BOOKS.

CAPTAIN YOUNGHUSBAND'S "HEART OF A CONTINENT."* THE speciality which distinguishes Captain F. Younghusbarraf as an explorer is the nonchalance with which he performed. extraordinary feats, such as riding from Pekin to Cashmeres. and the specialty which marks him as an author is his power of making unusual or novel scenes seem ordinary, so that- instead of merely feeling surprise, his reader understands.

them. Manchuria, for instance, which he rode round in 1886, becomes, when his narrative has been read, what the Scotch would call "a kent place," as familiar as Canada, which it greatly resembles. Instead of a mysterious desert, which is, we imagine, the general English notion of Manchuria, we see a province, vast indeed and thinly populated, but full of forests, of culturable plains, and of fertile valleys composed of meadows, the first distinction of which is myriads of wild flowers. In these valleys and in cleared patches of the forest are thousands upon thousands of small farms built, laid-out, and cultivated by hard-working Chinese farmers, who have swarmed into the province as emigrants, have nearly eaten. out the nomadic Mongols, and are building, digging wells, cutting roads, and opening up agricultural business with tire- less industry. Twenty millions of them are already establishedi in Manchuria, have founded towns which, though squalid;

have magnitude and trade, and have organised a society. which, so far as order goes, is like society in Canada, or Australia. That society is governed like the rest of, China by officials, whom the traveller found to be very' human persons, very civil, very much intent on making life comfortable, and among themselves so jovial and

good-humoured as to alter Captain Younghusband's con- ception of the Chinese character. They seem to have raised- no objection to his travelling where he would, and with hie- companions—Mr. James, an eminent Indian civilian, and Captain Fulford—he forced his way through interminable forests to the Ever-White Mountain, a hill 8,000 ft. in height, which is white with snow in winter and in summer with a kind of pumice-stone dust, and from which one can see over to Corea. At its top is a lake which, because it is there and.

not at the bottom, the Chinese describe as almost miracu- lous :—

" At last we reached the saddle, and then, instead of the panorama we had expected, we looked down in astonishment em a most beautiful lake in a setting of weird, fantastic cliffs just at our feet. We were, in fact, on an extinct volcano, and this lake filled up what had once been its crater. The waters were of a peculiarly deep clear blue, and situated here at the very summit of a mountain, and held in on every side by rugged precipitous- cliffs, this lake was particularly striking. We tried to descend to its brim, but could find no way down the cliffs ; so, after boiling a thermometer to ascertain the altitude, I set out to ascend the highest of the rocky peaks which formed a fringe around it. The climb was a stiff one, but I succeeded in reaching the summit—the very top of the Ever-White Moun- tain—and from there I looked out over a billowy expanse of forest-clad hills stretching away on every side, as far as the eye could reach in the direction of Manchuria, and as far as one could see over Corea ; nothing but forest, except where the lake- lay below me like a sapphire in a setting of rock, and it was only by this and by occasional glints of the river that the monotonoue green was broken."

Next year Captain Younghusband started on a much more adventurous journey, having determined to cross Asia from

Pekin to India alone, by the terrible desert of Gobi, a journey which he accomplished in four months, after every variety of adventure, always related with a kind of half-conscious depth of insight into the scenes and people around which is irresistibly attractive. The journey included the transit, -- camels, across the great desert of Gobi, which is horrible, though not quite so bare as is imagined, herds of cattle and of "wild" camels—supposed, we may remark, by naturalists to have been originally strays—of deer and of sheep, finding in places the means for a wretched sustenance. The mass of the desert is, however, as bare and desolate as the desert of Suez, and the traveller, besides the danger of dying of hunger or thirst, is harassed by winds of icy coldness, and the showers of sand which those winds drive. The march took sixty days, or rather nights, for no one moves by day, and the deadly monotony was broken only by an occasional interview

• The Heart of a C. ntinent. By Captain F. YounghnabAnd, C.I.F.. London : John Murray.

with a camel caravan, or a party of Mongols, of whom Captain Younghusband always speaks in most appreciative terms as a good-humoured, happy-go-lucky, careless people, utterly different from the Chinese, annealed as the latter have been into adamantine hardness by the centuries of toil forced on them by over-population. Once beyond the desert,

he marched on to Yarkand, where he came across a class of men whose very existence in such a region—at the back, as it were, of the world—gives the reader a sense of surprise. They are the commis voyageurs of Farther Asia, only they trade for themselves and with their own money, though the latter,

we have heard, is often borrowed from capitalists in India and China

:- "A large number of the merchants engaged in this trade gave me one day a sumptuous feast in a fruit garden a short distance

outside Yarkand. Few people know the way to enjoy life and make themselves comfortable better than these merchants. We first of all sat about under the shade of the trees, while huge

bunches of grapes and delicious melons and peaches were freshly plucked and brought to us to eat. Then dinner was announced, and after water for washing the hands had been passed round, we set to at dish after dish of pillaos ' and stews, all beautifully cooked, and we ended up with a pudding made of whipped egg and sugar and some other ingredients, which it would be hard to beat anywhere. All the time the merchants were chaffing away amongst themselves, and were as ' gay ' and talkative as French- men. You could scarcely wish for better company or more genial hosts. On the way home we had races, each merchant trying to make out that his own horse was better than the others. These men are a curious mixture of Eastern gravity and politeness, and boyish spirits and fun. They will come to call on you, and talk away with the greatest solemnity and deference. You meet them next day out for a burst of enjoyment, and every sign of gravity is thrown away, and they are as free and natural and full of life as children."

From Yarkand Captain Younghusband resolved to push on to Cashmere, by the Mustagh Pass, a nearer but more terrible road, and he found it even more terrible than he expected. The extract is long, but it will show more clearly than any writing of ours the kind of dangers he had to face, and the

kind of man it was who faced them :—

" That was an anxious night for me. I often recall it, and think of our little bivouac in the snow at the foot of the range we had to overcome. The sun sank behind the icy mountains, the bright glow disappeared from them, and they became steely hard while the grey cold of night settled shimmering down upon them. All around was pure white snow and ice, breathing out cold upon us. The little pools and streamlets of water which the heat of the sun had poured off the glacier during the day were now gripped by the frost, which seemed to creep around ourselves too, and huddle us up together. We had no tent to shelter us from the biting streams of air flowing down from the mountain summits, and we had not sufficient fuel to light a fire round which we might lie The ascent to the pass was easy but trying, for we were now not far from nineteen thousand feet above sea- level, and at that height, walking uphill through deep 81201V, one quickly becomes exhausted. We could only take a dozen or twenty steps at a time, and we would then bend over on our sticks and pant as if we had been running hard uphill. We were tantalised, too, by the apparent nearness of the pass. Everything here was on a gigantic scale, and what seemed to be not more than an hour's walk from the camp was in fact a six hours' climb. It was nearly midday when we reached the top of the pass, and what we saw there I have already related in the letter quoted above. There was nothing but a sheer precipice, and those first few moments on the summit of the Afustagh Pass were full of intense anxiety to me. If we could but get over, the crowning success of my expedition would be gamed. But the thing seemed to me simply an impossibility. I had had no experience of Alpine climbing, and I had no ice-axes, or other mountaineering appliances with me. I had not even any proper boots. All I had for foot-gear were some native boots of soft leather, without nails and without heels—mere leather stockings, in fact—which gave no sort of grip upon an icy surface. How, then, I should ever be able to get down the icy slopes and rocky precipices I now saw before me I could not think ; and if it had rested with me alone, the probability is we never should have got over the pass at all. What, however, saved our party was my holding my tongue. I kept quite silent as I looked over the pass, and waited to hear what the men had to say about it. They meanwhile were looking at me, and, imagining that an Englishman never went back from an enterprise he had once started on, took it as a matter of course that, as I gave no order to go back, I meant to go on. So they set about their preparations for the descent. We had brought an ordinary pickaxe with us, and Wall went on ahead with this, while the rest of us followed one by one behind him, each hanging on to a rope tied round Wall's waist to support him in case he slipped while hewing steps across the ice-slope. This slope was of hard ice, very steep, and, thirty yards or so below the line we took, ended in an ice-fall, which again terminated far beneath in the head of a glacier at the foot of the pass. Wall with his pickaxe hewed a way step by step across the ice-slope, so as to reach the rocky cliff by which we should have to descend on to the glacier below. We slowly edged across the slope after him, but it was hard to keep cool and steady. From where we stood we could see nothing over the end of the slope but the glacier many hundreds of feet below us. Some of the men were so little nervous that they kicked the fragments of ice hewed out by Wall down the slope, and laughed as they saw them hop down it and with one last bound disappear altogether. But an almost sicken- ing feeling came on me as I watched this, for we were standing on a slope as steep as the roof of a house. We had no ice-axes with which to anchor ourselves or give us support ; and though I tied handkerchiefs, and the men bits of leather and cloth, round the insteps of our smooth native boots, to give us a little grip on the slippery ice, I could not help feeling that if any one of us had lost his foothold, the rest of us would never have been able to hold him up with the rope, and that in all likelihood the whole party would have been carried away and plunged into the abyss below. Outwardly I kept as cool and cheerful as I could, but

inwardly I shuddered at each fresh step I took. At last we reached the far side of the slope The cliff we had now to descend was an almost sheer precipice ; its only saving feature was that it was rough and rugged, and so afforded some little hold for our hands and feet. Yet even then we seldom got a hold fey the whole hand or whole foot. All we generally found was a little ledge, upon which we could grip with the tips of the fingers or side of the foot. The men were most good to me, whenever possible guiding my foot into some secure hold, and often supporting it there with their hands ; but at times it was all I could do to summon sufficient courage to let myself down on to the veriest little crevices which had to support me. There was a constant dread, too, that fragments of these ledges might give way with the weight upon them ; for the rock was very crumbly, as it generally is when exposed to severe frosts, and once I heard a shout from above, as a huge piece of rock which had been detached from above came crashing past me, and as nearly as possible hit two of the men who had already got half way down."

After this, even the journey to Hunza with a small Goorkha

guard seems a little tame, though it was a wonderful march through the very heart of the loftiest Himalayas, and amidat scenes of the most awe-inspiring grandeur.

Next year Captain Younghusband was ordered to explore the Pamirs, which are not, as has been erroneously supposed, broad, desolate prairies, but desolate valleys, embosomed in the clefts of the Himalaya, made originally by water not powerful enough to wash out the soil down to the rocky bottoms. All Tibet is a collection of Pamirs, the water there also being insufficient to wash out the valleys. It was on this journey that Captain Younghusband came across a singular natural phenomenon which has been a mystery to the Chinese for ages, but which he was able to explain. They affirmed that near Mustagh a cave existed in which burned, and had burned for ever, a perpetual light, variously reported as coming from the eye of a dragon or from a. jewel placed in its forehead. Captain Younghusband went to see it, and there sure enough was the light; but after climbing without boots up twenty feet of perpendicular rock he was able, for Europeans, to dissipate the illusion. "We entered the mouth of the cave. I looked eagerly round to discover the source of the light, and, when I had got fairly on my legs, found that the cave was simply a hole right through the rock, and that the light came in from the other side. From below, of course, this cannot be seen, for the observer merely sees the top of the cave, and this, being covered with some white deposit, reflects back the light which has come in from the opening on the other aide. This, then, was the secret of the Cave of Perpetual Light, which I am told is mentioned in histories many hundreds of years old." We have left our- selves no space for the accounts of Hunza and Chitral, and can only send our readers to a book which seems to us the most fascinating of all recent books of travel. We only wish Captain Younghusband could devote his marvellous capacity as an explorer to the most attractive of all regions yet to be travelled, the nntrodden region which lies between the civilised portion of Peru and the civilised portion of Brazil. He might there find, as Spanish legends tell, some evidence of an ancient civilisation, perhaps even some village in which the old civilisation had only partially disappeared, and so help to lift the cloud which still hangs impervious to thought over the origin of the native civilisation of South America. That would be a greater discovery than any we shall now make in Asia, or even in the untrodden divisions of the fearful forests of central Africa, unless indeed the undying story of the white race which has been lost there should prove true,—nearly an impossibility.