Travelogue

THE ORCHID HUNTERS--Norman MacDonald--Farrar & Rinehart ($2.75).

SALWEEN -- Ronald Kaulback --Harcourt, Brace ($3.75).

MY ESKIMO LIFE--Paul-Emile Victor --Simon & Schuster ($3).

A GUIDE TO ALASKA--Merle Colby

Macmillan ($3).

Armchair travelers last week could go orchid hunting in South American jungles river hunting in Tibet, spend a winter in a jampacked Eskimo igloo, or the rest of the summer trying to absorb a fraction of the facts packed into the new Guide to Alaska, latest of the Federal Writers' Project series.

Cattleyas. The furtive human shadows who strip rare cattleyas from South American jungles and ship them to stock the hothouses of U. S. orchid growers sometimes gross $25,000 on a shipment. More often they die of malaria or snakebite. To 28-year-old Norman MacDonald & Frank McKay of suburban Nutley, N. J., such odds seemed better than their humdrum jobs (a broker's office, a radio-tube factory). Resolved to hunt orchids themselves, they somehow persuaded U. S. orchid growers to stake them to orders for 6,400 cattleyas from Colombia and Venezuela. When, one Christmas Eve, the venturesome young men reached Boca Grande, Orchid Hunter MacDonald was already at work on notes for his readable, Rover-Boyish orchid odyssey.

Messrs. MacDonald and McKay's luck was of the kind that sounds more credible in books than in life. In Manhattan a retired orchid hunter gave them a map with orchid hotspots neatly indicated. In Bogota they fell in with 67-year-old J. B., "six feet three inches tall, lean and hard, definitely English." His hunches about orchid hiding places were nearly infallible. With this sort of luck and help the young men made good.

Though he writes best about orchids, shrewd Author MacDonald does not write too much about them. He senses that most readers will read his jungle success story for its account of guacharos, birds with whiskers on their beaks (when their young fall out of the nest they plop and explode), trees that put people to sleep, moths whose sting drives men insane.

Last week, Orchid Hunters MacDonald and McKay were back in the jungle.

Shangri-La. No orchid hunter is Ronald Kaulback, though he once picked flowers in Tibet with famed Botanist Kingdon Ward, collected many rare plants, insects, snakes on his own 18-month scramble to find the source of Tibet's Black River, the Salween. He never found it, but he traveled some 3,000 miles of unexplored shingle on the freezing-cold roof of the world, earned the Murchison Grant of the Royal Geographical Society for his pains. There were plenty of them. Salween is probably the cheerfullest book ever written of discomforts ranging from intense heat among blood-sucking leeches to intense cold and a face so cracked by snow-burn "it oozed all over like a roasting joint."

To Canadian-born Explorer Kaulback, Tibet is no hermit kingdom, but a realistic Shangri-La whose glacial rocks, shrewd lamas, innumerable prayer-wheels, odoriferous grime somehow delight his Cambridge-bred soul. He had been to Tibet once before and was glad to get back: "It was good to taste real buttered tea again. ... We ourselves were awash by the time the tents were up. ... That night it was just as it had been two years before. . . horsebells jingling; the howl of a dog; a voice in the distance singing a mournful song; and over everything the smell of wood smoke and grease."

Over one 15,000-foot pass after another climbed Author Kaulback as spring melted the ice barriers in the rocky gorges. What finally defeated his quest for the source of the Salween was whiskers. Colleague John Hanbury-Tracy had grown a beard. A Tibetan official who had been in India and knew that Britons shave thought he was a Russian spy, and the expedition was held up until winter made the trip impossible. Though he failed to find the source of the Salween, Explorer Kaulback was comforted by the thought that "it still remains to be found by someone." He might be comforted by the further thought that in sharing his nostalgia and making mysterious Tibet as real to Englishmen, and hardly more remote, than the Scottish Highlands, he had written easily the best travel book of the year.

Kangerdlugssuatsiaq. Paul-Emile Victor looks like a young man about Paris. He is an outstanding French ethnographer who has the frozen field of Eskimo doings pretty much to himself. He speaks fluently their polysyllabic language which for most people is as tough as a piece of walrus gristle. At Kangerdlugssuatsiaq, he lived for six months as a member of the Eskimo community, records his observations of life in a crowded igloo in a 349-page book, whose footnotes and appendices are often more exciting than the rather disjointed text.

There is little midnight sun or everlasting snow in Author Victor's account, but there are unforgettable scenes of greed, filth, and foul food. Sample: "Behind the hut there was an enormous heap of seal's fat which had been left untouched for years, and was now transformed into a kind of yellowish rock which exuded rivulets of pus that reflected the sunlight. The birds which alighted on it lost, first their feathers and then their lives. . . . In this sticky, slimy mass, Yosepi, Gaba, Kriwi, Doumidia and I floundered about with shouts of laughter. We gathered handfuls of it which we threw into a large bowl"--to eat.

When winter came there was a feast! ". . . The high meat of the 'idiwitsi' [long dead seal] is the most highly prized of all foods, native or imported. There was no halfheartedness about the men as each one proceeded to hack away an enormous portion for himself. Little by little a powerful odour pervaded the whole hut. . . . [Others] were cutting up, carving, drinking large handfuls of sticky blood, shouting, licking their fingers, masticating, swallowing, stuffing themselves with meat and fat, sucking at fragments of intestine. . . . Men, women and children alike were besmeared with purplish blood." Author Victor ate a little piece too, found it "sharp, spicy."

But by February he began to hanker after French cooking, left Kangerdlugssuatsiaq for Paris.

Musical note: Eskimos enjoyed jazz played on Author Victor's phonograph: they thought it was funny. But they preferred Mozart and Bach.

Skookum. Latest of the American Guide Series compiled by the Federal Writers' Project corrects the following fallacies about Alaska:

>> That Alaska is a frigid land. At Fairbanks it is sometimes 100 degrees in the shade.

>> That Eskimos live in ice houses. In Alaska an igloo is a house of earth and wood.

>> That Alaska is remote from civilization. It is only 18 hours flying time from Yokohama or Manhattan.

>> That the Klondike is in Alaska. It is in Canada.

For travelers who may have to speak the language a short glossary is included. Sample Alaskan: hootchenoo (hootch): muckamuck (food); outside (the U. S.); skookum (strong, worthy).

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