Two of the Earth's Four Corners

THIS book will be of great interest, especially to those concerned with the growth of the Fogg Museum, for which Mr. Warner made his expedition into Western China and Turkestan in search of art objects from the early centuries of Buddhist Chinese civilization. But it is as a story of adventure that the book makes its greatest appeal. The narrative romps and blusters with Mr. Warner over the long and often perilous road. Mohammedan bandits, Chinese hospitality of the old school, fiery interviews with stubborn officials, forty-course dinners, thieving innkeepers, Russian refugees, seas of mud and acres of dust traversed by caravans of jolting carts and finally by camels into the great northern desert compose the panorama, which finally reaches its climax at the beginning of the snow-less Mongolian winter when the expedition sights the walls of ancient Kharakhoto, the Black City of Marco Polo, deserted for centuries to the shifting sands of the desert, a romantic paradise for the adventuring archaeologist.

A second and less joyous climax comes a little later, at the end of a long lay's travel by camel in the icy gale of the desert plateau, when Jayne, Mr. Warner's companion "slid from his kneeling camel and fell fiat. He could not walk a step. I stretched him on the snow with his back to the blaze and took off his fur boots to find both feet frozen stiff," What this meant, in the midst of the howling desert, at that time of the year, with little food and less fuel and no medical attention is hard to imagine. But the laconic narrative proceeds, with the reader's breath bated, until Jayne is disposed of in the care of Dr. Kao, "full of Christianity and antiseptics." This leaves Mr. Warner free but lonely to make his scheduled dash to Tun Huang, the second objective of his journey, where lie the caves of the Thousand Buddhas. The aspect of these ancient gods fills Mr. Werner with poetic reverence. However, "obviously, some specimens of these paintings must be secured for study at home, and, more important still, for safekeeping against further vandalism." For Mr. Warner makes it plain that the ignornt keepers of the chapel and the ignorant natives of the neighborhood are guilty of constant, unconscious vandalism against these ancient works of art. After witnessing with a shudder the desecration of the images by greasy hands and modern mud-daubed restorations, he proceeds in the solemn vein:--"Thus it was that I was enabled to set about a labour of love and reverently to pry from its pedestal a figure halting upon one knee, with sensitive hands clasped in adoration before its bosom (now in the Fogg). No vandal hand but mine had disturbed it for eleven hundred years."