Singing Sands

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 382, 18 October 1946, Page 13

Singing Sands

Miss MILDRED. CABLE, one of a team of missionary-explorers now visiting. New Zealand, spoke the other | evening from 3YA of her experiences, and displayed at once the indefinable quality of modern explorers — Freya Stark, Bertram Thomas, even Peter Fleming, these have it too. It is an outlook entirely different from that of the 19th Century voyager who, when they did not insist on judging the new lands by the standards of their own society, retained indomitably- the faculties of wonder and surprise. Not so the modern; Miss Cable, who distributes the Bible among Mongols, Kirghiz, and Uzbeks, has no sense of strangeness. In her voice is no more than a quiet naturalness, an acceptance of the flow of life as it passes before ‘her eyes, in whatever landscapes, garments and ornaments, on whatever beasts, vehicles and roads, it may chance to go. The charm and importance of this to the listener is that the speaker imposes no attitudes or reactions upon him, but. a calm objectivity which leaves him free to feel and. think as he really wishes; respecting the life she describes, she respects the independence of judgment of her audience. Here, she says, is a way of life; think of it what you will. One begins to wonder whether Central Asian travel is not the last refuge of the individual; no false standards of romance and glamour bedevil his mind, but in an atmosphere of dry and ageless calm he can breathe freely, and look for the first time at what he sees, weighing and measuring it for what it is in a pure relation of observer and observed. But, no doubt, it is no longer so. A Soviet column rumbles along the northern horizon, on its way to present collectivist standards to the Mongol; and the south-east sky is uneasy with Mustangs, ensuring the freedom of Uzbek individualism. Everywhere the importunity of commercial systems and ideologies beats at the citadel of the mind.