Coleridge Baedeker

By John Skow

The cargo manifest for Caroline Alexander's learned and delightful work of literary voyaging (The Way to Xanadu; Knopf; $23) might read something like this: toothbrush, 1; wide-brimmed straw hat, 1; large, leatherbound geographical and poetical tomes, six or seven dozen. But Alexander's account of her travels, undertaken to set foot and mind on the actual places around the globe that inspired Samuel Taylor Coleridge's misty and fantastical poem Kubla Khan, carries its erudition lightly.

Her journeying begins as it should, in libraries, and in particular with a 1927 work, The Way to Xanadu, by the British scholar John Livingston Lowes. He not only traced literary and mythological influences on the poet's imagery, but demonstrated that Coleridge (1772-1834) was a tireless armchair traveller. There was, in fact, a real Xanadu (more commonly called Shangdu) with the remains of real walls and towers. Marco Polo had been there. And there were in the world -- though not in the same place except on Coleridge's bookshelf -- marvellous caves of ice, mighty fountains, rivers that might well be sacred, caverns measureless to man, and a real, Abyssinian Mount Abora.

"Aggressively dressed in a long, full, Out of Africa skirt," Alexander writes at one point, she set out to trace her poet's imaginings. Mighty string-pulling brought a rare approval from the Chinese to visit Shangdu, in military territory 200 miles north of Beijing. This was the summer capitol -- pleasure dome is a fair description -- established by Kublai (1215-1294), grandson of Genghis Khan, and a personage who, according to Marco Polo, "always rides on the back of four elephants, in a very handsome shelter of wood, covered inside with cloth of beaten gold and outside with lion skins." The location of the palace, and the vast size of Kublai's grounds, can be traced today, with the help of guides from China's Bureau of Relics. It is the ghost of magnificence; only a few shards of colored tile can still be found in the sweep of grassland. Not far away, Chinese industrialization crowds in.

Coleridge moved "caves of ice" to Xanadu from the Kashmir region of northern India, where they had been described in 1795 by the Rev. Thomas Maurice in The History of Hindostan. Alexander and a friend, forbidden to travel there because of political turmoil, attached themselves to a mob of religious pilgrims and pressed on regardless. The journey was not entirely spiritual; an overcrowded campsite was fouled with human dung. This does not prevent Alexander from creating a beautiful scene. "I saw, on drawing back the tent flaps," she writes, "snowdrifts gleaming on the towering black peaks and, a long way beneath them, a wobbly line of light from the pilgrims' lanterns descending the far hills and inching across the plain." The ice cave at Amaranth lay ahead, offering Siva's boon, "a release from the fear of death, not from death itself.

The poet discovered his fountains both in the great, welling springs of north Florida (in his Travels, William Bartram wrote of them that "the ebullition is astonishing and continual") and in Abyssinia or Ethiopia. Alexander reports ruefully that the Ethiopian fountain, at a place called Gishe Abay, was thought to have magical properties, but may no longer; as a female, she unknowingly defiled the flow with her touch. Or so she was assured by locals.

Alexander's thoughtful and lively account shifts gracefully from travel heroics to library exploration. It is no admission of failure when she says that uiltimately it was impossible to find the sources for the images in Coleridge's great poem in mere geography. "Xanadu is a place dark and craggy," she writes, "but essentially reminiscent of nowhere I have seen."