Going the distance in Mongolia

“Study Mongolia” has never been on any resolution list I’ve ever drawn up. Yet here I sit, having just reluctantly finished Stewart’s fine book about his journey there. Now I am conversant in Mongol history and current, as never before, on what goes on across the many miles between Olgii and Ulan Bator. Stewart, a gifted British writer, has taken me there, covering much of the distance on hired Mongol horses, armed with a fancy saddle, a crazy dream and a sharp sense of humor.

The book’s premise is fairly slight. Part of it is that Stewart, whose previous books include tales of wanderings in China and Africa, admires the idea of a nomad’s life. He also cherishes the chance to hang around with modern-day Mongols while so many of their cultural traditions are still in practice, including a great deal of travel by horse.

The other reason for the journey is that Stewart wants to follow the path of an underappreciated explorer, Friar William of Rubruck. William was a Flemish Franciscan missionary who set off from Istanbul (then Constantinople) on a journey across Asia in 1253, the year before Marco Polo was born and less than 35 years after the death of Genghis Khan.

William made few converts, but he and his small party got to Mongolia and back, covering an estimated 11,000 miles. The friar documented it all in detail. (The only reason Polo’s account is more famous, Stewart suggests, is because he had a publisher who was better at publicity.)

So Stewart has several stories to tell: The history of the Mongols (including their struggles under communism and capitalism in the last 80 years), the 13th century exploits of Friar William and, not least, his own adventures.

That last category includes Stewart’s encounters with locals, guides, translators, fellow travelers and several horses, and his many meals (picture sheep parts bobbing in broth) in and around the gers (yurts) of his Mongolian hosts. Our narrator joins wedding parties, observes wrestling matches, disarms a gun-wielding adolescent on a bedraggled Russian ship and approaches the mountain of Burkhan Khaldun, where Genghis Khan is thought to be buried but has never been found. Stewart also spends many evenings in the company of rustic men in round tents consuming rustic alcohol. Here he is describing his compartment companion on a Simferopol-to-Volgograd train:

“He slept with one eye slightly ajar. From beneath its lower lid it followed me round the compartment. As he fell deeper into his slumbers his limbs began to convulse, like a dog dreaming of chasing rabbits.”

But if you’re thinking this is a Bill Bryson-riffs-on-the-hinterlands sort of book, don’t. Consider this later passage:

“From the air, Mongolia looks like God’s preliminary sketch for Earth, not so much a country as the ingredients out of which countries are made: grass, rock, water and wind. Undulating hills, smooth as felt, rolled away into grassy infinities. A river spilled a silver lacework of water across soft downs. The emptiness was startling. Mongolia made the sky, with its baroque clouds, seem crowded and fussy.”

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Pure spectacle in ceramics

The Art of the Islamic Tile , By Gerard Degeorge and Yves Porter, Flammarion, $65

Here is a marriage of bold colors, painstaking design and patterns intricate enough to make your head swim. The authors have gathered images from Spain, Tunisia, India and other lands with an Islamic heritage.

Iran and Central Asia get the longest chapter, which seems only right: The detail and scale of those tiled walls and domes are staggering. There’s some history, along with a map and chronology in back, but this book is about visuals.

Photographer Degeorge, a specialist in the Islamic world, is also trained as a civil engineer and architect.

London for the serious tourist

Blue Guide London, By Roger Woodley, W.W. Norton, $25.95

The price may seem a bit steep for a paperback (especially one with just a handful of color photos), but Blue Guides are aristocrats in the society of travel guidebooks. While others scramble to outdo one another with the latest restaurant and hotel listings, the Blue Guide kisses off those subjects quickly -- just 30 pages up front in the London book -- then charges ahead to its principal interests: architecture and history. In fact, author Woodley is an architectural historian, and the text is punctuated with his enthusiasms (the Houses of Parliament and Norman Foster’s curvy new City Hall, for instance) and his complaints (on the Tower Bridge: “first-class engineering made to look silly by its fancy dress”).

In this London guide, rewritten for its 17th edition, the series editors seem to be spiffing up the product for slightly shorter attention spans and perhaps younger travelers, a good sign from a series that used to be laughably staid. If you’ve already sorted out lodgings, don’t need much help with restaurants and really want to know what you’re seeing, who built it and when, this is your book.

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Calender writer Christopher Reynolds’ book column appears twice monthly.