Carte Blanche: The Romance of Travel.

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 20:35:27 GMT

Cart, Michael (author).
FEATURE. First published September 15, 2009 (Booklist).

When I was a kid, I used to think travel was romantic. Oh, not romantic in the sense of honeymoon trips to Niagara Falls (pause for parenthetical thought: Was the choice of that particular destination for launching connubial bliss actually an unconscious act of equation between getting married and going over the falls in a barrel?). No, definitely not romantic in that way but, rather, in the sense of high adventure, danger, wonder, and marvel. For that you can blame (or credit) world traveler par excellence Richard Halliburton, at whose best-selling, two-volume Book of Marvels I thrilled as a preadolescent armchair adventurer. How could I not? Listen:

“Then he looked toward the east, straight across the Aegean. . . . There was where adventure lay and all the marvels he was going to behold.” That’s from Richard Halliburton’s Second Book of Marvels: The Orient and if it doesn’t set your hair on fire with anticipation, then your spirit of adventure is in need of a serious tune-up. The “he” is an imaginary Greek boy named Demetrius, who is about to set off, in the year 250 BCE, on a voyage with his father, Diomede, to visit six of the seven wonders of the ancient world. In case you’ve forgotten, they were (1) the statue of Zeus at Olympia; (2) the temple of Diana at Ephesus; (3) the tomb of King Mausolus (from whose name our modern word mausoleum derives); (4) the Colossus of Rhodes; (5) the lighthouse at Alexandria; and (6) the Pyramids. Alas, Demetrius doesn’t get to see the seventh, the hanging gardens of Babylon: “Babylon was too far away from Greece. Diomede could not spare the time for such a long journey.”

But not to worry; Halliburton, that modern-day Demetrius, takes his readers there himself, for in his books, the globe-trotter likes to mix the (sometimes apocryphal) history of the wonders he visits with a look at their present-day circumstances. Thus, on our way to ancient Babylon, we have an appointment in Samarra, where an exciting and dangerous climb to the top of its ziggurat, the Malwiyah, awaits us. And there, 160 feet above the desert floor, Halliburton produces “a big lunch basket. We open it. Out comes roast chicken, and olives, and peaches, and melons. The citizens of modern Samarra have also prepared a feast for us. Several of them struggle up the dizzying incline carrying platters of rice and curried lamb. We are soon bulging with these delights.” Adventure and eats! That Halliburton sure knew the way to this boy’s heart.

There was much, much more to marvel at in Halliburton’s two-volume magnum opus. Volume 2 also introduced us to the Taj Mahal, where Halliburton once contrived to linger after it was closed to visitors so he could take a midnight dip in its reflecting pool (he really did!); then there’s Mount Everest, of course. “This defiant mountain we must see,” Halliburton enthuses, “for where, in all the world, is there a Marvel more marvelous than this?” And he should know, since his plane, the Flying Carpet, was the first ever to approach the world’s tallest peak, which, years before, had claimed the life of the intrepid English mountaineer George Mallory, Halliburton’s own childhood hero. It would be nice to be able to report that Halliburton grew up to climb the peak himself, but, of course, he didn’t. No one did until 1953, 14 years after Halliburton’s own romantic death. But more about that in a minute. First, there would be many other ports of call on Halliburton’s marvelous itinerary—faraway places with strange-sounding names. And some—New York City, the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, and even, you guessed it, Niagara Falls—not so far away (volume 1 of the author’s two-volume tour-de-force focused on what he called The Occident.)

Halliburton himself was born in the Occident—in Brownsville, Tennessee, on January 9, 1900. A child of privilege, he was educated at the pricey prep school Lawrenceville and at Princeton, where the budding writer was on the editorial board of the Daily Princetonian and served as editor in chief of the Princetonian Pictorial Magazine.

His first book, The Royal Road to Romance, was published in 1925 and became an immediate best-seller. His second effort, The Glorious Adventure, published in 1927, was an account of his journey retracing the voyages of Ulysses. Then came New Worlds to Conquer (1929), which included an account of his famous swim through the Panama Canal (for which he was charged 36 cents, the lowest toll in Canal history!). Then came The Flying Carpet (1932), the thrilling story of his flight around the world in an open cockpit biplane, and Seven League Boots (1935), which took readers like me to Ethiopia, Russia, Arabia, and the Alps. And, finally, the two volumes closest to my armchair heart: Richard Halliburton’s Book of Marvels: The Occident (1937) and Richard Halliburton’s Second Book of Marvels: The Orient (1938).

In a youthful letter to his parents, Halliburton once wrote, “And when my time comes to die, I’ll be especially happy if I am spared a stupid, common death in bed.”

He needn’t have worried. On March 3, 1939, he set off on what would prove to be his last adventure: his goal was to sail a 75-foot Chinese junk, the Sea Dragon, across the Pacific Ocean, from Hong Kong to San Francisco. Three weeks later, the ship was struck by a typhoon and vanished. Missing at sea for seven months, Halliburton was officially declared dead on October 5, 1939, by the Memphis, Tennessee, Chancery Court. He was just 39 years old.

“I hope you have enjoyed our travels together,” he wrote his readers at the conclusion of The Orient. “Now we know how really wonderful our world is—because we have seen its wonders with our own eyes, and touched them with our own hands.”

And so we had, thanks to Halliburton’s own blithely romantic and adventuresome spirit.

Michael Cart is, most recently, the author of Talking Animals and Others: The Life and Work of Walter R. Brooks (Overlook).

Booklist Online - Carte Blanche

Carte Blanche: The Romance of Travel.