. But Dr. Sven Hedin’s accomplishment for science surely stands at the top of the list. Always in the back of your head as you read him is the word ’indomitable.’ There is a Ulysses-like character in him, combining dogged persistence, brilliant attack, and wily reapproach when he has been rebuffed.
It adds a real, and a mean, delight to my reading of his books to remember how the British Foreign Office does not like Dr. Sven Hedin. The British Foreign Office says it was not cricket when he slung himself under the belly of the ram and let the Cyclops herd him out of the cave of death. Even when he told the Lhasa authorities (who were hurling mountain crags at him in blind fury ) that his name was Nemo, the British Foreign Office told the Royal Geographic Society to tell the grieving world that lie ought to have given his right name and come quietly.
But Dr. Sven Hedin was, at the time, frostbitten and lousy and half-starved and in grave danger of being beheaded by complete strangers, while none of these things was true of the British Foreign Office. Nor were they—at that moment, at any rate — being charged by wild bull yaks, unless you speak in metaphor.
Therefore, when you buy A Conquest of Tibet, remember these things and read between the translator’s lines. Also remember that this book takes you through only the Tibetan explorations and there will soon be another (this time with maps) to tell of the diggings in Mongolia, where Ulysses was again indomitable, where he tricked Seylla and Charybdis so that they crashed together and missed him by a hair’s breadth. It is a great experience to read his stiffly translated books and it is absolutely necessary not to miss a syllable of his spoken saga when he visits us again and may be persuaded to talk.
LANGDON WARNER