There is an old saying among the equestrian journeyers of Central Asia that a unique occasion will produce a special man. When such a rare occasion arose in 1905 for a courageous horseman to ride from Kashmir to Peking, Major Clarence Bruce stepped into the saddle and cantered into Long Rider history.
As the 20th century dawned this soldier turned author found himself on the wrong side of the Himalayas. Bruce had previously led a regiment of Chinese solders. Yet fate now placed him in picturesque Srinagar, Kashmir, thousands of miles away from faraway Peking where he wished to be.
So Bruce did what any Long Rider would do - the impossible.
He began by making his way to the mountain kingdom of Ladakh. There he enlisted a crew of "wild looking ruffians and 28 rugged ponies," then set off on an eight-month journey that taxed men and horses to their limits. Mounted on his trusty 13 hand high Kashmiri pony, Bruce started by leading his caravan over 18,000 foot high Himalayan passes, before descending onto the Devil's Plain in Tibet. The caravan was hard pressed to avoid detection by these xenophobic mountaineers who were adamant about keeping foreigners like Bruce out of their "forbidden kingdom."
They needn't have bothered. Bruce had set his sights on Peking, thousands of kilometers away, so he wasn't inclined to linger near Lhasa. From freezing in Tibet, Bruce next crossed into Chinese Turkistan. There he stood face to face with the infamous Lop Nor desert.
It was in this dreaded wasteland, as they followed "in the hoofprints of Marco Polo," that Bruce's caravan suffered. Men collapsed. Ponies died. Yet they still rode towards mythical Peking. "The ponies never failed us, no matter how impossible the ground was," Bruce recalled.
"In the Hoofprints of Marco Polo" is that rare kind of book, one that reads as fresh today as it did the day Bruce set his pen to paper. Its pages are full of brave men and braver horses, wild mountains and picturesque tribesmen. Amply illustrated with photos taken by the author, this equestrian travel classic also contains an excellent appendix, complete with all of the author's geographical observations.