There is at least one thing that will surprise you about It Happened in Egypt (METHUEN), and that is that, although C.N. and A.M. WILLIAMSON are the writers, motor-cars are hardly so much as mentioned throughout. It is a tale of the Nile and the Desert, of camels and caravans, told with a quite extraordinary power of making you feel that you have visited the scenes described. But this, of course, if you have any previous experience of the WILLIAMSON method, will not surprise you at all. As for the story that strings the scenes together, though it promised well, with almost every possible element of fictional excitement—buried treasure, and spies, and abductions, and secrets—somehow the result was not wholly up to the expectation thus created. To borrow an appropriate simile, the great thrill remained something of a mirage, always in sight and never actually reached. Also I wish to record my passionate protest against stories of treasure-trove in which the treasure is not taken away in sacks and used to enrich the hunters; I am all against leaving it underground, for whatever charming and romantic reasons. No, it is not so much as a novel of adventure that might have happened pretty well anywhere that I advise you to read this book, but as a super-guide to scenes and sensations that happen in Egypt and nowhere else. From the moment when, as one of the WILLIAMSON party, you sit down to breakfast on the terrace of Shepherd's, till you take leave of your fellow-travellers in the mountain-tomb of QUEEN CANDACE, you will enjoy the nearest possible approach to a luxurious Egyptian tour, under delightful guidance, and at an inclusive fare of six shillings.
Mr. SETON GORDON is a bold man. It is one thing to call a book The Charm of the Hills (CASSELL) and quite another to succeed in conveying that charm through the medium of the printed word. Perhaps, however, he was encouraged by the success that has already attended these pen-pictures of Highland scenes in serial form; certainly he knew also that he had another source of strength in a collection of the most fascinating photographs of mountain scenery and wild life, nearly a hundred of which are reproduced in the present volume. So that what Mr. GORDON the writer fails to convey about his favourite haunts (which is not much) Mr. GORDON the photographer is ready to supply. The papers, which range in subject from ptarmigan to cairngorms, are written with an engaging simplicity and directness, and show a sympathetic knowledge of wild nature such as is the reward only of long familiarity. The glorious mountain wind blows through them all, so that as you read you feel the heather brushing your knees, and see the clouds massing on the peaks of Ben-something-or-other. Perhaps Mr. GORDON is at his most interesting on the subject of the Golden Eagle. There are many striking snapshots of the king of birds in his royal home; and some stories of court life in an eyrie that are fresh and enthralling. One thing that I was specially glad to learn on so good authority is that the Golden Eagle, so far from being threatened with extinction, is actually increasing in the deer forests of the North. This is intelligence as welcome as it is nowadays unusual. The book, which is published at 10s. 6d. net, is dedicated "to one who loves the glens and corries of the hills"; and all who answer to this description should be grateful to the writer for his delightful record.
Goodness knows that of all London's teeming millions I am the possessor of the most easily curdled blood, but my flesh declined to creep an inch from the first page to the last of Animal Ghosts (RIDER). I think it was Mr. ELLIOTT O'DONNELL's way of telling his stories that was responsible for my indifference. He is so incorrigibly reticent. His idea of a well-told ghost story runs on these lines:—"In the year 189—, in the picturesque village of C——, hard by the manufacturing town of L——, there lived a wealthy gentleman named T—— with his cousin F—— and two friends M—— and R——." I simply refuse to take any interest in the spectres of initials, still less in the spectres of the domestic pets of initials. I am no bigot; by all means deny your ghost his prerogative of clanking chains and rattling bones; but there are certain points on which I do take a firm stand, and this matter of initials is one of them. Not one of these stories is convincing. Mr. O'DONNELL taps you on the chest and whispers hoarsely, "As I stood there my blood congealed, I could scarcely breathe. My scalp bristled;" and you, if you are like me, hide a yawn and say, "No, really?" There is a breezy carelessness, too, about his methods which kills a story. He distinctly states, for instance, that the story of the "Headless Cat of No. ——, Lower Seedley Street, Manchester," was told to him by a Mr. ROBERT DANE. In the first half of the narrative this gentleman's brother-in-law addresses him as Jack, and later on his wife says to him, "Oh, Edward." What a man whose own Christian name is so much a matter of opinion has to say about seeing headless cats does not seem to me to be evidence.
There seems to be an increasing public for the volume of reflections. At all events Mr. REGINALD LUCAS, who has already two or three successes in this kind to his credit, has been encouraged to produce another, to which he has given the pleasant title of The Measure of our Thoughts (HUMPHREYS). It is, of course, difficult to be critical with a book like this; either it pleases the reader or it doesn't, and that is about all that can be said. One reason for my belief that Mr. LUCAS's Thoughts will please is that he has put them into the brain of a definitely conceived and very well drawn character. They are told in the form of letters by this character to his old tutor. The writer is supposed to be the rather unattractive and self-conscious eldest son of a noble house, who suffers from the presence of a father and sister who think him a fool, and a brother whose charm is a continual and painful contrast to his own lack of it. The special skill of the letters is their self-revelation, which brings out the pathos of the writer's position, while at the same time showing quite clearly the defects that explained it. Mr. LUCAS, in short, does not commit the error of making his hero merely a mute, misunderstood paragon, whom anyone with common penetration must have recognised as such. On the contrary, we sympathise with him, especially in the big tragedy of his life, while quite admitting that to any casual acquaintance he must have appeared only a dull and uninteresting egoist. This I call clever, because it shows that Mr. LUCAS has created a real thinker, rather than striven to give him any unusual profundity of thought. An agreeable book.
In the sixteenth chapter of the First Part of The Rocks of Valpré (FISHER UNWIN) Trevor Mordaunt married Christine Wyndham, and on the last page (which is the 511th) of the book, "she opened to him the doors of her soul, and drew him within...." Granted that Mordaunt, with the eyes of steel, was not exactly an oncoming man and that when he married Christine he received, as wedding presents, two or three brothers-in-law who sponged hopelessly upon him, I still think that Miss ETHEL DELL has given us too detailed an account of the domestic differences between Mordaunt and his wife. For my own part I became frankly tired of the pecuniary crises of the Wyndhams and of their incurable inability to tell the truth. Had Mordaunt got up and given these feckless brethren a sound hiding I should have been relieved, but he preferred to make them squirm by using his steely eyes. In the future I suggest to Miss DELL that she should leave these strong silent men alone. They have had their day and gone out of vogue. The best part of this book, and indeed the best work Miss DELL has yet done, is her treatment of the romantic friendship between Christine and Bertrand de Montville. It is handled so touchingly and so surely that I resent with all the more peevishness the banality of the steel-eyed one.