Wide, Wide World

As the Spanish proverb says, 'He who would bring home the wealth of the Indies, must carry the wealth of the Indies with him.' So it is in travelling; a man must carry knowledge, with him, if he would bring home knowledge.

--Samuel Johnson

The traveler turned travel writer must also carry his knowledge lightly, rather like a tourist's folding iron, so that the press of history never completely smooths over the gaily rumpled wardrobe of fresh impressions. Six superior recent travel books are linked not only by knowledgeability and good writing but by their delightfully impressed wrinkles of the authors' personalities.

PARIS IN THE PAST, by Pierre Courthion, translated by James Emmons (149 pp.; Skira; $6.50), and PARIS IN OUR TIME, by Pierre Courthion, translated by Stuart Gilbert (142 pp.; Skira; $6.50), suggest that, if poets make the best historians, then perhaps a city's best tourist guides are her painters. The mind's eye of genius is bound to catch some ineffable quality that the traveler, with or without camera, is bound to miss. That is the premise of these two books, with their 144 handsome color reproductions of Paris from the 14th to the 20th centuries, around which Art Critic Courthion's social and artistic commentary flows with the unobtrusive authority of the Seine.

One can join the gentlemen on horseback at the Bois de Boulogne with Toulouse-Lautrec, or scale the white stone heights of Montmartre's Sacre-Coeur with Utrillo, or decorate the Eiffel Tower like a Christmas tree, as Seurat's fancy did. Telescoping the centuries, one can see the coronation of Napoleon or Marie Antoinette in prison. Here is Paris drinking the cocktail of the sun, and here is Paris wrapped in the misty veils of a Salome. These books present a courtesan, the irresistible city of a thousand wiles, painted by her infatuated admirers.

PERSONAL &ORIENTAL, By Austin Coates (260 pp.; Harper; $4), takes the reader to the Far East--Japan, Hong Kong, Burma, the Philippines, India. Author Coates, a son of the British composer-conductor Eric Coates and a colonial official in the Far East, travels by emotional radar. He waits for snatches of dialogue, mystic moods, glimpsed scenes, to flash like pips across his screen of consciousness and tell him how a people feels or where it is going. Such pips often come at the oddest moments. A smartly dressed, tart-tongued Chinese career woman from Hong Kong brought Coates a pair of knitted socks after a business trip to Formosa. Asked the surprised Coates: "You knitted them in--in Taipei?" Quipped she sardonically: "Of course, dear. In Taipei everybody knits--nothing else to do." Watching the sacred wooden temples of Nara, 8th century capital of Japan, Author Coates senses the painstaking, frustrating drive towards perfectionism in the Japanese soul, virtually the only high civilization ever to record and preserve its architectural masterpieces in wood for centuries ("What were Florence and Venice when Nara was in its prime? Charlemagne was not born . . .").

Today, suggests Coates, Asia is chucking out a lot of dead wood, including inferiority complexes left over from colonial days. While it avidly apes Western techniques, the East will no longer tolerate the propaganda peddlers of "West Is Best" signs. But what will replace those signs Author Coates' pips do not seem to say.

A NOSTALGIA FOR CAMELS, by Christopher Rand (279 pp.; Atlantic-Little, Brown; $3.75), offers still another view of Asia, not panoramic but miniaturist, with the focus on individual Asians. Unpretentious U.S. Journalist Christopher Rand, an old Asia hand, snaps some memorable candids of the famed and humble, ranging from Vinoba Bhave, India's post-Gandhi Gandhi (TIME, May 11, 1953), to Mr. Fu, a Hong Kong opium connoisseur with a palate as refined as that of the most finicky Western vinophile. There is a weatherbeaten Malayan old man of the sea who knows the language of the fish (sharks say "snnnnnng KWAH"). And there is--in perhaps the most haunting portrait of all--modest, bewildered Tenzing Norkay, conqueror of Mount Everest, now half-man and half-God by Asian standards. In his Darjeeling home, he is badgered by reporters, featherbedded with relatives, envied and slandered by the poorer fellow Sherpas. Says he: "I thought if I climbed Everest whole world very good. I never thought like this."

SULTAN IN OMAN, by James Morris (146 pp.; Panfheon; $3.50), is about one of those diplomatic escapades which Britain still occasionally stage-manages with a fine and crafty imperial hand. The sultanate of Muscat and Oman commands, like an Arabian Gibraltar, the entry to the Persian Gulf. In 1955 a fifth column of Saudi Arabian agents with oil-glazed eyes was busily subverting the sultan's power and touting the claims of the euphonically titled Imam of Oman. Four British-officered armies of the sultan set about trying to sweep the Imam out of Oman.

In a motorcade that resembled a Roman triumph crossed with a Mack Sennett chase, the sultan followed his soldiers. Reporter James Morris, then with the London Times, was at his side. Morris camps his story at the oases of human interest, from Mohammed's legendary prayer ("Honor your aunt, the palm, which was made of the same clay as Adam") to vignettes of Arabs setting their watches by the sun and "sweetening" their beards with incense. There is still only one God and that is Allah, but oil is profit, and Author Morris is happy that he saw Muscat and Oman before its rulers became the Cadillackeys of their fate.

THE SURPRISE OF CREMONA, by Edith Templeton (295 pp.; Harper; $3.50), combines good sense with a special sensibility in a tour of six Italian cities. British Author Templeton's manner is direct and disconcerting, and it will take an agile reader to duck her dicta. Samples:

P:"It is always the same with church paintings. If they are on the wall more or less at eye-level one cannot see them because it is so dark, and when they are near the light, in the dome, they are so high up one cannot see them either."

P:"A non-Italian cannot look dignified while eating pasta."

P:"I do not like seeing places which are the most up-to-date of their kind in Europe; there is nothing more depressing ... In the world of today, which is as it is, slackness and corruption are often the saving graces of humanity and take the place of kindness and charity, and mercifully counteract the horrors of efficiency."

Author Templeton's wit is a subdued delight, and her mental antennae vibrate not only with a sense of the past but with an understanding of the present as well: "[Renaissance men] protested against the shortness of human life and against the instability of all things by being as alive as they possibly could be. They ate sensations by the spoonful and turned themselves into a salad of all sorts of contradictory human qualities. We today behave in the opposite manner. We imagine that the less different and the less conspicuous we are, the less we shall be noticed by the forces of life and the safer we shall be."

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