[In the following review of The Road to Oxiana, Greene discusses what he considers the book's strengths and shortcomings.]

"Samarcand, for the last fifty years, has attracted scholars, painters, and photographers. Thus the setting of the Timurid Renaissance is conceived as Samarcand and Transoxiana, while its proper capital, Herat, remains but a name and a ghost. Now the position is reversed. The Russians have closed Turkistan. The Afghans have opened their country. And the opportunity arrives to redress the balance. Strolling up the road towards the minarets, I feel as one might feel who has lighted on the lost books of Livy or an unknown Botticelli."

It is this mixture of scholarship and romanticism that gives Mr. Byron's account of a journey through Persia and Afghanistan [The Road to Oxiana] its unusual and agreeable flavour: the poetic imagination which evokes a personal East so vividly—the roses stuck in the rifles of Afghan soldiers, the opium flowers "glowing in the dusk like lamps of ice, " the dead wolf under a wild fruit tree in pink blossom—is strengthened by the architectural detail, so that at their best his descriptions have the merits of two worlds. Take, for example, his account of the doorways in Persepolis:

Other architectural features are the stairs, the platform, and the palace doors. The stairs are fine because there are so many of them. The platform is fine because its massive blocks have posed, and solved, an engineering problem. Neither has any art. But the doorways have. They, and they alone, boast a gleam of true invention; they suggest ideas, they utter a comment, with regard to other doorways. Their proportions are narrow and thick, thus inviting a perpetual to and fro; whereas our doors ask the figure to pause and frame itself.

And this of the ruins of Balkh:

And from these acred cerements, first on the north and then on the south of the road, rose the worn grey-white shapes of a bygone architecture, mounds, furrowed, and bleached by the rain and sun, wearier than any human works I ever saw: a twisted pyramid, a tapering platform, a clump of battlements, a crouching beast, all familiars of the Bactrian Greeks, and of Marco Polo after them. They ought to have vanished. But the very impact of the sun, calling out the obstinacy of their ashen clay, has conserved some inextinguishable spark of form, a spark such as a Roman earthwork or a grass-grown barrow has not, which still flickers on against a world brighter than itself, tired as only a suicide frustrated can be tired.

Occasionally—that last comparison is an example—Mr. Byron's romanticism runs uncomfortably riot: a more serious complaint which has to be made against an admirable book is a kind of unsteadiness of approach, as if the author had been in some doubt in what quarter he was going to find his public. The firm vivid writing edges away at one end into a rather smart, cheap, un-sympathetic superiority to his surroundings, as when, against the Persian custom, he turned his muleteers from his room: "I answered that I also have customs, and one of them is not to be inconvenienced by the pipe or presence of muleteers in my own employ"; at the other to a text-book dryness: "The dome of the middle chamber is some fifteen feet higher than the other two. Higher still is the elliptical cupola which separates it from the front dome, and which roofs the passage between the middle chamber and the outer ruined one. The passage is divided into two storeys, " etc. This type of description demands photographs or drawings to illustrate it: mathematical and not visual it will appeal only to specialists, who may find the humour and romanticism of the rest of the book tiresome; nor are the pages of Persian and Afghan history always transformed into personal material. We are left with three books, one a little gossipy and knowing with private jokes, the second almost too dryly instructive, the third among the best books of Eastern travel since Kinglake.