Wonders of the Himalaya E-Book

Francis Younghusband

• Herausgeber: La Línea Del Horizonte Ediciones
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Serie: Contemporary
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 306

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Francis Younghusband was barely twenty years old when he set out in search of "the true spirit of the Himalayas". Written forty years later, this book takes a retrospective look at the two expeditions he made between 1886 and 1889 for which the Royal Geographic Society awarded him its Gold Medal. The first of these expeditions took him from Peking to Kashmir via a route that was 5,500 kilometers long. In the second, he explored the uncharted Karakoram and Pamir passes. Previously unpublished in Spanish, this work conveys with serenity the passion of his youth and the satisfaction he derived from those vast Himalayan landscapes. The present edition commemorates the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of its author's birth.

Leseprobe

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sir Francis Edward Younghusband (May 31, 1863, Murree, Pakistán — July 31, 1942, Lytchett Minster, Dorset, England).

Sir Francis Edward Younghusband (b. May 31, 1863 in British India, d. July 31, 1942 in Dorset, England) was among the great British figures to explore the Karakorams and the Himalayas. In recognition of his achievement, the Royal Geographic Society awarded him its gold medal. He was the youngest member to be inducted into that organization and later in his life would go on to serve as its president.

A career officer, Younghusband set off on Central Asian and Himalayan expeditions soon after joining the Queens Dragon’s Guard in the regiment at Rawalpindi, now part of Pakistan. This was during the era of the Great Game, when the discovery of Himalayan routes and passes were of vital importance to England and Russia’s imperial ambitions of England. In the wake of his first mountain exploits, he carried out various missions for the Political Service in India and led the British invasion of Tibet, which resulted in the occupation Llasa and the Anglo-Tibetan Treaty of 1904 and in turn the flight of the XIII Dalai Lama to Mongolia. Explorer, officer, spy, geographer, journalist, mountain climber, author, professor, Younghusband was an extraordinary character who in the last years of his life promoted the World Congress of Faith, which he founded in 1936. He believed in spiritualism and in the common values of other religions, and drew on their teachings to conceive a new faith based on ideas of holistic nature, including the existence of the planet Altaïr as the radiant focal point of a new humanity.

ABOUT THE BOOK

We are told to “live dangerously.” And we are told to lead “the strenuous life.” That day I had lived dangeously enough to satisfy a Nietzsche and strenuously enough to satisfy any Roosevelt.

FRANCIS YOUNGHUSBAND

If the word “adventure” still exudes a fragrance, then some of its most alluring aromas circulate around the person of Francis Younghusband: will, chance, romanticism, creation...This year marks the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of his birth. He was barely twenty years old when he set out in search of what he called “the true spirit of the Himalaya,” perhaps a state of plentitude, of oneness with existence, a condition that has been described at length by explorers of snow peaks. Between 1886 and 1889, he led two expeditions for which the Royal Geographic Society immediately awarded him its gold medal. In this beautiful and moving account, never before published in Spanish, Younghusband relates the details of this early adventure. Written forty years later, the book conveys with serenity the passion of his youth and the satisfaction he derived from those majestic Himalayan landscapes.

On his first expedition, he departed from Peking, crossed the Gobi Desert, discovered the Mustagh Pass and made his way to Kashmir. This was the principal trade route between Yarkand and India, all five thousand five hundred kilometers, which no European had travelled since Marco Polo’s day. Just a few months later, in 1889, he set off on his second expedition, the present volume, to locate a route through the uncharted Karakorams and the Pamir Pass (he was particularly keen to explore the Saltoro Pass and the Shimshal Pass). Crossing Hunza and returning to India by way of Gilgit and Ladakh, he was overjoyed by the sight of Mount Everest. Years later, he chaired the committee that organized the earliest assaults on that mountain (in 1921, 1922, and 1924) and which claimed the lives of George Mallory and Andrew Irvine.

A multi-faceted, contradictory, and passionate figure, Younghusband’s biography is filled with gray areas and perplexing episodes characteristic of one who lives at the edge. His role in the invasion of Tibet and the massacre of its people under his leadership, his spiritual preoccupations which launched him on a quest for a new religion, and his eccentricities are all of a piece with the rare individual who in these pages gives voice to his passion and determination to fully live.

The last great imperial adventurer. Patrick French

Wonders of the Himalaya by Sir Francis Edward Younghusband in Google Maps

Wonders of the Himalaya

EXPLORATIONS IN CENTRAL ASIA, KARAKORUM AND PAMIR

Original title : Wonders of the Himalaya Author: Sir Francis Edward Younghusband

Títle of the Spanish edition:Por el Himalaya. Exploraciones por Asia Central, Karakórum y Pamir

First edition published by La Línea del Horizonte Ediciones: December 2013 © This edition: La Línea del Horizonte Ediciones, 2013www.lalineadelhorizonte.com | [email protected] Ph: +00 34 912 940 024

Introduction copyright © Ricardo Martínez Llorca Biographical note © Adolfo Muñoz and Ricardo Martínez Llorca Introduction, English translation © Laurel Berger © Print edition layout and cover design: Víctor Montalbán | Montalbán Estudio Gráfico Digital edition layout © Valentín Venzalá

Jacket photographs:Francis Younghusband by William Quiller Orchardson and Kunlun Peak by Robert Shaw

ISBN ePub: 978-84-15958-21-5 IBIC: WTLC- WTLP- WSZG-1FKAH-1FL

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form, except as permitted by law, without the written permission of the publisher.

Wonders of the Himalaya

EXPLORATIONS IN CENTRAL ASIA, KARAKORUM AND PAMIR

FRANCIS YOUNGHUSBAND

Introduction: Ricardo Martínez Llorca

SOLVITUR AMBULANDO COLLECTION

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ABOUT THE BOOK

The Grammar of ResurrectionINTRODUCTION BY RICARDO MARTÍNEZ LLORCA

CHAPTER I First leave in the Himalaya

CHAPTER II By Kulu to Simla

CHAPTER III T urkestan to India

CHAPTER IV The Mustagh Pass

CHAPTER V Through Kashmir

CHAPTER VI Raiders and Russians

CHAPTER VII Meeting the Kirghiz

CHAPTER VIII The Search for the Saltoro Pass

CHAPTER IX Rest and Reflection

CHAPTER X The Raider's Stronghold

CHAPTER XI Meeting the Russians

CHAPTER XII Hunza

CHAPTER XIII

The Grammar of Resurrection

A person of means, seeking escape from the damnable pest-houses of ordinary life, decides to pay a visit to the old cities along the Silk Road. In twenty days, moving at the speed of brushfire in a duststorm, he covers the distance from Instanbul to Beijing and catches but a whiff of the spice-scent that permeates the Asian bazaars, each leg of the journey having been tightly scheduled. Tour operators, keen to maintain their juicy slice of the market pie, leave little to chance lest they risk the ire of their clients. And with this intrusion of order, those who seek to elude the enemy -- otherwise known as everyday reality -- never quite lose touch with it. It’s a complicated business, to shed the seriousness that governs the most quotidian part of the realist’s nights and days. And like good realists, we’re loathe to let things take a course we can’t control and so we find ourselves engaged in a struggle for order.

An encounter with the English adventurer Sir Francis Younghusband (b. 1863, Murree, India, d. 1942, Lytchett Minster, England) -- or at least the Younghusband whose acquaintance we make in books like this one -- introduces us not to certitudes but to certain ideas of the intuitive order. One such notion holds that realist ideology is just as burdened by psychic disturbances as is, say, romanticism.

Where reality rules, chance, one of the main forces that drives the natural world, is denied passage. In a romantic universe, however, chance is ever present and is allowed to operate unbound. Like all good explorers, Younghusband chose the Romantic’s perspective in which the world around him is not just one big pest house. Through the moral authority conferred by his text and the flights of fancy that punctuate his emotional life, he cut himself off from reality. Early in his wanderings as a young man, a period he revisits in Wonders of the Himalaya, Younghusband had an inkling that chance was all of a piece with adventure and the creative impulse and nature; indeed, in later years, chance represented, for him, the very essence of spiritual life.

On high mountain peaks, he found all the aspects of himself that gave his life meaning. He was a commissioned officer and a leader of miltary expeditions; a solitary traveller (in the sense that on many occasions he travelled unnacompanied by other Europeans); a conquistador of freedom and self-reliance. He became a writer so that he could share with others the dual passions that he thought sufficient to justify the existence of the cosmos: Beauty and religious faith. And in the process, he transformed himself into a multi-faceted yet contradictory character whose grandiosity lead him into barbarity.

Younghusband commenced his travelling life as a disciplined military man, anxiously awaiting permission to take up residence among treacherous mountain passes. He ended his days promoting the Gaia hypothesis (which theorizes that the Earth is possessed of a universal cosmic spirit) and affirming his conviction that cosmic rays had the power to transform Man’s soul. His spiritual theories were conceived at five or six thousand meters above sea-level, among the great peaks, where breathing is hard and the thinness of the air reduces us to half of what we are and nature strips us of our pride and demands all-out effort. This idea of effort would become another key to his work, his ideology, his religion.

Today, tour outfitters organize journeys which cover ten thousand kilometers in twenty days, the amount of time it took Younghusband to locate a mountain pass that connects two contiguous valleys in the Himalayas. Any physical obstacle, any boulder, hunk of ice, storm, any hazard at all, was transformed at a glance into an object of wonder. Other wonderous things included the company of the hardy admirable men with whom he communicated -- or so one gathers from his accounts -- in the universal language of the eyes.

And it was to these men that Younghusband conceded the privilege of being the region’s true discoverers. Although he is recognized as the first European to have crossed on foot the Pamirs and the uncharted mountain ranges that surround the Baltoro Glacier, he wasn’t the first to explore those routes. That privilege belonged to the Asians. The explorer’s spirit, full of respectful energies and energetic respect, was the privilege of the few and the best: Francis Younghusband and the unsurpassable Richard Burton. Like Burton, who credited the Africans with the discovery of Africa, Younghusband maintained that the Himalaya and the Karakorums were discovered by Baltis and Gurkhas and sherpas. In an era of Western imperialism, when it was commonly accepted that the center of the universe was not far from the imaginary line that ran from Paris to London, Younghusband’s comradeship with the inhabitants of the lands he visited, as he recalls in this memoir, showed great daring (even though he may have fallen prey to a vague desire for camraderie that followed hard on the heels of his previous imperial fervor). The memory of that fellowship combined with his avid desire to be a good man led him to step away from the role of gentleman-explorer with his vassals.

Midway through the book, in little more than a paragraph, Younghusband deals with an incident that perhaps best reveals his character and explains his need for flight. In 1888, Younghusband, barely twenty-four years old, had just returned to England after a seven-month journey in which he crossed on foot the most massive mountain range on the planet, standing on glaciers in boots so worn that the bare soles of his feet were exposed to the snow and ice. In recognition of his bravery, the Royal Geographical Society awarded him its gold medal and elected him as its youngest Fellow. Assuming his place in an unbroken lineage that stretched from Livingstone to Mallory, and from Burton and Speke and Mummery to T. E. Lawrence, Younghusband entered the society’s lecture theatre and delivered a full account of his exploits.

But at the end of his talk, he found himself in a bind that took him by surprise. Doctors of science, specialists in all manner of geography-related disciplines, fired questions that hit him with the force of condemnations. As he later recalled, “The geologists wanted to know if I had observed the rocks; the botanists, if I had collected flowers; the glaciologists, if I had observed the motions of the glaciers; the anthropologists, if I had measured the people’s skulls; the ethnologists, if I had studied their languages; the cartographers, if I had mapped the mountains.” Plagued by guilt-- a sentiment forgiveable in a young man -- Younghusband went back to India determined to never again commit such sins of ommission.

But he did -- or at least his memory did. Because Wonders of the Himalaya, which gives geography short shrift, forms part of a set of memoirs in which what really matters is filtered through the mesh of time. Previously Younghusband had reflected on his experiences in accounts of journeys and in books on the customs and British foreign policy in India, Tibet, and Kashmir. Later he would write extensively about his metaphysical theories, his mystical visions in the high mountains, and his belief in telepathy, free love, and pantheism. On that last score, his best work was the creation of the World Congress of Faiths in 1936.

But as he puts his memories in order, he ignores the very things that those learned men in London cared so much about. To summarize: A geological survey is an obstacle to entering into deep communion with nature. Attempting to collect flowers where lichens are the only plant life is an absurdity, all the more so when one’s main concern is life at a height of five thousand meters. Glaciers are avatars along the road, and as such they must be approached with something like respect, although in this instance the word ‘respect’ falls short. As for people’s skulls, their form and contents matter far less than the feelings in their owner’s hearts. And given that one’s ignorance of their languages gives rise to regrets about one’s failure to penetrate the human condition more deeply, it’s easy to conclude that one ought to learn them. But to know a language is not the same as to master its philology, which is what those learned men had asked him about. That leaves us with cartography, a science so limited that, as Borges noted in one of his best-known fictions, were maps to be as precise as the ambitions of the adventurer, those maps would have to be drawn to actual size.

And so he would throw off those intellectual fetters in subsequent expeditions, many of them political missions conceived without pity or mercy and that were an excuse, for him, to raise funds. Over time, Younghusband didn’t so much see the light of day but the light from the torch he carried. And this sense of being unfettered, of cutting himself loose from realities (which at certain moments might have made him more human) and his desire to guide himself by his own inner flame also helped him to experience a kind of freedom. Freedom is a difficult word to define but its opposite is easy to recognize. It plays a vital role in the life of the explorer, affecting not only his spirit but his public image. Where the first is concerned, it allows him to feel in harmony with the grand symphony of which he is both composer and performer. As to the second, it sparks envy in those who consider themselves realists. Perhaps dirty envy is one of the most psychotic byproducts of realism since it inevitably and agressively pits what we are against the idealized beings we’d like to be, not to mention the balance we wish we had in our checking accounts and the accomplishments on our curriculum vitaes.

To master the gift of freedom, to be free from envy, and to be blessed with boundless reserves of energy are among the qualities we attribute to the adventurer of legend. To that list we should add secret passions, a fondness for breaking rules, a scoffing at laws, a firm code of ethics with made-up norms, a sense of being at home wherever one goes. And so that the connection to ordinary reality will slip though his hands like a clump of sand, the explorer must fight against the deeply-rooted belief that time exists in a single dimension. To this end he travels to countries where they have no use for the tedious attributes we consider part and parcel of what it means to be human: our limitations, our ties our prohibitions, our censure. Given the choice between all that, between the sense of safety that these walls we’ve constructed provide us with and the unknown, Younghusband, iin pursuit of an object he knew little about, chose the unknown.

True to the course of a life that eschewed straight lines, Younghusband would go on to be appointed president of the Royal Geographical Society. But not to insist that the society must fill in the blanks on its maps while mopping its brow. Or that explorers must return from their expeditions with saddlebags replete with rock, plant, and bone specimens. In fact, from his rostrum, Younghusband would promote and organize the most important feats of mountaineering of all time, including -- as chairman of the Mount Everest Committee -- George Mallory’s assault on the highest mountain in the world.

As an officer, he completed his meteoric rise by becoming the British government’s representative in Kashmir. Nevertheless, there was a dark episode in his career, namely his role in the invasion of Tibet. Between 1903 and 1904, the British army left Sikkim with the intention of settling border disputes. In a military operation stained with gratuitous violence that took the lives of many Buddhist monks, the soldiers arrived in Lhasa leaving hundreds of corpses in their stead. (Some sources place the overall death toll as high as 5000.) Thirty years later, when his sentimental education had suffused him with love for the whole world, Younghusband came to regret this incident. He was also visited by madness and by an incomprehensible spiritual obsession -- or rather, an obsession with faith and with proselytizing about that faith -- which included the belief in a redeemer who lived on the planet Altair and broadcast his spiritual wisdom via a kind of telepathy. Still, those notions do have a certain poetic justice -- after all, as Plato, speaking through Socrates, observes, it’s impossible to deny the existence of the gods if one has recognized the consquences of one’s actions (ie. Mount Everest, K2, the Muztagh Pass, the Baltoro Glaciar, the Pamir Mountains, the Gobi Desert). And all this in an era when just a few of the great mountaineering pioneers -- figures like Albert Mummery and the Duke of the Abruzzi -- were beginning to doubt if the great peaks really were as inaccessible as they seemed.

Written forty years after his first journey, Wonders of the Himalaya is a text that exists for one reason only: to return to freedom. And with this recursion to an idealized state, to adventure, Younghusband convokes the ghosts of his best years and in his mind’s eye sets them to dancing. But as our dreams each night will attest, emotions experienced in imagination are no less intense than those perceived through the five senses that ostensibly keep us tethered to reality. For this reason, Younghusband feels as free as he did when he was young, before the advent of those episodes steeped in so much sadess and rage, episodes that are not the subject of this book. And that is why, in the name of liberation, he seeks recourse in the power of literature. Because literature isn’t style -- in fact, it is often confused with an excess of style, much like the feeling of freedom, of chance, of travelling in pursuit of an aim that is in essence unknown.

If to travel is to live, then to read and write is to revive the past.

RICARDO MARTÍNEZ LLORCA

CHAPTER IFirst leave in the Himalaya

In the distance we see a range of hazy hills. We do not doubt their real existence. But they are shrouded in a bluey mystery. And we long to penetrate their secret. Glorious woods, with marvellous birds and beautiful flowers, they must surely contain. And magnificent views we should see over wonderful country ahead. We cannot be content until we have stood upon those hills and seen the other side.

Of all mountain ranges the most wonderful is the Himalaya, besides being the highest; and it provides wonders in the greatest variety —variety of outward form; of flower and forest; of beast and bird and insect; and of human races—. So impressive, indeed, is it that the Indians have always looked upon it with awe and reverence. And we who have known it best are most impressed. By rare good fortune I have been able to live in the Himalayan Mountains for years together, to explore them up and down from one side to another, backwards and forwards, year after year. And though I have already in books and lectures told the story of these wanderings, I do not seem yet to have told all that they have been to me —or told the most important part—. However much I say, there always seems a great deal more to tell.

In the year 1884 I was quartered with my regiment, the King’s Dragoon Guards, at Rawal Pindi, when one day in April, just as the hot weather was coming on, the adjutant informed me that, if I eared to take it, I might have two and a half months’ leave; and he strongly recommended me to take it. This was joy indeed. I was not yet twenty-one. I had been two years in the regiment, and with drills and examinations had been kept pretty hard at work. Now came the chance for a real holiday. What should I do with it? There was not much doubt. Those who live in the plains in India naturally look to the hills. To the hills, therefore, I would go. The Himalayan Mountains were close at hand, so I determined to plunge right into them. Not, indeed, into that part which we could see from Rawal Pindi itself —an entrancing line of purple mountains crowned by spotless snowy peaks— but a part farther east and south near Dharmsala, where my uncle Robert Shaw had lived, and from whence be had planned those journeys which had carried him across the Himalaya to the plains of Turkestan beyond. He had died only half a dozen years before, and I knew I should find there men who had known him, and a few, perhaps, who had accompanied him on his journeys. And for me there hung about such men a wondrous halo of romance. My uncle bad always been to me a hero, and had won his way deep into my heart by giving me half a sovereign when I was a boy at Clifton College. Amid if I could see even only his servants I should be able to picture to myself something of the hard adventure. And, better still, I should be able to gather something of the attachment my uncle felt for men who loyally served him. For besides being a quite exceptional linguist, proficient in most European languages, and versed in many Oriental tongues as well, Robert Shaw bad a genius for attaching Asiatics to him. He always spoke and wrote in terms of warm affection of his men. And I was eager to see these men themselves, and perhaps hear from them something of their adventures and something, too, of their devotion to my uncle.

So, as I say, it was to Dharmsala, roughly midway between Kashmir and Simla, that I determined to go when I had this holiday almost thrust upon me. And what more heavenly chance could a young man have? The weather in April and May would be perfect. There would be unbroken sunshine day after day. Yet I need suffer no excessive heat, for I could just climb higher as the heat increased. Then I would get right up under the glorious peaks. I would see glaciers and stupendous precipices and rushing rivers and dashing waterfalls, and great cedar forests and flowers I had never seen before, and strange hillmen. John Alexander, a brother officer who had been there, said I would have a splendid time, and became as keen on my small adventure as I was myself, offering me both money and a rifle.

And I might have gone on a shooting expedition; but the sportsman’s instinct is missing in me. I have an enormous admiration for those many men one sees in India who will for weeks and weeks, every year, give up all comforts, spend all their spare cash, undergo the severest hardships, and run the most deadly risks in the pursuit of game. I know well the strong determination, the hard training, the fine physique, the skill, and the steadiness of nerve that is required by the sportsman who will himself seek out the tiger in the plains of India, or the Kashmir stag, the ibex, markhor, or Ovis ammon in the Himalaya. Only real men can do this. And manliness we all admire. And the joy they get from a successful stalk —from successfully pitting their wits against the wits of the animal— we must all envy.

Yet I do not regret the absence in me of the sportsman’s instinct. What I do most heartily regret is that my instinct for natural history was never fostered during youth and childhood. There must be very few in whom the love of living things is wholly absent. Certainly I can recall it in me from my earliest days. I can feel to this day the joy I felt, when five or six years old, at finding white violets in a Somersetshire wood and a little red cup in the moss of a Somersetshire lane; at watching sea anemones in the pools of the Ilfracombe rocks; at seeing rabbits on a summer evening scurrying in and out of their holes on the grassy edge of a Devonshire wood; at discovering a cosy tomtit’s nest’ one Easter holiday; at trapping and holding in my hands a delightful little chaffinch; and, above all, at collecting butterflies one summer holiday in Switzerland. From all these incidents I derived intense enjoyment. I did not want to kill the chaffinch. But I did most keenly want to hold it in my hands and admire it more nearly than was possible when it was still at liberty. And the butterflies I wanted for the sake of the sheer joy there was in having between my finger and thumb something so beautiful, so rare, and so difficult to find and catch. So, like most boys, I had the nascent naturalist spirit in me. But also like most boys I was wrenched violently away from opportunities of developing it and of observing and getting to love the animals and birds and flowers about us, and was with other boys herded into classrooms and forced to strain my brains in acquiring quantities of quite useless information.

But if I had none of the sportsman’s instinct and if the naturalist instinct had been nearly atrophied within me, I had —Heaven be praised— the explorer’s instinct still strong and ardent. That was more than the most fervent examiner could deaden. It was born in me, and it had been fostered by circumstance. It was born in me because both on my father and my mother’s side my progenitors had been accustomed to travel over the earth. And it was fostered in me, for while my parents were in India I was taken away during the holidays for tours in North Wales, Cornwall, Devonshire, and Somersetshire. And when they returned we spent many holidays in Switzerland and the south of France.

Hence the zest with which I started on my first leave in India. A night’s journey by train brought me to Amritsar, and a few hours on a branch line brought me to Pathankote at the foot of the hills from whence my journey on foot of about forty miles to Dharmsala would commence. And this was the true beginning of my life of exploration. Here I was at last absolutely free —for two months, anyhow. And here I was at last entirely by myself— in real solitude. And young men do need a breathing space now and then in which to be alone, to be by themselves, in order to find themselves and be themselves. As boys they are hurried off to school, herded up with a crowd of other boys, and constrained into a mould whether they fit it or not, and regardless of whether the mould is bruising some of their most sensitive parts. Before they know anything of the world they are again rushed off —this time into a profession or business— and again a mould is applied. They do need, therefore, a time now and then to themselves —a time quite free of the pressure of their fellows in which they can indulge their own individuality, find their own feet, and expand upon the lines they are naturally disposed to develop.

Something of this feeling I had as I set out the next morning on my march to Dharmsala. And I felt, too, like a man feels when the motor-car at last stops and he can get out and stretch his legs, and look at the view, and look into the hedgerows and really see life, instead of being at the mercy of a machine and a mechanic, rushed through life without a chance of enjoying the beauties on the way.

I suppose I must have suffered the usual irritation of the dak-bungalow khansama who would produce the toughest old cock and call it chicken, and who would have my breakfast at seven when I was wanting it at six, so as to enjoy the freshness of the dawn; or of the mulemen bringing their mules late, or loitering on the march. It is certain that I must have had many such irritations, and no doubt expressed my feelings at the moment. But these are not the things that linger long in one’s memory. The impressions which have lasted are very different. First the beauty of those early mornings. I was in the “foothills” of the Himalaya, among the buttresses, as it were, of the mighty range which lay behind, but which was not yet visible. I was perhaps a thousand feet or so above the plains of India. And now, in the middle of April, the air at sunrise was cool and fresh. There was no nip or bite in it, but it was pure and invigorating, and so clear that I could see far away along the foothills, and far away over the plains. And there was never a cloud. But over all was the lovely delicate haze of varying lilac and purple which gives the charm and mystery to every mountain region. As I stepped out on my first day’s march in the Himalaya, a strange exhilaration thrilled me. I kept squeezing my fist together and saying emphatically to myself and to the universe at large: “Oh, yes! Oh, yes! This really is. How splendid! How splendid!” Life to me did indeed seem worth living. The world really was beautiful —something I could really love.

And it was not a case of “every prospect pleasing,” and only man being vile. For man was not vile. Man was very attractive. These foothills in the northern part of the Himalaya are inhabited by manly races, who have maintained both their independence and the purity of their stock while waves of invasion have been surging over the plains below them. Here we meet some of the most ancient families of Rajputs, the nobility of India, highborn-looking men, rulers and soldiers, dignified in their bearing and with conscious pride of lineage. And among the Mohamedans are many of a truly patriarchal type, with grace and ease of manner, who would have stood for any Biblical character. And though I did not know it, there had arisen in this district, just about the time I was passing through it, a man who was honestly convinced he was both the Messiah of the Christians and the Mahdi of the Mohamedans, and was destined therefore by God to combine both Mohamedans and Christians under his leadership. Many thousands of people believed in him. But he had a strong prejudice against native Christians. He used to prophesy the death of certain native Christians within a year, and as the deaths actually occurred the English missionary prosecuted him in a court of law. During his trial he made a dramatic appeal to the English judge, declaring himself to be like Christ before Pilate, and he was acquitted; and in consequence of his acquittal he always afterwards spoke in terms of the warmest praise of British justice. But, years after, the judge told me that there was a pretty strong suspicion that the prophet’s followers had in some manner or other made away with the native Christians named, but that no legal proof could be established. So he had the prophet up privately and warned him against prophesying in future —or if he must prophesy then he must take care that his prophecies did not come true—. The prophet took the warning and the death-rate among native Christians decreased.

Gradually ascending through these foothills, and passing every now and then some fort picturesquely perched on an outstanding rock, or some ancient temple designed on the model of bamboos bending over towards one another across a roadway, I reached Dharmsala on the third day, and went straight to Robert Shaw’s house on the top of a little hill a mile or so outside. Now, indeed, I was in a thick atmosphere of exploration. The house itself was named Easthome, and was one which Shaw had occupied when managing the tea plantations which lay all around it. Being prevented by an attack of rheumatic fever —the disease from which he eventually died as Resident at Mandalay when only thirty-nine— from joining the Army, he had joined my father and mother in India and set up as a tea planter. And it was from here that he had planned his great journey to Yarkand in 1869, designing to sell his tea in Turkestan and to bring back from there carpets, felts and silks. Commercially the journey was not of much success, but scientifically and politically it had much value. He was awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical Society, and he was taken into the political service of the Government of India.

As it was only a dozen years since his last visit to Yarkand, there were still many who had known him, and some who had accompanied him; and these soon collected round me. Towards these men I had a feeling very akin to awe. It was to me something wonderful that these very men had traversed the succession of ranges which separated India from Turkestan, and had clambered up the glaciers, plunged through icy streams, crossed passes 18,000 and 19,000 feet above sea-level, risked the dangers of life among hostile peoples, and seen the mysterious cities of distant Central Asia. I looked upon them with the greatest reverence —staid, grave, dignified figures, with faces worn by strain and hardship; and with a characteristic composure and politeness—. I was quite happy in simply looking on them. But I liked also to hear them speak of Shaw. And their faces kindled into eager life when they spoke of “Shah-sahib.” He was their “father and their mother.” He was always kind to them and looked after them, and had provided them with pensions. The attachment and devotion of these hillmen to Englishmen whom they can trust and who will be thoughtful of them is one of the most touching traits in human nature. And if I had first felt awe for them on account of their adventures, I now felt real reverence for them on account of their fidelity, loyalty and affection.

But in my uncle’s house I found not only men but books. And books can also inspire a traveller. First there was my uncle own book, “High Tartary and Yarkan,” published by John Murray in 1871. In those days books of travel were illustrated by real pictures and not by mere photographs. And pictures play an important part in impressing the imagination. The frontispiece of Shaw’s book is a picture in colour of a peak in the Kuenlun range, and it set me craving to see such a peak towering up to one sharp pinnacle point across a chasm of terrific precipices. Then there was another picture of an inundation caused by the melting of a glacier, with men hanging on by the skin of their teeth to a boulder, while a great river was surging all round them, carrying along with it huge blocks of ice from the glacier which formed the background. How splendid, I thought it would be, to have such an adventure! And, as a fact, three years later I did have exactly such an experience.