PRISONERS IN A GREEN HELL

Dominion, Volume 28, Issue 98, 19 January 1935, Page 19

PRISONERS IN A GREEN HELL

Brilliant Story of Amazon Rubber Trappers

“Jungle,” by Ferreira de Castro, translated from the Portuguese by Charles Duff (London: Lovat Dickson. 12/6). With a realism that at times becomes almost terrifying Senor de Castro writes of the lives of the rubber tappers on a plantation on the Madeira River, one of the great tributaries of the Amazon. It is a story based on his own experiences in what has been called the “Green Hell.” In a foreword he acknowledges that the book was written in the interests of suffering humanity. His feelings will find a response in the hearts of his readers and leave them feeling that here, if conditions are sti’.l the same as when he lived on the “Paradise” plantation in his youth, is a wrong crying out to be righted. With the solitary white man among them a party of natives and mulattos journey for days up the mighty rivers to the work for which they have been engaged, almost regarding it as an adventure and talking of the time when they will return to their families. Disillusion comes swiftly as they immediately find themselves saddled with a huge debt to the planter for the equipment necessary for the work. Their meagre weekly earnings, it soon becomes aparent, will make it almost impossible to pay the initial debt. Hope dies slowly, but dies nevertheless in the soul-destroying place where the planter has almost power of life and death. Escape is well-night impossible Many of them may never leave it. There they remain, hemmed in by the relentless jungle, a solid mass of hungry vegetation where no tree exists as an individual but merely as part of one vast mass. To these exiles it becomes an oppression that grows into an obsession. It appears in the guise of a personal menace certain in the end to obliterate all traces of cultivation and cultivators. The author confesses that the thought of the jungle remained an ever-present nightmare to him long after he had left it. There are descriptive passages in this book that rise to great heights. The journey up the rivers to the plantation comes first; by contrast canoe trips through the smaller jungle waterways where progress resembles going through a green tunnel of branches and where giant snakes, coiled round boughs, have to lie avoided; and of the great storm that alone bad power to humble the jungle. Though the white man is able to leave the plantation, and though the planter meets a terrible death (whether this results in his employees being able to return home we are not told), tlutboughts of readers as they look back on this book —and assuredly it will be remembered —will be haunted by memories of those on the plantations for whom there appeared to be lint one release ADVENTURE IN GEORGIA “Unending Battle,” by H. C. Armstrong. (London: Longmans, 10/6.) Truth, it is said, is stranger than fic'tion. Certainly few products of an inventive writer’s mind could hope to rival the adventures that fill the life story of General Leo Keresselidze leader of the Georgians in one stage of their age-old fight for freedom from the yoke of Russia. Fierce, fearless, proud, quick-temper-ed the Georgians had long chafed again the knowledge that another nation was their master and Leo Keresselidze, reared in one of the staunchest of the nationalistic households, grew up, prodigiously strong, to lead his followers in another phase of the “unending battle.” Summoned from his studies at Geneva. while still almost a boy, he played an important part in a revolt against the Tsar’s rule. In the unequal combat the Georgians, driven finally to conduct a guerilla warfare from the hills and forest, fought without counting the cost, performing feats which succeeded by their sheer effrontery and daring. It could, of course, have only one end but the spirit of Keresselidze’s band was magnificent. Came the war and Keresselidze fought first in Georgia and then in Arabia on the side of the Turks. Back in Georgia again he became a general, but when the long-sought goal seemed within sight at the time of the Bolshevik revolution, yet another disappointment was in store for this soldier of freedom. This story, set in what is to most people a comparatively unknown part of the world, makes enthralling reading. i INTERNATIONAL PEACE | I “Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Year Book, 1933. (Washington: publishedz-by the Endowment.) On October 14. 1910 Mr. Andrew Carnegie, in his letter to the trustees, said: “I have transfered to you as trustees of the Carnegie Peace Fund, ten million dollars of five per cent, first mortgage bonds, the revenue of which is to Ire administered by you to hasten the abolition of international war, the foulest blot upon our civilisation. Although we no longer eat our fellowmen nor torture prisoners, nor sackcities killing their inhabitants, we still kill each other in war like barbarians. Only wild beasts are excusable for doing that in this, the twentieth century of the Christian ora. for the crime r-f war is inherent, since it decides not in favour of the right, but always of the strong.” Thus began the great foundation which every year in its year book surveys the work of the numerous agencies in the world working for the cause of international peace. This volume is a mine of information on the subject, and can be recommended to all who desire a comprehensive and reliable guide to present problems and endeavours. 4 - Sir Charles Mallet has undertaken to write a life of Sir Anthony Hope Hawkins (“Anthony Hope”), of whom he was a contemporary at Balliol. » » * In celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of King George's accession. Mr. John Buchan is writing a survey of his Majesty’s reign, which will be published in the spring by Hodder and Stoughton under the title, “The King's Grace.”