Books: Adventure in the East

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A PERSON FROM ENGLAND, AND OTHER TRAVELERS TO TURKESTAN (314 pp.)—Fitzroy Maclean—Harper ($5).

This book is a reverent and amusing hymn to a handful of adventurers who penetrated the bone-littered wastes of Central Asia during the past 125 years. Many of them stayed there, with their heads cleaved from their bodies by the bloodthirsty rulers of Bokhara, Merv, Kokand and Khiva. The most fascinating of these adventurers was one Joseph Wolff, a disputatious Jew turned Anglican missionary, who set out in 1843 to rescue two British officers held captive in Bokhara.

Poker at Seven. The son of a German rabbi, Wolff early developed a crank interest in religion and, at seven, was so critical of the tenets of the Jewish faith that his exasperated aunt threw a poker at him. He examined Lutheranism and found it wanting, tried Roman Catholicism but was expelled from a Redemptorist monastery, and finally entered the ministry of the Church of England.

As a contentious missionary, he got into trouble throughout the Middle East. Kurdish tribesmen loaded him with chains and bastinadoed him; in Khorasan he was flogged, in Afghanistan nearly burned alive. Wolff was also shipwrecked, poisoned, stung half to death by wasps, and three times stripped naked in the desert and left to die.

On his way to Bokhara to liberate the British officers, Missionary Wolff stopped off in Teheran to shout down the Shah of Persia, paused at Merv for a three-cornered theological debate with a dervish and a Talmudic scholar. Arriving in Bokhara with its Tower of Death, verminous dungeons and treacherous Emir, Wolff grandly ordered that the British prisoners be handed over to him. "How extraordinary," exclaimed the Emir. "I have 200,000 Persian slaves here—nobody cares for them; and on account of two Englishmen, a person comes from England and single-handedly demands their release." Wolff was jolted to discover that the two officers had already been executed, and was lucky to escape Bokhara with his own head still on his shoulders.

Up-to-Date Town. Other valiant adventurers in the book include Hungarian-born Arminius Vambery, who disguised himself as a dervish in 1863 and traveled for ten months through Central Asia; American Januarius MacGahan, the special correspondent of the New York Herald, who dodged both Cossacks and Turkoman cavalry in his daring 1873 coverage of the Russian conquest of Khiva; Irishman Edmund O'Donovan, representing the London Daily News, who was simultaneously held prisoner and elected prince by the Tekke tribesmen of desolate Merv. Said O'Donovan: "It is well worth while to have lived among the Tekkes to know the ecstatic delight of parting company with them."