“Upon my word as a gentleman, nothing can make me have it,” said the giant, whose name was B——.
“Mr. B——,” said Landor, “nothing could make you behave like a gentleman.”
And his courage in taking other risks is just as great.
Undismayed by his experiences in Thibet, he was back in the Himalayas two years afterwards, and reached an altitude of 23,490 ft. He was with the Allied troops on their march to Peking, and was the first European to enter the Forbidden City. He visited four hundred islands in the Philippines in a Government steamer, lent him by the United States for the purpose. He crossed Africa in the widest part, marching 8,500 miles to do it, and he crossed South America from Rio de Janeiro in Brazil to Lima in Peru, over the great central plateau, across the swamps of the Amazon and the heights of the Andes, with followers selected from the most desperate criminals in the gaols, because they were the only Brazilians who would undertake the risk. That last journey alone cost him seven thousand pounds. All Mr. Landor’s books are illustrated with his own paintings and photographs. It must be remembered that he was an artist before he was an explorer or an author.
Though he is contemptuous of hardships and semi-starvation in his explorations, and travels with a lighter equipment than any other explorer, he likes luxurious surroundings when he is back in civilisation, and lives in a charming flat in one of our most luxurious hotels.
He also has a large estate in Italy, near Empoli and Vinci, where he has carried on the wine-growing business very successfully. Landor’s mother is an Italian, and he himself was born and educated at Florence, where his father, a younger son of the celebrated Walter Savage Landor, has always lived, and amassed a magnificent collection of works of art.
It is not generally known that Landor was one of the first to take up the invention of aeroplanes. He began long before the Wrights, as long ago as 1893, when he succeeded in flying a hundred yards, and later he built a more perfected machine not unlike the ordinary aeroplanes. But he was away, making his celebrated journeys across Africa and South America while the invention advanced with such leaps and bounds, and he abandoned aviation.
Landor speaks many languages. He has lectured in English, Italian, French, and German, before learned societies, and he can speak several other European and Oriental languages and many savage dialects. For he has travelled all over the world, although the attention of the public has been concentrated on the big journeys of exploration which have formed the subjects of his books.
Sir H. M. Stanley I only knew after he had retired from exploring, and was living at Richmond Terrace, Whitehall. I met him through having been a friend of his wife, who, as Dorothy Tennant, was a leading figure in the most brilliant set in London Society, and in so many altruistic movements. I had met her brother, Charles Combe Tennant, when we were both at Oxford—he at Balliol and I at Trinity. He either proposed me or seconded me, I forget which, for the Apollo, my other sponsor being J. E. C. Bodley, who was both at Harrow and Balliol with Tennant. Bodley has since become a very distinguished literary man. He is perhaps the best writer we have upon French Constitutional questions, and he was selected by the late King Edward VII to write the book on the coronation, which involved a very wide knowledge of the British Constitution.
Lady Stanley wrote a book on London Street Arabs and put together and edited an admirable autobiography of her famous first husband, whose name she retains. Her sister married Frederick Myers of Psychical fame, the greatest Cambridge scholar of his generation.