In the Land of Far Beyond

By R.Z. Sheppard

JOURNEY TO KARS by Philip Glazebrook; 246 pages; Atheneum; $12.95

Before beginning a slow lap around Turkey, before numberless encounters with melons, rugs, mustaches and ruins, Philip Glazebrook asks his big question: "What was the impulse which drove middle-class Victorians to leave the country they loved so chauvinistically, and the company of the race they considered God's last word in breeding, to travel in discomfort, danger, illness, filth and misery among Asiatics whose morals and habits they despised?"

His answer, skillfully shuttled through the narrative of his own journey, is that the adventurers of yore were misfits. The squaring of these pegs, he suggests, began in school with tales of bold Westerners challenging sinister enchanters in the East. The heroes of antiquity, the knights-errant and the pathfinders of empire, symbolized virtues that quickened young hearts. But mercantile Britain offered few opportunities for a romantic. "Where was the use of valor and a knowledge of Xenophon and all the rest of the accoutrements?" Glazebrook inquires. "He had put on knight's armor to play croquet in."

The author, a novelist when closer to home (The Eye of the Beholder, Byzantine Honeymoon), suits up in deflective irony for a different game: to produce a travel book with the confident style of the 19th century and the elegiac soul of a modern spiritual nomad. Glazebrook's reflections on the past are a form of detachment as real as the thousands of miles between him and his family in Dorset. Writing about other travel writers distances him from his own encounters on the trail. By ranking subjectivity above literal facts, he finally removes himself to that lonely height where the artist, not the soldier-adventurer, is hero. "Writing the book," he thinks before catching the train home. "That was the real journey."

Wisely, Glazebrook keeps this sort of modernist baggage to a minimum. He knows what readers want from a travel book, and he does not disappoint them. His route, from the Aegean coast to the borders of Iran and the Soviet Union, stretches like an ancient weft on which history and legend are tightly knotted. This has a sumptuous effect on his prose: "We were surging through bright water off the promontory of Knidos, to which Praxiteles' Venus once drew all travelers . .. Here were the ramparts of Asia crumbling into a sapphire sea."

Through dusty villages and neglected cities called Urguep and Erzurum, Glaze-brook finally arrives at Kars in the "Land of Far Beyond." Near by, Noah's ark went aground on Mount Ararat, and the Eden of Islamic myth bloomed. Persian, Turk and Russian battled over Kars for centuries. More prosaically, we learn that, except for Norway, Turkey is the only NATO country to border the U.S.S.R.

The mountain passages of this part of the world were like the bloody birth canals of civilization. Today Glazebrook finds mostly shards and indifferent descendants. Like VS. Naipaul, the best of contemporary novelist-travel writers, he takes a melancholy view of lands that are past their primes. In the city of Kenya he discovers a universal shabbiness imposed by the use of concrete: "The Asiatics' love of bright colors, too, is betrayed by the plastic paint they slap on everywhere, which flakes and peels as the colors of their native fabrics and tiles never did." A few passages border on old-fashioned disrespectful wog-whomping, though some of the author's deepest disdain is reserved for the scraggly, underwashed Western students who can be found everywhere: "They were hot and smelly, and seemed to be sitting on top of me, sticking bits of themselves into me in a way Asiatics don't."

The experience of hardship and inconvenience is largely the point of Journey to Kars. Travel is defined as an accumulation of instances of self-sufficiency. Being dumped into a remote town, at night and reservationless, is a challenge to be savored; cashing a traveler's check in Trabzon takes two banks an entire morning and involves the police. Months on the road lead to some choice distinctions ("It isn't the badness of bad hotels which is distressing, it's the badness of 'good' hotels"). There are also useful tips:

On eating: "If you wait and watch, you find that the kind of food you like exists in a slightly different form in most cuisines . . . Until that time comes, far better to be hungry than sick."

On itinerary: "For peace of mind, I need to have taken steps to settle all questions in view! ... Once I know how to leave, I am free."

On authoritarian governments: "A repressive regime suits the traveler better than the anarchy which preceded it, so long as his documents are in order."

On getting to know a place: "You have to drum a town into your head with your feet. You have to walk till you're lost."

On wandering alone: "I probably prefer to travel with my chimeras, and leave the baby behind. Someone said once that traveling with your family was like waltzing with your aunt."

Journey to Kars takes many risky directions. It is to be hoped that Glaze-brook's next book is not titled You Can't Go Home Again.

--By R.Z. Sheppard

Excerpt

"If you want to look with interest and contentment into a bay for any length of time, it is better that it doesn't have a whale in it. Now, it occurred to me that the freakish landscape of Cappadocia illustrated the same truth. What you need of such a weird spectacle is one good view of it, and this I had ... The uneasy moonscape stretched away on every hand, and, below me, clinging to the roots of the fortified pinnacle of rock I stood upon, were the ruinous mud huts of the old village, their terraces heaped with melons yellow and green. Fantastical that landscape is, the tufa towers riddled with painted churches, like the sandcastles of giants' children, and I was amazed by it; but amazement is pretty soon exhausted."