Saga in Sand*

Saga in Sand*

Hassanein Bey, Oxford Sheik, Thirsts in the Wilderness

The Story. A small caravan led by A. M. Hassanein Bey, F.R.G.S., set out from Sellum on the Mediterranean in 1923, began to crawl in the sun's eye across the Libyan Desert. Seven months later, Explorer Hassanein reached El Fasher in the Sudan, having covered 2,200 miles of little-known terrain, discovered two important oases, mapped a new route from Egypt to equatorial Africa, collected a large amount of orographic geological material. He has written the narrative of that expedition.

Perils. Fanatical and predatory tribes that skulked in the mountains at the edge of the sand, thirsting for the blood of more effete Bedouins; snakes that cuddled against sleepers for their kindly warmth; drought, fever, storms by day and night; a sheik with yellow eyes who would have annihilated the caravan in the belief that the cameras were chests of golden nuggets. Once a quarrel broke out between the Egyptian and the Bedouin members of the company. Hassanein arbitrated, reflected with a deep thankfulness upon the danger he had thus avoided. "For the Bedouins would probably have killed Ahmed and Abdullahi out of hand," reflected this scholar and gentleman. "Then what could I have done, as an Egyptian, but avenge the killing of my countrymen at whatever cost to myself?"

Traditions Noted. "When a Bedouin woman loses her husband, she is kept 40 days without washing and nobody sees her. . . . It is supposed to bring very bad luck to anybody who sees her on the day of the first bath."

Camels permit themselves but one vice, an innocent diversion of which these pseudo-docile beasts are ashamed. At night, having first ascertained that the occupants are asleep, they scratch their necks against the ropes of the tents.

When a Tebu rides a camel, he takes off his drawers to save wear and tear, and hangs them upon the camel's neck.

Desert men prefer having their dead bodies devoured by vultures to all forms of interment. "Better the entrails of a bird than the darkness of the tomb."

A Bedouin is ready at any moment to give his life for his camel.

Milestones. Skeletons of camels-- the cheering advertisement of a well nearby. (Camels usually die near the end of a journey when, if water is scarce, they have been pushed too hard by their masters.)

The fabulous mountains of Arkenu, blazing, like golden thunderheads above the desert.

Drawings upon a rock wall, possibly made by heliolithic men. "The work of djinns," say the Tebus.

The lost oases of Arkenu and Ouenat--little pits of damp sand in the southwest corner of Egypt.

The Significance. Only a man who was at once a Muhammadan, a scientist and a leader of great tact, courage and obstinacy could have consummated this expedition. Ahmed Hassanein was awarded the Founder's Medal of the Royal Geographical Society. In this book, which is purged of science, he writes of long fatigues and desperate adventure like a University Fellow .discussing such fantasies over the afternoon crumpet, yet this reticence gives the tale an objective ambiguity, as if the type of all desert wanderers, the very ghost of the Golden Horde, rode with Hassanein's thin company along the last frontiers of nomadism. The volume is adorned with many excellent photographs, frontispieced with one of the author himself--no don, but a bold sheik, his falcon features glittering above an expanse of magnificent laundry.

The Author. Ahmed Hassanein Bey, a very great gentleman in Egypt, was educated at Balliol College, Oxford, won fame as a fencer in the University. He served in the Ministry of the Interior at Cairo, is now in the diplomatic service. King Fuad I is his friend.

Smart

VARIETY--R chard Connell--Mint on, Balch ($2.00). In the columns of every U. S. newspaper, occupying the odd inch at the root of a divorce, or a box, maybe, between finance and mayhem, are items about nameless people who have become news because some extravagance in the comedy of their lives has made them pathetic or some vagary in their afflictions has made them funny. Richard Connell, with one snip of the shears, two strokes of the fountain pen, can transform such items into tales that delight the readers of The Saturday Evening Post, and may afterwards be collected in such a book as this. Other nameless ones who have never had the misfortune to furnish grist for a news item will chortle with glee at Big Lord Fauntleroy (a comic story), Sssssssssshhhh (a satiric story), Spring Flow'rets or Womanhood Eternal (a sex story), will marvel at the ingenious craftsmanship, vociferate their appreciation of the smarty wit of this Punchinello, Connell. If, sometimes, they prickle in amazement to discover that they themselves have on the pantaloons, that Connell is the gentleman who laughs, why should they mind?

Tired

XLI POEMS--E. E. Cummings--Dial-Press ($2.50). Upon the pages of a far haughtier, a far less circulated magazine* than that for which Author Connell writes, lines of fiery poetry are often encountered, drooping through their allotted space a syllable at a time, like the languid descending streamers of bored rockets. They are the lines of Poet Cummings. Words, he realizes, have four dimensions--contour, connotation, color, sound. In ordinary poetry, the dray work of supporting the context and of conforming to the conventionalities of a pattern maim these values, render words absurd as a medium of meticulous art. Therefore, he arranges them in bizarre groups, droops them across a page, lets their meaning depend largely upon their effect as psychological images. That words can ever be used thus fastidiously is a doubtful hypothesis. Poet Cummings, in his wilder moments, imitates the young French decadents. Tired of this, he reacts against them, against himself, adopting in his sonnets a lyricism that has come down to him, thinned and sweetened, from the lutes of the 17th Century cavaliers. Thus a very old and a very new spirit speak out of his mouth in clear alternate voices.

Journalese Majeste

MAMMONART--Upton Sinclair--Published by himself ($2.00). Homer was a hanger-on, Pindar a pressagent, AEschylus a 100% Athenian, Raphael a pampered pet of popes. Dryden was a "bedroom" playwright, Coleridge a reactionary sensualist, Balzac a predatory careerist. And so on.

Conversely, Euripides was a great Bolshevik, Aristophanes a greater; Michelangelo and Milton, Bunyan and Beethoven, Dante and Dostoievski, George Bernard Shaw and Upton Sinclair--all splendid Bolsheviks looking forward to "a complex social order and to social art which will possess an intensity and subtlety beyond the power of comprehension, not merely of Russian peasants, but of the exclusive and fastidious culture of our time."

This sprawling "essay in economic interpretation . . . a text book of culture . . ." which "will be serving in the schools of Russia within six months," labors two rather self-evident main points: 1) That many an artist now called "great" was a comfortable parasite upon the body plutocratic of his day; 2) that the word "propaganda" may connote the exertion of unconscious as well as conscious efforts to further a doctrine.

When glib Mr. Sinclair writes a book, it has no creative value. It is sure to lapse into intellectual dishonesties. For Mr. Sinclair is sorely egocentric. He constantly mistakes vulgarity for strength of purpose and the woes of the world for his own.

But Mr. Sinclair is a gifted journalist, if you care for the Hearst variety. He knows the news value of a similarity in the plots of Madame Bovary and Main Street. He knows that it catches the eye--and should pay--to headline "Prayer in Adultery" for his chapter on George Sand; and "God's Propaganda" for an A. D. 300 "review" of the four Gospels.

*THE LOST OASES--A. M. Hassanein Bey Century ($4.00).

*Vanity Fair.