Amurath to Amurath

A SECOND edition of Miss Bell's account of her journey from Aleppo to Baghdad, and thence to Konia, is very welcome; for surely “Amurath to Amurath “deserves to rank with the best of travel books. Miss Bell's keen observation, penetrating judgment, and profound archseological knowledge, which are combined with a gift of graphic narrative, are here perhaps at their best. She is equally at home in describing an ancient Mesopotamian site and in recording the gossip of the bazaar. Her thumb-nail sketches of the people she met are vivid and compact with an imaginative insight into the soul of the Eastern races. As this book was first published in 1911, soon after the uprising of the Committee of Union and Progress and the advent to power of the young Turk, its political interest, when read in the light of subsequent events, scarcely need be emphasised.Amurath to Amurath.Gertrude LowthianBellBy. Second edition. Pp. xvii + 370 + 105 plates. (London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1924.) 21s. net.