by Tahir Shah
All is blissful… but not for long.
Almost from the outset, Charles – portrayed as a friendly, but weak man – has eyes for another. Enter the steamingly seductive Camilla Parker-Bowles (‘Bowles’ pronounced ‘Bowels’). Distraught by her husband’s infidelity, Diana seeks comfort in the dashing, tender war hero, Major James Hewitt (pronounced by the Assamese palate as ‘James Herriott’).
Sitting in the drawing-room of Buckingham Palace, the Queen is kept abreast of the affairs by an obsequious adviser, not dissimilar to Mr. Bean. Her Majesty is strangely eager for the sordid details. She learns how Charles is cavorting around with a woman who has the body of a goddess; while the rather chunky Diana’s being wooed by James Herriot (sorry, I mean ‘Hewitt’). Always caring, with a soft shoulder for the young Princess’ head, Hewitt comes out as the real hero of the show. So much so that you begin to wonder whether the poor chap’s been dealt a harsh hand.
But there’s no time to ponder this…
The palace guards have been bribed by the unscrupulous anorak-clad paparazzi. Meanwhile, Diana has a blazing row with the Queen, and storms out of Buckingham Palace (the audience goes wild with delight). Her Majesty is anything but amused. Over at Kensington Palace, Diana assaults Camilla, who’s strutting her stuff, waiting for Charles. More blue anoraks, as the press tries to get a look-in. A couple of quick dance scenes to lighten up the mood, before Diana capers about with a lost expression to delicate strains of a sitar. Realising that her marriage is over, she gives in to Hewitt’s advances, agreeing to spend the night with him. The women in the audience whoop with glee… this is racy stuff, in Assam at least.
To his credit, the writer has kept away from Squidgy-gate, eating disorders, and obsessive phone calls, perhaps fearing that such material might not be understood in an Assamese village. A cynic might pick holes in the performance but, for my money, there isn’t a dull moment. It’s no less accurate than an amateur version of The Mikado.
After almost three hours, punctuated by power-cuts (one caused when a pye-dog chewed through the generator’s cable), Dodi Al-Fayed slinks onto the scene. He whisks Diana away on a jumbo jet to the Med, where they career about in a speed boat. Then to Paris (with its Eiffel Tower backdrop), where the blue anoraks are waiting.
Backstage there’s pandemonium as a cohort of workers heave Buckingham Palace and St. Paul’s away, and position the Mercedes. Like the motorbike, it’s attached to a trolley, and runs on bamboo rails.
Every now and again there’s a shriek from the sea of dark heads, as anticipation spills over. The crash is coming, and everyone knows it. The Assamese can relate to nothing better than a bloodthirsty car crash. Their roads are a constant theatre of carnage.
Spotting Dodi and Di off-stage, the paparazzi take chase. The stage lights dim. The piercing sound of an engine revving fills the tent. Four thousand mouths gape open with expectation. A drum beats faster and faster. Cymbals clash together. Then, when we can stand no more, the Mercedes – its lights blinding us – shoots forward through a tunnelcoloured backdrop, and smashes onto its side.
The curtain falls.
Without a word, the people of Mirza slink away into the night. No one waits for a curtain call, or even applauds. When asked if this infers that the play has flopped, the producer shakes his head wildly from side to side. ‘Are you mad?!’ he bellows. ‘It means they loved it!’
FIFTY-EIGHT
The Romance of Richard Halliburton
THERE WAS BETWEEN THE WARS a faint aperture of time in which great marvels were still to be found. These holy grails of travel were made reachable through new technologies, and by the boldness and grit of an intrepid band of women and men – a new breed of explorer.
Until then, travel chronicles had been dominated by the great nineteenth century adventurers. Mostly men, they were towering figures of Victorian celebrity – names like Burton, Barth, Livingstone and Stanley. Their accounts of subjugating natives, and hoisting the flag for colonial rule, were at best terse and at worst unreadable, by today’s standards at least.
Great travel writing is all about evoking an atmosphere of adventure. But more than that, it’s about story-telling plain and simple. Far too many works of travel have slipped into obscurity because the writing is lacklustre, dated, or downright dull. Trawl the shelves of the London Library and you’ll find miles and miles of books that are all but forgotten. And many of them deserve to be left there – deep underground.
Yet from time to time you come across an author whose work is a beacon of originality. The American adventurer, Richard Halliburton, whose life was snuffed out at far too early an age, was one such writer.
Although his work has a small but devoted following, his books warrant a far greater readership – and are the kind of travel literature that have withstood the test of time, and continue to inspire the youth to achieve.
With the slaughter of the Great War over, the roaring ’twenties were a gateway to a new realm. Effervescent and frivolous, it was a time to assuage the pain of battle and to uplift the sunken hearts of armchair explorers the world over.
The result was a new kind of work – the birth of the modern travel book.
Quests in their own right, these accounts were less about empire or life and death exploration, and more about engaging the reader through passionate description and a really good yarn.
On the eastern shores of the Atlantic, we like to imagine that to be a worthy adventurer you have to be an European as well. But nothing could be farther from the truth. Leading the field in this genre of new romanticism was a zealous young American named Richard Halliburton.
Born into a middle class home in Brownsville, Tennessee, at the start of 1900, Halliburton was a frail youth who suffered from a heart murmur. Despite an enthusiasm for the outdoors and for sport, he was confined to bed for months at a time in childhood, and even attended the legendary Battle Creak Sanitarium of self-styled nutritionist John Harvey Kellog.
Putting his clinical confinement to use, Halliburton devoured every work of geography and exploration available. Yearning for a time when he could break free, he longed to experience the wild lands of which he had read. A romantic through and through, he had been weaned on the Classics, a fabulous backdrop and a blend of fact and fantasy without equal.
Indefatigable, eloquent, and rip-roaringly upbeat, Halliburton was intensely alluring as a character. Soon after graduating from Princeton, he was well on his way to achieving the celebrity he so desired. Inspired by the intellect of Oscar Wilde, and the glamour of Rudolf Valentino, he was himself a dandy of the time. Impeccably dressed, exquisitely groomed, charming and ambitious, it’s easy to imagine him as a player in The Great Gatsby world of the inter-war years.
For me, Halliburton’s most intoxicating quality was the effortlessness with which he embarked upon a quest. Respectful, yet deaf to his detractors, he followed his gut, and used the media to his advantage right from the start. Certainly, the old guard wrote him off as whimsical, but Richard Halliburton was a man who grasped the pulse of the time better than almost anyone else alive.
The ’twenties were about recuperation, a return to the serenity of the Classical world that had been so obliterated from common culture on Flanders’ fields. By understanding this – and by adoring it – Halliburton rose to astonishing fame. By the ’thirties he was a household name across America.
Daring, jovial, and eccentric, reports of his expeditions filled the news reels of the time, to the delight of a generation of youth. His Boy’s Own style of adventure leaps off the page, the kind of writing that can’t fail to enthuse, inspiring as much as it does entertain. Relying on fledgling aviation much of the time, and never fearful of terrible danger, Halliburton broke new ground, soaring high above wonders that other travellers had only skirted from the ground.
As far as he was concerned, the world was his giant playground, one still unscathed by mass tourism, political correctness, or industry. In this sunset of empire,
the suave and fearless young Halliburton could do no wrong. Fêted by columnists and swooned over by adoring young women – and men – he was in a league of his own.
First published in 1928, The Glorious Adventure came hot on the heels of The Royal Road to Romance, an amalgamation of disparate travels through Europe, North Africa, Central Asia and the Far East.
In scope, The Glorious Adventure is certainly far less wieldy than any of the other Halliburton travelogues. By choosing Homer’s Odyssey as his theme – his great childhood love – he embarks on a journey to the theatre in which Ancient Greece was played out. Lyrical, lighthearted and passionate without end, the book must have been a hymn to thousands of young men about to be hammered by the Wall Street crash of 1929.
His reasoning to leave is as spirited as the quest itself. He wrote:
Suddenly I became bored and impatient with everything I had and was: bored with people, bored with knowledge. I realized I didn’t want knowledge. I only wanted my senses to be passionately alive, and my imagination fearlessly far-reaching. And instead, I felt I was sinking into a slough of banality. Adventure! Adventure! That was the escape; that was the remedy.
Seeking out the land of the Lotus Eaters, the Cyclops’ cave, Circe’s lair, and Mount Olympus, home of the gods, Halliburton satiates his need for adventure and his infatuation for the Classical world. Furiously fast-paced, packed with verve, at times it exhausts even the most devoted fan.
Enamoured by the life and legacy of the English war poet, Rupert Brooke, Halliburton seeks out his grave on the Greek island of Skyros. It was there the poet had expired in his prime from fever whilst en route to Gallipoli. But it was another English poet – Robert Byron – who provided the inspiration for the greatest feat of the journey. Following his lead, Halliburton succeeded in swimming the Hellespont, the brutal current almost drowning him.
Of the handful of books he published, there’s one that stands out as a monument to the time in which he lived, as much as it is a chronicle of everything Halliburton stood for. The Flying Carpet is a rare and enthusing tale of Boy’s Own bravado. It’s one of those books that stays with you, not so much because of the intoxicating roll call of adventure, but because of the frantic sizzle of the tale.
Halliburton may have been thirty but he was gripped as ever by the raw enthusiasm of a twelve-year-old. Longing to once again be, as he put it, a ‘footloose vagabond’, he searched for an aeroplane capable of crossing deserts and jungles, oceans and seas. Without hardly any preparation, and almost no background knowledge of flight, he bought one on the spur of the moment – a Stearman biplane. Shiny and small, with an open cockpit, he christened it the Flying Carpet.
The only thing needed now was a pilot.
By a stroke of luck he was introduced to a young Stanford graduate named Moye Stephens, who was employed for flying passengers over the Rockies. Sharing the same lust for daredevil adventure, Stephens readily agreed to pilot them both on a circumnavigation of the globe – ‘to all the outlandish places on Earth’. He was promised no pay, but unlimited expenses.
His only question was when they were to leave.
‘In half an hour,’ Halliburton replied casually.
And, pulling him to the door, they did.
The journey was the kind of feat that people are drawn to recreate today, but with a rigid safety net of support. And yet the alluring thing about Halliburton and Stephens’ epic flight, was the absolute lack of safety, and the child-like zigzagging of wonders of the old world.
Flying by the seats of their pants, and with almost nothing in the way of preparation, the pair set off into the unknown.
Halliburton was dead set on visiting Timbuktu first. Lured by the mystery of the name and by its seeming inaccessibility, all he knew was that it was somewhere in Africa.
To reach it, they traversed the United States eastwards from California, headed south through Europe, and into the mysterious hinterland of Morocco.
Soaring high above the Atlas, they climbed to fifteen thousand feet, to avoid pot shots from the tribesmen eager to bring down a shiny little plane like theirs.
And, then, laden with extra fuel, they began the gruelling flight southwards, with the formidable dunes of the Sahara laid out in an ocean beneath. Warned time and again about sand storms, but taking no notice, they flew headlong into one after the next, their faces and the Flying Carpet rasped raw.
Causing immense excitement as it came to land at Timbuktu, the little biplane assured the two Americans immediate celebrity. They were received by Père Yakouba, the so-called ‘White Monk of Timbuctoo’ – the first of many intriguing locals they encountered.
Flying on eastwards, they reached the Algerian Sahara, where they were welcomed into the folds of the French Foreign Legion, at Colomb Bechar. Amazing all they met with acrobatics and tall tales of their journey so far, they flew back up to Europe.
In an era in which travel was far more leisurely an activity, they took off and landed where they liked, when they liked. Reaching Italy through the Simplon Pass, they made a beeline for Venice, where they spent a month.
Then they wondered where next. Halliburton wrote:
Once more we unrolled our world map. Moye suggested Berlin. I voted for Malta. We compromised on Constantinople. A few hours later the Flying Carpet and its crew were in the air.
Our first stop was Vienna. Then to Budapest – to Belgrade – to Bucharest – through storms, across plains, over mountains – on to Constantinople and the Golden Horn.
On and on they flew – across Turkey, down through the Holy Land, to Cairo and the Pyramids, over the Nabatean ruins of Petra, and eastwards over the great basalt desert to Baghdad.
The frequency with which they landed must have reflected the trying conditions of low altitude open-cockpit flight. Yet always gung-ho in style, Halliburton’s writing brushes aside the air-sickness from what must have been rollercoaster flights.
But their eagerness to land was inspired, too, by a genuine delight in witnessing new realms. At a time when the globe was not yet homogenized by mass media and equally mass travel, Halliburton and Stephens observed first hand the last vestiges of the old world order.
And wherever they went, their celebrity status was enough for the doors of palaces, monasteries, and jungle longhouses to be flung open for them.
No one, it seemed, wanted to be left out.
In Baghdad, they took the young Crown Prince Ghazi up for a ride; and, in Persia, they carried aloft the daughter of the Shah, Princess ‘Flower-of-the-Morning’. While there, they helped out the stricken German aviatrix, Elly Beinhorn, who was flying solo around the world, and had just arrived from Timbuktu. Aged just twenty-three, she was the same age as Stephens. She must have outlived all the other early pilots for whom longevity was at odds with their sport. She finally passed away aged one hundred, in 2007.
Halliburton was a great believer in the wonders of the world.
He understood that associating his expedition with great landmarks would guarantee the media exposure he so desired. Soaring over the Taj Mahal was a natural way to hit the headlines back home, as was the daring flight in the shadows of Mount Everest.
A devoted aficionado of George Mallory, who had perished on that mountain seven years before, Halliburton was desperate to do a fly-by in some kind of tribute. Risking life and limb, and almost freezing solid in the ultra-thin air, they managed, with Halliburton taking the first aerial shots of the mountain with his camera.
The episode is Halliburton description at its best. He wrote:
And then Everest itself, indescribably magnificent, taunting the heavens with its gleaming crown. Her precipice, her clinging glacier shield, her royal streamer forever flying eastward from the throne, her court of gods and demons, her hypnotic, deadly beauty… what incomparable glory crowns this Goddess Mother of all mountains!
Of all the characters and encounters, my very favourite comes a little further, once they had traversed Burma, Indochina, and ar
rived at the seething, steaming jungles of Borneo. There, they found the fabulously eccentric English aristocrat, the ‘Ranee’ Lady Sylvia Brooke, whose husband ruled Sarawak, a principality the size of Britain, peopled with Dyak headhunters. The author of a remarkable book herself (entitled Queen of the Headhunters), they took her up and did acrobatics over the jungles that were her home.
An astounding success, The Flying Carpet Expedition helped in making Halliburton a household name across the United States. The adventure supposedly cost him $50,000, but he recouped twice that in media deals – a huge amount for the time.
As his meteoric career progressed and, as he crisscrossed the planet, Richard Halliburton became one of the most travelled men alive. Always longing for adventure, one gets the feel he also longed to be remembered, cognizant of the fact it would take one slip up, or act of god, to end it all.
And, ultimately, Halliburton’s daredevil brand of travel ran out of luck. Not yet forty, he had embarked on his most hazardous adventure – The Sea Dragon Expedition, in 1939. Having commissioned a Chinese junk in Hong Kong, he intended to cross the Pacific to San Francisco.
After a catalogue of teething problems, the craft set out. Three weeks at sea, and aloft mountainous waves, they sent their last radio dispatch.
Neither the Sea Dragon, Halliburton, nor the crew, were ever heard of again.
To disappear on the trail of a glorious quest is surely the secret dream of any travel writer. But to vanish in one’s prime – with years of accomplishments still unfulfilled – is our great loss.
Richard Halliburton deserves the celebrity he so enjoyed, and to be remembered as an inspiration from the nascent age of modern travel. His was a time of good manners, genteel delivery and, most of all, of impassioned values. It was an era of biplanes, tramp steamers, and of vast open-topped vehicles, a world in which most of humanity had not yet been exposed to the trappings of the industrial age.