The Birmingham age-herald., 1914-05-17
RUDYARD K|PL|NG
 TALKS ON SMELLS
Burning Fuel and Melting
 Grease Most Potent
RELATION TO TRAVEL
How Men Visualize Their Travels Through Association of Smells-In- accessible No Longer Fossil
 ble as Applied to Place

Rudyard Kipling talked last night to an audience of geosraphers who filled Queens hall. says the London Daily Mail It was some of the best talk they had ever heard.
 It was all about travel-how men vis- uaiize their travelr. the smells they re- member, the memories that smells recall. and the coming change In all things as the limitless new air travel over mountain ranges and oceans make obsolete the old travel by horse. camel. steamboat. and motor-car.
 sonn .af the more intimate and personal aspects of travel" he said They may be trival or absurd, but one must remem- Der that in few years most of our ex- isting methods of transport, together with the physical and mental emotions that accompany them. win be profoundly changed
 ''The time is near when men will receive their normal impressions of new count " suddenly and in pain. not slowly and in perspective; when the most extreme distances will be brought within the com- pass of one week's-1eS hourse-travel: when the word 'inaccessible' as applied to any given sport on the surface of the globe will cease to have any meaning: l present myself tonight. then, as in some sort of recorder of experiences which are on the eve of being superseded
 Mental Cinema
 'I knew one man who said he could run any road that he had marched over, back ward between his eyelide like a cinemato- graph film before he went to sleep His companions told me that his diary and written work were quite bad, but that they always took his word for the time and place of any event that had happened on the road
 "A man who carries too many pictures in his head is apt to forget vital things like straps and kettle-lids when the loads are being packed On the other hand. I have been assured by competent authori- ties that the camp book, if white, ought to be of a sentimental and imaginative disposition It makes him more generous.
 ~I seem to have read lately of a cook whose notions of twelfth course of a dinner to some returned voyagers was 10 boxes of sardines made into a pile with bacon and pastry to match May one take it that he was imaginative?
 l|cl uS CDnsiaCI TUT d Wuilt tie able, the fascinating subject of smells in their relation to the traveller" Here the audience laughed loudly.
 We will soon have to exchange them for blasts of petrol and atomised castor oil
 T suggest, subject to correction-there are only two elementary smells and uni- versal appeaEthe smell of burning fuel and the smell of melting grease The smell that is, of what man cooks his food over, and what he cooks his food in
 Wood Smoke First
 'l rank wood-smolze first, since it calls up more, more intimate and varied mem oriess over wider geographical range. to a larger number of individuals than any other agent that we know
 And next to wood smoke for waking rampant 'wanderlust' comes the smell of melting grease-such smell or boquet of omels as one may gather outside a Lon don fried fish shop Where grease Is melt ing, something is being cooked, and that means a change from tinned food for one night at any rate It is an opulent, kalei- doscopic, semitic smell of immense range and variety of color
 Sometimes 1t reconstructs big covered bazaars of well-stocked cities with the blue haze hanging in the domes, or 1t ressurects little heaven-sent single stalls picked up by the roadside, where one can pul penny DOIIleS or sauce or paper of badly needed buttons
 "lt implies camels kneeling to unload; belts and straps being loosened; contented camp followers lodging off to buy supplies -turmeric. assafoetida, curry stuffs: men washing their hands in sand before dip ping them into the greasy pewter platters-
 And the next gust of surge of 1t may be pure Central Asia-thick and choking as butter lamps before Thfbetan shrine Thihef2n Qhriuo nth ;r, |. one star on the tip of mountain, and brown-cloaked Bhityali rustling up through dry maize stalls to sell a chick en-
 Polar Smells
 Coming now to smells of particular ap- peal what would most vividly remind a Polar explorer of past experiences? I sug- 'gest that ether-like smell given off by the flame of big spirit lamp when it is flattened out against the heated metal cooking plate above-an unmixed smell. simple of itself like Falstaffs sack. I should put thes limits of this appea1 roughly as from the seventies of either pole
 Prom the seventies to the sixties runs the desolats smeTl of tine stranded berg as it plies mp reeking with ooxe gauged off the sea floors At the sixties and down to Labrador 1t seems to me we reach kindly timber and suggestion of meat on the hoof. little lower the ap- peals thicken and become more complex. There is heartaching little motE of five .notes-horse, old saddlery, coffee, fried <bacon, and tobacco (from cut plug or maizeleaf cigarettes)-rhat can carry a man down from high dry camps in the -Se1kirks, or wet ones in. the Oregon. .down and down over red spicy dust and sdead white dust through the scent of ,sage-bush and sharp peppery Euphorbias, down to the terrified goat-scented south where fried beans, incense. and the ab- .ominable brassy smell of pluque will pass .bim on to all the forlorn brood of man. grove foreshore and yellow fever stinks. until he leaves his horse on the beach, and while the tropic lift up his heart with the wholesome rasp of sunbaked coral and dried fish.
 The Future
 "But what of the future? Into what 4erms win this world-old, foot-proud energy of travel translate itself under Ahe new conditions? Here is our position. Jp to the present we have been forced to .fnove in two dimensions by the help of fhe three beasts of burden and a few live goals in pot. Now we perceive that we can move in three dimensions, and the possibilities of our new freedom distract And disturb us in all relations.
 ' There will arise-and are shaping Themselves even now-rfsks to be met as Eruel as any that Hudson or Scott faced: dreams as worldwide as Columbus of Cecil Rhodes dreamed, to be made good or Ipiendidly terrible as that which Drake clincked by Magellan. or Oates little further south.
 r There is no break in fl,e 1t,,e no iooda