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strange tongues, practising strange customs, worshipping strange gods; where the ash and the oak of our own countryside, the asphalt and bricks and concrete of our towns, the sparrows and dull-plumaged, sweet-voiced birds, are superseded by heavily creepered trees, with brilliant, exotic flowers, by tents and huts, and by birds of enamelled colouring and no song. Who has not dreamed of endur- ing great hardships in icy salt deserts or burn- ing sands, in storms and tempests, to add some small contribution to the solution of the riddle of the universe. And—alas—how many of us manage to do so ? In most of us, as the years creep upon us, the urgent desire wanes, driven away by the comforts and luxuries that civilisation has brought—but there is still a faint stirring of that ambition, which seldom leaves us entirely, although almost strangled by the desire for all the comforts—including palatable food at regular hours—that we have been brought up to expect. Isn’t that the secret of the immense success of holiday cruises ? That taste for seeing strange lands can be gratified without sacrific- ing any comfort. It is one of the ways of enjoy- ing a thrill,with no need for hardship and danger. The other, still more popular, because it is even cheaper, is the cinema. Sitting in your seat, safe and sound, you can put yourself in the hero’s place on the screen and undergo the most startling experiences and be sure that at the end of them you will not find your- self stranded in the middle of the Gobi Desert with one dying camel and no food. And what a wealth of adventure the screen has given us. It ranges from the thrills of fiction to the re-created biography of great men, and the real-life adventures of men of to-day—the men we actually see on the screen. The trials and tribulations of Captain Peter Blood in the days when criminals and political prisoners were sold as slaves, to be worked to death beneath the grilling tropic suns, the excitements and privations of piracy (which has a subtle appeal to everyone, for who is there that does not get a thrill from “ getting away with it," whether " it ” is smuggling a packet of cigarettes or a bottle of perfume through the Customs, or exceeding the thirty- mile speed limit ?) are very real, and would stir the most sluggish blood. “ Elephant Boy gives Left: Frank. Buck with a poisonous land-crab, and, in circle above, a Malayan honey bear. Below : A scene from “ Rhodes of Africa,” showing an attack on a pioneer column of 1890. scene from '* Beyond Shanghai.' us thrills of a different kind—it is an adaptation of Kipling's “ Toomai of the Elephants,” and was filmed in India. The little human hero is pictured here on the elephant hero, Kala Nag. The old saying that truth is stranger than fiction has been most strongly demonstrated by the films. We can travel to forgotten cities, built by a civilisation that was old when the Ancient Britons still daubed themselves with woad and lived n caves; we can see man’s painful struggle to build the present civiliza- tion—the slow triumph of brain over brawn—science over superstition. For the cinema gives us not only vivid re- creations of the exploits of heroes of the past, it gives us pictures of present- day achievements — with the actual