Restating the Obvious

Book Review XVIII: Gobi: Tracking the Desert

GOBI: Tracking the Desert, by John Man. 212 pages, illustrated. Widened & Nicholson, 18.99 pounds

When “Gobi” was published in 1997, author John Man claimed it was the first book in English about the desert. There had been other books, but they were about doing things in the Gobi, hunting Przhevalski horses or dinosaur fossils, not just about the desert itself.

The distinction is too subtle to be worth bothering about. “Gobi: Tracking the Desert” is a travel book and a good one. It is more about the people who live there than the desert as a desert. In fact, there is a disappointing lack of mere facts about the land.

This was, perhaps, unavoidable, but since the basic fact is that it is a desert, one would like to know, how dry. It is a huge place -- as big as France -- with a variety of terrains, but except for one area where Man tells us that rainfall averages under 3 inches a year, we learn nothing about how much, or even at what season, it rains.

Even a gravel bed as dry as the Gobi has to experience some rain -- it is not like the Atacama -- because it supports wild and domesticated herds of big animals and a lot of people for a gravel bed: 200,000 and growing rapidly in 1996, when Man spent a couple of months there.

Although skimpy on geology and meteorology, “Gobi” is otherwise an information-rich environment, despite being only 200 pages. Man manages to recount the highlights of  the most famous recent western explorers, Nikolai Przhevalski and Roy Chapman Andrews.

Przhevalski discovered the last wild horse, a sort of punk horse in attitude and appearance with its Mohawk and rejectionist attitude which later went extinct but is now being restocked from display herds in Europe, rather as Hawaii recovered its nene. Andrews discovered dinosaur eggs.

Man devotes a lot of space to the horse (also known as the tarkhi) and the snow leopard, and some to other big animals -- asses, gazelles, camels and a somewhat forlorn bear, the only one that lives in a desert. Much less to the plants, whose ability to get by in this environment is in some ways even more remarkable than the animals.

However, the book is mostly about the people, who Man found very appealing. The emphasis on their charm is perhaps excessive, but then, after all, this is a people whose national hero is Genghis Khan.

The desert hospitality is, in fact, a necessary social behavior. If travelers could not count on water, food and shelter from strangers, no one would be able to move at all. The Arabs and those other desert dwellers, the Eskimo, have similar customs and the Arabs, at least, lose most of their charm when they move out of the desert, as, indeed, have the Mongols.

Man has the decency to worry about barging into this exchange, since “I was the recipient . . . of a generosity I could not repay in kind.” Whether Mongol social practices can survive modernization -- coming on fast -- is a question. Man doubts it.

It is difficult to judge the accuracy of a report about such an unknown place, but I found only a single, not terribly significant error: Man describes the battle of Khalkhin Gol as one of the “most significant, biggest and underrated” of the 20th century. He is right about the first and the last, but the battle was not big. The Imperial Japanese Army committed only one division.