Not all ill winds blow no good. If two years of COVID confinement sat like a heavy Camusian plague on the world, there were doubtless many personal reliefs, even if not rewards. If the general air of despair got to most, stultifying them, there were islands of hope, of purpose even. And not just at the individual level either. For apparently during this period of stasis – I say apparently because I discovered this only two days ago – the venerable publishing house of John Murray wasn’t sitting on its hands moping. In a gesture of bibliophilic altruism as worthy as any humanitarian cause, it decided to reprint a selection of long out of print travel classics – as a relief from the forced imprisonment – through the endearing means of asking for public recommendations. A convenient Twitter address was provided, and all you had to do was send the name of your favourite travel book to it.
But it is for a life spent in travel, and travel writing that she is best known. Sometime in the early 1930s she travelled solo in the (then out-of-bounds) republics of Soviet Central Asia, from the Tien Shan mountain range in Kyrgyzstan to the Kizil Kum desert in Uzbekistan, mostly on horseback.
And thus was born a truly lovely series, the John Murray “Journeys”. And who better than John Murray, who were THE travel publishers in that golden age of travel, the 19th and early 20th centuries?
On Monday morning I dropped in at The Bookworm and found this visually fetching pile of colour bindings: I could barely contain my excitement. There was Dame Freya Stark’s “Valley of the Assassins,” there was Patrick Leigh-Fermor’s “A Time of Gifts”, there was something by somebody else. But my eyes were only for Ella Maillart’s “The Cruel Way” (I already had both the Freya Stark and the P L-F, in earlier editions), her account of her motor journey with a female companion from Geneva to Kabul in 1938. This was one book of hers that I didn’t have.
And who was Ella Maillart? The cliché ‘the last of the great classic women travellers,’ while true and deserved still falls short as a descriptive. Among many other things, she was a champion ski-er, and as a yachtswoman she represented her native Switzerland in the 1924 Olympic sailing championships. And if that wasn’t all, she led the Swiss hockey team in the same Games.
But it is for a life spent in travel, and travel writing that she is best known. Sometime in the early 1930s she travelled solo in the (then out-of-bounds) republics of Soviet Central Asia, from the Tien Shan mountain range in Kyrgyzstan to the Kizil Kum desert in Uzbekistan, mostly on horseback. And like some of us (her very poor, humble followers), she was bitten by the Central Asia bug for life. The carefree nomadic temperament, its almost Edenic innocence uncorrupted (still) by western modernity appealed to her at some deep primal level: for her vision was forever tinged pink with the romance of open spaces, of strange and lovely people. She was an ‘orientalist’ in the nicest possible way: without the western condescension, and with an almost karmic identification with the east (her compatriot and friend Nicholas Bouvier was similarly afflicted, writing one of the most lyrical of all travel books, “The Way of the World”).
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Yet while “Turkestan Solo” established Maillart’s reputation, oddly it was as another great traveller-writer’s companion on an epic journey that she became truly well known. Sent by her Paris newspaper – she was a journalist too – to cover events in Manchuria in 1934, she ran into Peter Fleming – whom she had already met before – and the two decided to find out what was going on in Sinkiang (Xinjiang now) in the ups and downs of the Chinese Civil War, and then debouch into India.
In the event, their seven-month trek from Peking to Kashmir wrote itself into the history of travel in a flourish of superlatives, still unmatched. It produced too – one of the few (in any) such instances – two books about the same journey, Fleming’s “News from Tartary” and Maillart’s “Forbidden Journey”. The much-bandied-about adjective ‘iconic’ perhaps in this instance would not be misplaced: more than a half-century later, in 1987, four American youngsters would set out from Beijing just to re-create that fabled journey. Sadly they got no further than Kashgar – the world had changed since 1935. Stuart Stevens their leader went home and wrote a book about it (“Night Train to Turkistan”, 1988); but before that he – like any starstruck heroine-worshipper – went to Geneva and met the great Ella to tell her they had followed in her footsteps. She was 83 at the time.
Also Read : Travel: The Kyrgyztan Detour
The present book (featured in the photo) describes a later journey from Geneva to Kabul, in 1939, in the shadow of the war to come. This time her companion is a young woman, Annemarie Schwarzenbach (‘Christina’) in the grip of a drug addiction from which Maillart desperately tries to wean her. The poignancy of her efforts, ranged against the deadly vise-like hold of the drug leaven the narrative like a counterpoint to her own traveller’s obsession with the east, her own respiratory relief almost, as their Ford car crawls its way from the claustrophobia of Europe to the deserts of Central Asia.
Ella Maillart died in 1997, just six years short of her hundred. But ninety-four years of a life one can only envy.
Picture Credit : Author
