Books: Sahara, 1932

AIR ADVENTURE—William B. Seabrook —Harcourt, Brace ($2.50).

In that doubtful borderland bounded on the bottom by such boyish ballyhoo as Richard Halliburton’s and on the top by such popular-science as William Beebe’s, the best-selling books of Traveler “Willie” Seabrook stand well above the middle. Better writer than Halliburton, more of a rolling adventurer than Beebe, Seabrook has popularized a new formula for travel books. His readers can now expect of him not only a racily written report of outlandish foreign parts but a frank confession that he has gone as native as he cared to. In Jungle Ways (TIME, April 6, 1931) his description of what human flesh tastes like tickled the curiosity of more readers than it shocked. Though there is nothing so startling in his latest book, Traveler Seabrook again has an unusual trip to report, as usual reports it well.

Air Adventure tells of a flight across the Sahara, from Paris to Timbuctoo and back. Seabrook wanted to go to Timbuctoo to see Pére Yakouba. famed renegade French priest (their first meeting is described in Jungle Ways). Flight Captain Rene Wauthier of the French Army, then on furlough, offered to fly him there in his plane. Third member of the party was Marjorie Worthington, U. S. writer. In luxurious comfort they slid down across France, bumped over the Pyrenees, skimmed the Mediterranean. North Africa looked much like southern France. Then the Sahara began. Crossing the Sahara nowadays is a comparatively safe matter. The French run passenger buses over a fairly well-defined trail. But the two principal way-stations are not marked on any map. Bordj Estienne, an elaborate mud fort near the oasis of Reggan, boasts (and not idly) an American bar, French table d”hÓte, illustrated French and English magazines less than ten days old, bedrooms with electric light. Bidon 5 is a gasoline pump, “a white-enamelled pillar identical with those you see along any road in Long Island or Westchester or in front of your next-door garage—except that it stands there in the sand, in the midst of nothingness, in the almost exact geographical centre of the Sahara, stuck there like a pictorial infantile idea of the North Pole, the most lonely and isolated gasoline pump in the world or the universe.

. . . No man on foot or horseback, no camel, no gazelle or jackal, can even today reach Bidon 5 alive.

” Morning after leaving Bidon 5 they flew peacefully on to Timbuctoo’s landing-field, Khabara. were forced down by a sandstorm, had to anchor the plane with sandbags, shelter themselves in a trench under it. The storm over, they flew peacefully Timbuctoo’s on to landing-field, Timbuctoo Khabara. (Traveler Seabrook winds up his book with bitter remarks about the present impossibility of landing anywhere nearer a desired destination than “baseball fields and suburbs.”) Not all Saharan oases are natural, Seabrook discovered. Some have been fed for centuries by long underground aqueducts which pick up moisture in the distant mountains, carry a thin stream of water some 30 ft. under the baking sand. These conduits, bored through the clay subsoil by no one knows whom, have to be cleared periodically and for this have manholes 50 ft. apart. Seabrook went down one of these fougaras and crawled painfully a quarter-mile, was glad to emerge muddily into sunlight again. Seabrook called on Pére Yakouba, quickly finished his business, then plunged into Timbuctoo night life. Very soon all three decided the social pace there was too fast for them, moved on to get away from cocktails and all-night parties. On their leisurely way back Wauthier and Seabrook joined in a hunt for missing French airmen, Companion Worthington was temporarily lost crossing the Sahara in a motor truck, but they all left Africa together, flew home safe & sound.

The Author’s insatiable and restless curiosity has led him into many queer places and situations in his 47 years; his unabashed frankness in reporting his unusual adventures has paid him good dividends. Son of a Lutheran minister in Maryland, he was a newshawk on the Augusta, Ga. Chronicle, then worked his way for nine months at the University of Geneva, returned to the U. S. to go into advertising. Private in the French Army during the War, he was gassed at Verdun. After the War he started writing in Manhattan. One evening in 1924 he met an Arab, shortly afterwards went to Arabia for 15 months among the Bedouins and Druses of the Arabian mountains. Sympathetically curious if not credulously enthusiastic about magic, he went to Haiti for a year to find out about voodoo. He has also visited whirling dervishes at their monastery in Tripoli, Yezidi devil-worshipers in Kurdistan. Tall, heavy of build and face, with near Hitlerian mustache, Traveler Seabrook looks hopelessly lethargic, is not. He says: “I am not brave. Only full of curiosity.” Other books: Adventures in Arabia, The Magic Island.