Have Car, Will Travel

ADVENTURER'S ROAD (235 pp.)--

T. R. Nicholson--Rinehart ($4.50).

WILL ANYONE AGREE TO GO FROM PEKING TO PARIS THIS SUMMER BY MOTORCAR?

Headline in Le Matin,

Paris, Jan. 31, 1907

As a circulation booster, Le Matin's question was an unqualified success. Press and public not only buzzed over the antic notion of an auto trip across Asia and Europe, but within six months five teams were in China, ready to follow the caravan track north and west into the Gobi Desert. There was no need for road maps; there were no roads. There was no sure fuel supply; what was available had been hopefully shipped ahead by camel. But in Peking on the rainy morning of June 10, 1907, one of the roughest car rides since the automobile engine drew its first breath began as casually as a clutch of college boys starting off for a weekend .at Wellesley.

From the first backfire, modern drivers, cushioned by air suspension, automatic transmissions and power steering, will boggle at this venturesome cross-continental tour. Historian Nicholson's chronicle jounces over every rut in the obstacle course in recreating what, even for the primitive motorists of the Peking-to-Paris reliability trial, was a bone-bruising, soul-trying nightmare.

Meals by Blowtorch. The five cars on the odyssey made an odd lot. The heftiest, a four-cylinder Itala, weighed in at two tons and worked up to 40 h.p. The others: a couple of two-cylinder, 10-h.p. De Dions, a 15 h.p. Spyker, and a tiny (6 h.p.) three-wheel Tri-Contal. Before they had covered 20 miles, all the cars needed coolies to haul them most of the rest of the way to Kalgan, on the edge of the desert.

Across the Gobi they sputtered. The drivers soon found that the trial was as much a test of men as machines. Dried out by the desert, the travelers drank the oily water from their radiators to keep alive. They used blowtorches to heat their meals when they could not bear using camel dung as fuel. Bridges collapsed under them, their cars sank hub deep in mud or sand, brakes gave way and the cars slid down steep, rocky hillsides. The Tri-Contal gave up its tiny ghost, but the other four somehow made it to the Siberian border.

Illusions of future ease were shortlived. Only madmen, the motorists soon discovered, tried to drive into Russia that summer. In Russia, what roads they found were rivers of mud; what rivers they came to were all but impassable. The hotels were primitive pestholes, thriving with insect life and always located next to the sleep-shattering din of a dance hall. They rolled into Moscow in four battered heaps, so filthy that the cheering crowds at their reception hardly recognized them as the heroes of the occasion.

The rest of the way home, across Poland and Germany, the roads were good and the food was fine. Italian Prince Scipione Borghese, captain of the Itala crew, led a triumphant parade into Paris to complete what he called "the amplest, the completest, the most persuasive testing to which this new instrument has ever been subjected." The trip had taken just two months.

No Way to Quit. Barely nine weeks after the last car finished, Le Matin was beating the drums for a midwinter drive from New York to Paris across frozen Bering Strait. Everyone knew it could not be done. But the magnificent lunacy of the scheme attracted six cars. The wild ride started from Times Square in freezing weather on the 12th of February, 1908. By the time the cars got to the West Coast, a 40-h.p. German Protos had traveled 1,000 miles by railroad, two other cars had dropped out entirely, and everyone agreed that the Arctic crossing was impossible. So the survivors sailed for Japan, then for Vladivostok, and again they hit the road.

Historian Nicholson follows them every mile of the way. The cumulative effect is appalling. Manchuria is every bit as terrible as Siberia was the last time. Spring floods threaten to swallow up the cars. Drowned cattle float by, their corpses bloated like grotesque balloons. And the worst part of all is that there is no way to quit. Today, says Nicholson sadly, all these pioneering autos are only names. The grands pilotes of the golden age of the motorcar are forgotten. The great "raids" are gone for good. Adventurer's Road embellishes the epitaph written by a Le Matin journalist whose job it was to find some excuse for all the foolishness: "It was a good idea."

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