BOOK REVIEW - The Gobi Desert by MildredCable

 

This is a fascinating book.

I got it second hand and did not realise just how well-known the author actually is. So far as I was concerned it was a cheap second hand book written at the time and so was likely to be an interesting contemporary view of an area of the world about which I knew little. Which it is in. In spades. Wow.

The book was written by a British missionary woman who traveleld for years around the oases, towns and out of the way hamlets of the Gobi desert to bring the word of Christ to the locals. Not that you would really know that from this book. The missionary activity is barely mentioned. And her two companions do not rate a mention at all except she occassionally says "we" when referring to herself indicating that somebody else was there at the time.

What this book is, however, is a marvellously compelling description of the Gobi as it was in the 1920s and early 1930s. It was a vanishing world, and the author is aware of that. The advent of aircraft and motor lorries was transforming the millennia old face of the Gobi with its camel trains, donkey transport and unsuface roads and byways. This was a Gobi where a wrong turn could spell a hideous, long-drawn out death from thirst

She describes the different peoples of the area, their religions, customs and habits. She looks at the ruins of the past and gives a bit of history, but mostly it is the contemporary that dominates this book. The crops, the minerals, the trade, the characters, the places, the road and the desert - always the desert.

The book ends with an account of the wars that broke out after the Chinese government annexed and then abolished the centuries old Khanate of Kumul, which had ruled the area for centuries under a dynasty that was descended from Genghis Khan. Those wars eventually saw the area collapse in to chaos and anarchy that costs tens of thousands of lives, destroyed the trade routes and ended with dozens of towns utterly abandoned. It also drove the author from the area in fear of her life

A great book. It is available in modern reprints, so go and get a copy.