Books: Trek with Girl

NEWS FROM TARTARY—Peter Fleming —Scribner ($3).

Three years ago Peter Fleming wrote an amusing account of a tropical expedition in Brazilian Adventure. The work of a 26-year-old London book reviewer, it was partly a debunking of adventure books, partly an adventure story in its own right, telling of the perils accompanying a search for a lost British explorer. Last week Author Fleming offered U. S. readers his report on a more serious exploit: a seven-month trek of 3,500 mi. from Peking to Kashmir, India, through the turbulent province of Sinkiang and over the Himalayas. A slow, 381-page narrative divided between day-to-day records of the journey and wisecracks on politics and travelers’ poses, News from Tartary has little of the unforced liveliness that made Brazilian Adventure good reading.

Author Fleming’s news from Tartary is that it contains magnificent scenery which a traveler is likely to be too cold to enjoy; that the province of Sinkiang, larger than France, is under Russian influence to an extent disquieting to a person of his anti-Soviet convictions; that a major civil war has recently been fought there with tanks, airplanes and armored cars; that the native officials, with their suspicions, red tape and dubious loyalty, are almost the most harrowing feature of the journey.

Peter Fleming made the trip with a Swiss girl, a professional traveler and author of adventure books named Ella Maillart, called Kini. No romance delayed them. “By all the conventions of desert island fiction,” says Peter Fleming, “we should have fallen madly in love with each other; by all the laws of human nature we should have driven each other crazy with irritation.” Actually they divided the work, quarreled occasionally, slept in the same tent on cold plateaus 10,000 ft. above sea level, got along very well in an innocent sharing of hardships that are more carefully described than their relationship.

With Kini, Peter Fleming wangled proper passports for the first stages of their journey, collected supplies and ominous rumors about the revolt in Sinkiang, observed the Mongols, studied camels, shot ducks. He played solitaire during delays and she did the housework around the camp, while they amused each other by parodying their future reports of these exciting adventures. Aside from their discovery of Soviet influences in Sinkiang, the high points of their trip included a meeting with a white man, a Russian refugee, in the remote mountains at the edge of Tibet; a meeting with a British Indian postman carrying the mail over the Himalayas; two arrests; a lucky break when they gave the wrong passports to an official representing a different faction, were passed because he could not read; their discovery of a copy of the London Times in a mountain pass 15,000 ft. above India; a cold reception when, dirty & tired, they entered a hotel in Kashmir.