News from Tartary: A Journey from Peking to Kashmir

Published in 1936 this account of a journey on foot, horse, yak, mule, and, at the beginning and end, train, truck, and car from Peking to Kashmir offers up author Peter Fleming as an exemplar of the diffident English traveler, upper lip always stiff, and capable of tossing off prose refreshingly arid in understatement and irony. One imagines that if, in our time, travelers attempted such a grueling journey packing "only the following supplies: 2 lb. of marmalade, 4 tins of cocoa, 6 bottles of brandy, 1 bottle of Worcester sauce, 1 lb, of coffee, 3 small packets of chocolate, some soap, and a good deal of tobacco," they would be somehow be forced to desist. And you have to love the "1 bottle of Worcester sauce." One wants to know more about Fleming's traveling companion, a woman he calls Kini, and whose real name is Ella Maillart. (See http://www.ellamaillart.ch/index_en.php.) That I read the book in a 1944 hardcover published by Jonathan Cape that includes the all important map (not the comparatively garish product whose cover adorns this squib) made this literary journey that much more enjoyable.