Travelers In High Asia

OUT OF THIS WORLD (320 pp.)--Lowell Thomas Jr.--Greystone ($3.75).

THE LAND OF THE CAMEL (200 pp.)--Schuyler Cammann--Ronald Press ($5).

By traveler tradition, any Westerner who pushes his way into the high hinterland of Asia is entitled to write a book about it, and generally does. Nowadays, such narratives have a special point: with the Communists slamming Asia shut, the latest traveler stories may be the last for a while.

Currently, readers have their choice of two. One is an exuberant feature story of the 1949 Tibetan holiday of Lowell Thomas and Lowell Jr.; the other is a sharp-eyed account of a junket through Inner Mongolia, taken in 1945 by Orientalist Schuyler Cammann of the University of Pennsylvania.

Last Close-Ups? The Thomas epic, Out of This World, was written by 27-year-old Lowell Jr. in the man-on-a-magic-carpet tone his father favors. The tone still works; the book has already sold 100,000 copies and climbed high on the bestseller lists.

The Thomases had a fairly uneventful trip on their muleback way from India to Lhasa, but in Lhasa things got more exciting. They had the rare enough distinction of being presented to the Dalai Lama, and while the spiritual head of millions of Lamaistic Buddhists had very little to say, the travelers had a good chance to talk with some of his advisers.

Author Thomas gives concise, thoughtful sketches of half a dozen top Tibetan officials, the hard core of the hardest theocracy in the world. The sketches compose what may be one of the last close-ups of a strange ruling class, compound of enlightenment and cruelty, high spirituality and human self-seeking. The author plays some of his characters for discreet laughs --as when a high lama muses on the possible numbers of unrecognized reincarnations of the Buddha. "For instance," he reminded his guests, "take your own President--undoubtedly he is a living Buddha."

At the end, there is a graphic account of Newscaster Thomas' leg-breaking fall from a horse, and of his litter-borne passage over the Hump to India.

A Real America? Schuyler Cammann travels in the tradition of the scholar-adventurer, and his book, The Land of the Camel, cleaves to the best in its tradition (truthfulness, a sense of moral involvement, good humor) while shunning the worst (bad writing, political or sectarian tirade, excessive footnotarianism).

Author Cammann was sent to a U.S. meteorological outpost in Inner Mongolia toward the end of the war. During the weeks of his stay, he took short trips in all directions from his base near a town called Shanpa to the tents and temples of the Mongols. Since he thinks they are a vanishing people, Cammann looks close.

He describes the interiors of Mongol yurts and lamaseries, observes with fascination the diversion of technical talents that once conquered Asia into the construction of more & more intricate prayer wheels. He describes without flurry Mongol butchering (directions: cut a hole in the animal's side, pull out the heart, squeeze it until animal is dead), and admires the tricks which Mongol farmers play on their reluctant soil to make it yield. Yet in a land where there is barely enough to eat, an undernourished girl may have silver rings in her ears. Cammann condenses his impressions of Inner Mongolia into a phrase: "Wealth in squalor."

Keen as he is, Scholar Cammann almost throws away one of the biggest facts in his book. He reveals, but only in passing, that most of the Mongols he talked to had never heard of America. They were astonished when they were shown America on the map. They had taken for granted that all strangers of European stock come from "West Russia."

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