What’s Christmas without snow?
Should snow be scarce – just as it is where I am sitting right now – we can always find it in a good book.
Scotsman Andrew Wilson was a Journalist for the Bombay Times and later with the China Mail, in the second half of the 19th century.
Later still he became editor for the Times of India and the Bombay Gazette.
He chronicled the campaigns of Colonel Gordon in China, but his literary fame rests on a collection of travel writings that goes under the title of The Abode of Snow: Observations on a Journey from Chinese Tibet to the Indian Caucasus through the Upper Valleys of the Himalaya.
You can find it, in a number of handy electronic formats, in the Internet Archive.
It’s quite an interesting read in these long winter nights.
In the years following the huge success of the first Indiana Jones movie, something like a pulp renaissance seemed to be about to sweep the movie halls of the planet.
It never worked out properly, but a number of films actually hit the screens that were plain good fun.
Of the lot, there’s two of them I never tire of re-watching.
Today I think I’ll write about the first.
High Road to China (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Released two years after Raiders, High Road to China was a strange beast from the start.
Based on a fine novel by an Australian novelist, set along the Silk Road, co-produced by Warner Bros. and by a Hong Kong company, directed by an American and shot in Yugoslavia by an international crew.
The set-up in a nutshell: flapper heiress Eve Tozer has to hire alcoholic pilot Patrick O’Malley to fly her from Istambul to somewhere in China, in order to save her father and/or protect her inheritance. Adventures ensue.
Pretty straightforward – an uncomplicated yarn, and quite enjoyable.
An Hawksian comedy of sorts, with adventure interludes.
It features good flight scenes, a great interpretation by Brian Blessed of tribal chieftain Suleman Khan, there’s an air duel, there’s some warlord-era Chinese action.
And then there’s the chemistry between the characters.
Just my cup of tea.
The 1977 Jon Cleary novel – which is highly recommended, if you can track down a copy – is much more complex, has a more varied cast, and has Eve’s flying circus starting from Paris, not from Istambul.
It is a perfect example of the paradigm of adventure being narrative applied to geography.
But the simplified plot is ok.
There’s a wonderful score by John Barry – which I posted on this blog in its earlier days.
Stars Tom Selleck and Bess Armstrong are more than adequate to their roles, and their endless bickering is believable and delivered with obvious fun – and yes, Bess Armstrong is beautiful.
Sure, director Brian G. Hutton abandoned his directing career after this movie, to become a plumber.
And after previews they had to add scenes featuring Robert Morley as a petulant bad guy.
And everybody considered this film to be a cheap attempt at riding the Raiders’ popularity – but High Road had been in the works since the late ’70s, and should have starred Roger Moore and Jacqueline Bisset, directed by either John Huston or Sidney J. Furie (that one would have been fun to see!)
And it surely failed in the attempt of establishing Tom Selleck as the new Clark Gable.
But despite what-might-have-beens, this is still one of those films I really enjoy whenever I have the opportunity of catching it on the TV (or, when the telly does not cooperate, popping my DVD in the DVD-machine).
A great montage of sequences shot in China and the Far East in the 1920s, set to some suggestive and atmospheric jazz music.
A treat from the YouTube collection of marvels by Aaron1912.
As I already mentioned, with a new series in the works, I’m researching my next (?) short story.
One finds the most wonderful things, in old travellers’ tales.
Here’s a snippet from the diaries of Ruy Gonzales de Clavijo, Spanish envoy in the court of Timur Leng (or Tamerlane), in 1403.
It is exactly the sort of information I was looking for.
And I thought you might like it, too.
Fifteen days journey from the city of Samarcand, in the direction of China, there is a land inhabited by Amazons, and to this day they continue the custom of having no men with them, except at one time of the year; when they are permitted, by their leaders, to go with their daughters to the nearest settlements, and have communication with men, each taking the one that pleases her most, with whom they live, and eat, and drink, after which they return to their own land. If they bring forth daughters afterwards, they keep them, but they send the sons to their fathers. These women are subject to Timur Beg; they used to under the Emperor of Cathay, and they are Christians of the Greek Church. They are of the lineage of the Amazons who were at Troy, when it was destroyed by the Greeks.
I’m doing some light revision work on an interesting text about China in the days of old.
As a side effect, the author gave me some images for my blog.
These pictures were taken by her grand-granfather, in China, between 1900 and 1905.
There’s six of them and they are captioned (in Italian).
And talking about China and fossils… 50 cents per kg is the price of dinosaur bones used as medicine in central China.
I was researching Gustav Heinrich Ralph von Koenigswald, a German paleontologist that in the 1930s found a tooth belonging to a Gigantopithecus in an Hong Kong pharmacy, and I collected a few factoids about the practice of consuming “long gu” (“dragon bones”) for medical purposes – which is still is still going strong in China today.
The most common afflictions cured by boiling or grinding into powder the fossil bones are cramps and dizziness, but the list of possible applications is long and varied.
“… “dragon bones” are crushed to a fine powder, boiled, and mixed with other ingredients to make healing concoctions. According to an ancient Chinese medical text (dating back around 2000 years) pulverized fossils have been used to treat conditions ranging from diarrhea to epilepsy to “manic running about.” Some ancient “medical” conditions were mystical ailments. For example, dragon bone “mainly treats heart and abdominal demonic influx, spiritual miasma, and old ghosts.”
In 2007, the BBC revealed that one enterprising bone collector had found, dug out and sold about 8.000 kilos of old bones.
According to online sources, today, more than 100 tons of “dragon bones” are consumed each year in China and Southeast Asia.
All of which is great news not only for my Silk Road book (updates, updates!), but is also excellent fodder for stories.
His father was the inspiration for the James Bond villain.
I discovered John Blofeld‘s The Secret and the Sublime when I was sixteen.
The book, in its gaudy, cheap Italian paperback edition, was interesting for two reasons.
First, because it connected with my growing interest for zen and taoism.
Second, because it promised to reveal Taoist Mysteries and Magic– which was extremely good, because I was tired of the standard, psaeudo-celtic, or D&D-derived magic in fantasy stories, and was looking for some off-beat inspiration*.
In the end, the book was useless in developing my own magic system – but in retrospect, it was probably instrumental in convincing me that “magic system” is the wrong idea when writing fantasy.
Magic should be magic – and sure as hell it feels that way in Blofeld’s book.
On the other hand, Blofeld’s book fueled my interest in the East, which is one of the reasons I’m writing this blog, and I still feel a strong affection for this small book. Continue reading →
Karavansara 