COLONEL WADDELL'S contribution is not the least important in the

literature of the Tibet Expedition, for he supplements.

• Lhasa and its Mysteries, with a Record of the Expedition of 1903.1904. By Lieutenant-Colonel L. Austine Waddell, C.B., C.LE. London : John Murray. 25e. net.]

the impressionist sketches of others with a detailed account of the land and its people, written with the fall knowledge of one to whom the country beyond the Himalayas has long

been an absorbing study. He suffers, to be sure, from the fact that he is the last to tell a very good tale ; and we cannot

expect to find in his narrative of the incidents of the advance the same fresh interest that we found in the first reports. But his aim is not that of the war correspondent. Battles and marches are subordinated in his book to the habits and beliefs of the people, and the strange cult of the dominant hierarchy. He has neither Mr. • Candler's power of vivid

description, nor Mr. Landon's emotional picturesqueness, and he does not compete with them in the same fields. He is not so much the soldier and correspondent with a notebook as

the student who had long collected such scraps of informa- tion about the country as were obtainable, and who at last reached by a happy chance a full knowledge. When stationed at Darjeeling nearly twenty years ago, he tells us, he used to cross-examine Tibetan pilgrims about their country, and tramped for hundreds of miles along the frontier in the vain hope of evading the guards and effecting an entrance. "During these years of preparation I had accumu- lated such accurate pictures of the laud that my ultimate entry into the capital, when it came, seemed but the realisa- tion of a vivid and long-cherished dream." To every member

of the expedition the arrival at Lhasa was like a dream coming true, but especially to one who for twenty years had

prepared himself for the experience. A man who travelled with such an equipment of knowledge could not fail to have much of special interest to relate, and no one who takes up Colonel Waddell's book will be disappointed. He writes with clearness and grace, he has an eye for the picturesque and the curious, and he provides a variety of information in which every type of reader may find something to his taste. The only blemish is an occasional tendency to egotism, which is perhaps not unnatural in one of the few real authorities on the land when dealing with his special subject.

The main interest of the book, as we have said, lies in matters unconnected with the actual events of the expedition.

There are, to begin with, some excellent excerpts from Tibetan folk-lore. The Dalai Lama had to contend not only with Colonel Younghusband and Lord Curzon, but with the generations of soothsayers before him, for it was prophesied

that in the year of the Wood-Dragon (i.e., 1904) there would be a great coming forward of robbers and grievous fighting,

and at the end a conciliatory speaker would achieve peace.

Still more disheartening was the popular saying, current in Lhasa as long ago as 1866, that the Grand Lama would transmigrate only thirteen times, when we remember that the present Dalai Lama is the thirteenth. The Tibetans claim to be descended, in true Darwinian style, from a monkey who crossed the Himalayas and married a she-devil of the moun- tains. The ancient religion of the country was a kind of devil-worship, and Colonel Waddell gives a full account of the introduction of Buddhism and the creation of a theocracy.

For long China ruled the country with a heavy hand, and the fact that the present Dalai Lama was permitted to grow up was due to the rise of a national party who resented Chinese interference. Colonel Waddell touches lightly on the political causes of the expedition, but he points out, what is now universally recognised to be true, that India's scientific frontier on the north'is not the Himalaya, but the great deserts to the north of Lhasa. As Prince Henry of Orleans said, "il n'y a qu'un pas de l'Inde an Tibet." He criticises the route chosen from Sikkim by the Teesta gorges to Chumbi, urging that the proper route was through Bhotan to the Lower Chumbi Valley, a fact which was later recognised in the construction of the new trade road. As was to be expected from a medical officer, he has some interesting remarks on the health of troops at high altitudes, and we can recommend his account of the cold at Phari to any one who desires to keep cool on a hot day.

The best portion of the book is that concerned with the special wonders of the country, which we already knew of from other writers, but find here described in ampler detail.

The first of these is the colony of entombed hermits near Gyangtse. Mr. Landon has given us a gruesome picture of this hermitage, which is called by the strange title of "The Cave of Happy Musings on Misery," and Colonel Waddell was equally impressed by the spectacle. After a period of is shut up in a rock-hole with a sliding shutter, which he opens once a day when food is placed on the sill. His sole furniture is a rosary of bits of human bone, a trumpet of - human thigh-bone, and a goblet made out of the top of a human skull :—

" One of us asked to be shown evidence of the hermit's presence inside. Thereupon the attendant gave the signal which they use when they deposit the food. He tapped very gently thrice on the sill, so softly that it was almost inaudible to us, and then, after ten or twelve seconds, whilst we held our breath expectantly, in a silence like that of the tomb, the tiny rabbit-hutch door in front of us trembled, then began to move and was jerkily pushed ajar about three inches or so, and from the deep gloom came slowly faltering forth a gloved hand. This was all. Only a gloved hand ! It protruded about four inches on to the stone- slabbed sill and slowly fumbled there for two or three seconds, and finding nothing it returned slowly, trembling as in a palsy, and the door closed up like a snail retreating into its shell In the daylight it was unearthly and horrible to a degree. The stimulus of light was denied even to the poor wretch's hand, another drop in his cup of misery."

There is an interesting account also of the convent of the Dorje-Phagmo, or Pig-faced Goddess, by the shore of the Yamdok Lake, which was scrupulously respected by our troops, since the Abbess had beforetime befriended British subjects. It is clearly a place of special sanctity, for when the Mohammedan invaders attacked it in 1717 the nuns changed themselves into pigs; and since the pig is an offence to the good Mussulman, there was nothing for the enemy to do but retire. The Lhasa chapters are full of valuable matter, notably the account of the interview with the Regent, when the Christian religion in theory and practice was discussed with that Buddhist dignitary, and the description of the great cathedral, the Jo-kang. With Mr. Landon's wonderful picture of the statue of Buddha in the Holy of

Holies in our memory, it is with something of a shock that we read Colonel Waddelrs summary condemnation. "It is a repellent image, about a man's size, seated, with goggle eyes and coarse, sensual face, and is of very rude workmanship." This is very different from Mr. Landon's "pure and eager young prince." Colonel Waddell's comments on ceremonies 'and temples acquire a special interest from his unique knowledge of the subject, and any one in search of informa- tion upon Tibetan Buddhism will find the book a mine of• learning. We may note one final point which, to the best of our knowledge, is 'not touched upon in any other book on

the subject,—the course of the Lower Tsangpo till it becomes the Brahmaputra. He tells us all that is known of that mysterious district, in which the great river breaks through the chain of the Himalayas. It is not a safe country for travel, for it is inhabited by savages, who are both tea- drinkers and cannibals, but it is one of the two or three first- class geographical mysteries that await solution. The man who first penetrates it will have a reward for his toil, for somewhere ib must contain the most wonderful gorge and waterfall in the world.