The Wily Wali

REPORT FROM PRACTICALLY NOWHERE (252 pp.)--John Sack--Harper ($3.95).

The big countries have been thoroughly pawed over by tourists and travel writers. Searching for a virgin field, Author-Traveler John Sack turned to 13 of the smallest and least important nations, seminations and oddball principalities he could find, from seagirt Lundy (pop. 21), ten miles off the coast of an indifferent England, to the Middle Eastern principality of Swat (pop. 518,600), whose wily Wali encourages the tourist trade, according to Sack, by personally inspecting the toilet drains in his nation's only hotel.

Generally, Author Sack found the rulers he encountered friendly in inverse proportion to the size of their domains. But not always; the Sovereign Military Order of Malta rules over an area in Rome that is half as large as a football field and has a total population of two. One of them, the reigning Lieutenant Grand Master, was far too busy to see Sack. In Monaco, Sack missed Prince Rainier, but everywhere else he hobnobbed with the princes, seneschals, presidents, captains regent, sheiks, nawabs, rahs and dewans of postage-stamp domains from Sark in the English Channel to Sikkim on the edge of Tibet. The Nawab of Amb, a country that is gradually being swallowed up by Pakistan, told Sack of his philanthropies (he had just given 60-c-to a beggar, $3.60 to an orphanage). Then, too, his son, the Nawab Zada, has had difficulties (excessive wenching and cheating on exams) at two missionary colleges in Pakistan, but now has his sights set on Harvard.

In his journeyings Author Sack, 30, visited the Middle European principality of Liechtenstein, where he was the near-victim of an explosion in a salami-skin factory; learned in Sharja on the Arabian peninsula that the selling price of a slave girl is $270; gambled for low stakes with Cadillac-driving smugglers in Andorra, the tiny domain perched in the Pyrenees, between France and Spain. An ex-reporter for U.P. and a magazine writer, Sack employs a racily frenetic style, e.g., using "chugalug" as a verb meaning to drink and "crackajack" as an adjective meaning excellent, and is often as determinedly elfin as Tchico, the dog ghost of Sark. In rating the 13 microcosmic spots he visited, Sack gives highest honors to San Marino, the mountaintop republic in Italy, and second place to polo-playing Punial, a small state near Kashmir. Readers may find the book too whimsy-whamsy to be described as crackajack, but it should not drive them to chugalug.

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