Also, the reader believes it to the letter. After all, why shouldn't he? Only there is this curious result. The reader carries away in his mind the impression of unreality, of a country impossible to be understood and measured and traveled by the ordinary human and his equipment. It is interesting, just as are historical novels, or the superheroes of modern fiction, but it has no real relation to human life. In the last test, the undeniable untruth of the thing forces itself on him. He believes, but he does not understand. He accepts the fact, but he cannot grasp its human quality. The affair is interesting, but it is more or less concocted of cardboard for his amusement. Essential truth is lost.
All this, you must understand, is probably not a deliberate attempt to deceive. It is merely the display of the writer's boyish desire to be a hero in a brand new environment. When a man jumps back into caveman days, he digs up some of his ancestors' cave-qualities. Among these is the desire for personal flourish. His modern development of taste doesn't permit skewers in the ears and polished wire around the neck. So the man drapes himself in qualities instead. It is quite an engaging and diverting trait of character. The attitude of mind it both represents and helps to bring about is too complicated for my brief analysis. In itself it is no more worthy of blame than the small boy's playing at @Indians in the back yard. It is also no more worthy of praise than a child's decoration with feathers.
We are more concerned, though, with its results. Probably each of us has his mental picture that passes as a symbol rather than an idea of the different continents. This is usually a single picture -- a deep river, with a forest, hanging snaky vines, snakes, and monkeys for the east coast of South America, for example. It is built up in youth by chance reading and chance pictures. It serves us as well as a pink place on the map to stand for a part of the world about which we know nothing at all. As time goes on, we extend, expand, and modify this picture in the light of what knowledge we may gain. So the reading of many books modifies and expands our first crude notions of @Equatorial @Africa. And the result is if we read enough of the sort I describe above, we build the idea of an exciting, dangerous, continent, visited by half-real people more like the historical-fiction hero.
