Tales of travel

Front matter

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MARQUESS CURZ OF KEDLESTON

Introduction

Virgil, Aeneid i. 203.

I WONDER if it may be permitted to a politician to remember the days when he was only secondarily a politician, and when he found the chief zest of life in travel, not indeed in aimless and desultory travel, but in travel with that most generally unpopular of all attributes, a purpose. In my case the purpose was twofold: to see the beautiful and romantic and, above all, the ancient things of the earth — ^taste which I probably share with most travellers, but which took me preferably to distant Oriental lands; and, secondly, to see how far the study of those places and peoples would help me to form an opinion on the Eastern responsibilities and destinies of Great Britain. This was a subject in which I took from boyhood an absorbing interest, and which led me to devote many months in each year, and, after I had entered Parliament, the bulk of my Parliamentary holidays, to wanderings in all parts of Asia from the Mediterranean to the China Seas. The results of these studies were embodied long ago in books of a more or less serious character, and I have no intention to repeat any part of that story here. But in the course of these journeys I visited

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many other countries and places, twice going round the world, and exploring unfrequented spots, not in Asia only, but in Europe, Africa, and America. In certain of these cases I studied rather deeply some subjects of more than ephemeral interest, I came across some remarkable persons, and I made notes of many curious scenes. I have found it a diversion, in the turmoil of public life, to put these notes into final shape, and have even thought that they might prove of interest to a larger audience.

After I had spent some years in travelling and in writing about my travels, it gave me greater pleasure to be awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical Society for exploration and research than it did to become a Minister of the Crown; and every moment that I could snatch from politics^ — ^before they finally captured and tied me down — I devoted to the pursuit of my old love.

Even now, if in rare moments I seek literary distraction, it is in the perusal of works of travel and exploration that I am certain to find it; and when foreign affairs are specially vexatious or perplexing, recreation and repose come stealing in upon me from the memories of the past. I am once again in the wilds of Asia, or on the mountain-tops, or amid the majestic monuments of bygone ages. At one moment the wonders of nature fill the picture, at another, the scarcely less remarkable masterpieces of man. The shut pages of the past unroll, and the characters written upon

INTRODUCTION ix

them a quarter of a century and more ago start again to life.

On these occasions I remember, ahnost with a start, that it is the middle-aged and sedentary pohtician who in the early nineties shot Ovis Poll on the Pamirs, who nearly foundered in a typhoon off the coast of Annam, and was reported as murdered in Afghanistan. I am again the youthful rover who was stoned by furious Spaniards on the quays of Valencia; who climbed to the crater of Etna in deep snow by night to witness the glory of the sunrise over Sicily and the Straits; who saw the cone of Adam's Peak throw its shadow, also at sunrise, over the folded mist wreaths that smoked above the steaming valleys of Ceylon; who stayed with Amir Abdur Rahman Khan at Kabul, and with the afterwards murdered Mehtar of Chitral; who arrested the Abbot of a Korean monastery for steahng his watch and purse, and was himself arrested as a spy in Khorasan and in Wakhan; who was wrecked off the coast of Dalmatia, and explored the source of the Oxus; who wrote travel books that, mirabile dictUj still find readers and have appreciated in value; and who even composed an Oxford Prize Essay in the cabin of a steamer on the Nile.

Sometimes, as I recall those days, I find myself reviving memories or telling tales that seem to belong to a past that is quite dead, not merely by reason of the change in my own environment, but also because of the revolution in the conditions of travel, or in the state of the peoples and lands

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which I visited. For instance, in some countries where I rode thousands of weary miles on horseback, the traveller now proceeds rapidly and comfortably by carriage or motor, or even by train. In other countries — as, for instance, Korea, which at the time of my visit in 1892 was still independent and had a Court and a King — political changes have brought about a transformation not less startling. And so it comes into my mind that there may be something in the experiences of those days that may be worthy of record before I have forgotten them, and which other people will perhaps not have the chance of repeating in exactly the same way.

The following pages contain these memories. They include nothing that has been published in any of my other books, and they have nothing to do with politics. They relate to many parts of the world, but principally to the East, which has always been to me the source of inspiration and ideas. Most of the papers are of no great length, and only a few are learned. Whether I ought to advertise or to apologise for the latter must be left to the judgment of my readers. All relate to places or incidents lying somewhat outside the ordinary run of travel. Had I written a volume of political memoirs, could I have hoped to escape controversy? As it is, nothing that I have set down will, I trust, excite dispute. The genuine traveller quarrels with nobody — except his predecessors or rivals, a temptation which I have been

INTRODUCTION xi

careful to avoid. All countries are his washpot. All mankind is his friend.

Perhaps the most striking testimony that I could offer to the change that has passed over the scenes of my earlier journeys — and incidentally also to the chronically unstable equilibrium of the East — ^would be a reference to the dramatic fate that has befallen so many of the rulers and statesmen with whom I was brought in contact, and some of whom appear in these pages, in the days to which I refer. Shah Nasr-ed-Din of Persia, my audience with whom at Teheran in 1889 is mentioned later on, perished in 1896 by the weapon of an assassin. The ruler of Chitral with whom I stayed in 1894 was shot and killed by the half-brother who had sat at table with him and me only two months before. The Emperor of Annam, who presented me with a golden decoration at Hue in 1892, was deposed in 1907 and subsequently banished. The poor little King of Korea, who conversed with me in low whispers at Seoul in 1892, first saw his Queen murdered in the Palace and was afterwards himself forced to abdicate. His son, who struck me as the stupidest young man I ever met, shared the same fate. Deposition was the fate of the trembling figure of Norodom, the King of Cambodia, whom I visited at Pnompenh. The Amir of Bokhara, whom I saw in his capital in 1888, was afterwards expelled from his country and throne. Abbas Hilmi, whom Lord Cromer took me to visit at Cairo, soon after he had xii TALES OF TRAVEL

ascended the Khedivial throne, is also a fugitive and an exile. The life of that eminent Japanese statesman, the Marquis Ito, who was so friendly to me when I was in Japan, was cut short by the knife of an assassin. Almost alone among the Eastern potentates whose guest I was, the Amir Abdur Rahman Khan, who told me that he lived in daily fear of his life, but that his people had not the courage to kill him, died in his bed. But of his two sons with whom I used to dine at Kabul, the elder, Habibulla, was murdered in his tent, and the younger, INTasrulla, languishes in prison. His Commander-in-Chief, known as the Sipah Salar, a gigantic figure, 6 feet 3 inches in height, and of corresponding bulk, who rode at my side from Dacca to Jellalabad on my way to Kabul in 1904, died suddenly a few years later in circumstances which left little doubt that his end was not natural.

Even in Europe my diaries refer to more than one similar tragedy. As far back as 1880 I recall a visit to the picturesque castle of Herrenhausen in Bavaria, where, in a room adorned exclusively with furniture and decorations in the shape of swans, I heard the steady tramp overhead, as he passed to and fro, of the mad King of Bavaria, who ended by drowning himself in a lake. I recall very clearly, and others have related, the incidents of a dinner with King George of Greece, who came to his death at the hand of an assassin in the streets of Salonika.

These incidents illustrate no more uncommon

INTRODUCTION xiii

phenomenon than that the lives of monarehs and statesmen are subject to exceptional and fatal risks, particularly in the East. But as I recall the features and tones of those ill-fated victims, so famous or so prominent in their day, a chasm appears to open between me and the time when I saw them in the plenitude of their strength and power — and I seem to be almost living in a world of different circimistances and different men.

I have said that this volume, which, if it be found acceptable, will be followed by a successor, is intended to be descriptive rather than didactic in object, and that I hope not so much to instruct as to entertain. But a few of my subjects may be thought to make a more sober claim, or to demand a more definite apology. The portrait of the Afghan Amir, with whom I was the only Englishman to stay at Kabul in a private and unofficial capacity, is the likeness of one of the most remarkable men of his time — a man who, had he lived in an earlier age and not been crushed, as he told me, hke an earthenware pot between the rival forces of England and Russia, might have founded an Empire, and swept in a tornado of blood over Asia and even beyond it. The paper entitled " The Voice of Menmon," in the investigations with regard to which I was assisted by my old Oxford tutor, J. L. Strachan Davidson, afterwards Master of Balliol, may, I hope, be regarded as a positive contribution to historical and archaeological research. The " Singing Sands " is an essay on a subject which has always xiv TALES OF TRAVEL

greatly interested me — ^namely, the mysterious moaning and muttering of the sands in desert places, as a rule far removed from ordinary ken — and which has never before been treated with the fulness which it deserves. When I began this essay I intended it merely to be a synopsis of the cases of musical or sounding sands of which I had previously heard descriptions or attempted the investigation. But, as I proceeded, the subject expanded, until I found myself producing a treatise which may possibly fill a modest place in the scientific literature of travel, while the story may still appeal to the dilettante reader by reason of its mystery and romance.

There are many other aspects of travel, apart from its incidents or experiences, which I should like to examine, but which must be deferred to a later volume. Among these is a study of the Philosophy of Travel — its character, history, purpose, methods, justification, and results; and a chapter or more on the Literature of Travel — a subject that, to the best of my knowledge, has never received attention save perhaps in the casual pages of a magazine.

Here, however, I conclude with a reflection that will certainly not offend by its seriousness. The joy of travel, while it is being pursued, lies in a good many things: in the observation of new peoples and scenes, in the making of discoveries, in the zest of sport or adventure, in the pleasures of companionship or the excitement of new acquaintance, even in the collection of often valueless ob-

ROPE BRIDGE IN THE HINDU KUSH

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INTRODUCTION xvii

jects, and the achievement of purely illusory bargains. But I think that even more does it consist in the half-intangible but still positive memories that it leaves. One can make friends with places as well as people; and an hour's, even a minute's, experience in one spot may be more precious than a sojourn of months in another. These are the intimacies that survive, and constitute a perpetual endowment. With them we can always solace the hoiu^s, whether of idleness or gloom.

Whereas the experiences of life at home, even when they are not conmionplace, are apt to fade quickly, and sometimes to be completely forgotten, the incidents of travel, a quarter or even half of a century ago, stand out indelibly as though graven in steel. Each of us has his own museum of such recollections. Among mine not the least prized are these: the music of many nightingales floating across the water from the coasts of Athos; the incredible glory of Kangchenjunga as he pierces the veils of the morning at Darjiling; the crossing of a Himalayan rope-bridge, sagging in the middle, and swaying dizzily from side to side, when only a strand of twisted twigs is stretched between your feet and the ravening torrent below; the first sight of the towered walls, minae murorum ingentes, of Peking; the head and shoulders of an Indian tiger emerging without a suspicion of sound from the thick jungle immediately in front of the posted sportsmen; the stupendous and terraced grandeur of Angkor Wat; the snowy spire of Teneriffe glimmering at xviii TALES OF TRAVEL

sunrise across a hundred miles of ocean; the aethereal and ineffable beauty of the Taj.

I am not going to trouble my readers by saying anything about these particular mind-pictures in this book. I merely record them in passing, as a part of my own spiritual possession, just as others will have and will cherish theirs. The things that I have preferred to set down here are experiences or memories rather less personal and fugitive, which I may be justified in inviting others, even though on paper and in print only, to share, and which, here and there, may give them a few moments of entertainment or reflection.