Page:FM Bailey letters from LA Bethell.pdf/16

    I don't suppose his theory of the Divides, the Salween and the Himalayan extension, will ever be solved in our lifetime – and when it is, it will be by aeroplane, and vertical photographs. After all, it's nearly 50 years since A.K. put on paper any reliable facts about the ranges, and the very fringes of the detailed survey have hardly yet been touched. K.W. estimates the triangle Sadiya, Fort Shers, Shinden Gompa, to cover 25,000 square miles flat, and many more when those miles are upended. And if you were to put in a fourth point, say Lhasa, or even TSARI, to these three – as would inevitably be necessary if one had to blanket the whole area under discussion, think of what a colossal job that once would be for survey. Personally, I don't think it will ever be done. Much of the geography of Inner Asia depended for its interest, and for the enterprise of explorers like yourself, on the fact that we held India: and when, well within our lifetimes, India ceases to be of any interest to any of us (as, indeed, Ireland has for the past 12 years ceased to be of interest to Englishman – and for the same reasons) I think you will find that all geographical, geological, and geophysical problems hanging on the countries adjoining it will drop out of the picture. In which case, you and Kingdon Ward and men like you may well find yourselves the last of the great explorers of great problems, and “the glory will have departed”. It’s rather hell to think of it. If only our politicians knew what, in the name of an unworthy and unmanly sentimentality, they are destroying, when they ask us to abdicate.

I have another reason for being glad that you will be within reach, here, before long, and in England till December 27th. For months past I've had under my hand the roughed-out words of that series of incidents covering my association with “BARCLAY” for Maga, and though I shall have to embroider and work up bare

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facts with a picturesque story, I must get you to look it over first and tell me that however great an ornamental liar you may think me, you haven't any actual objection to this thing going in. Naturally I'll say nothing offensive, and, remembering what you told me of the long arm of the Soviets who pursue till today anyone they can recognise as having been with you that time in Tashkent etc, I shall gloss over that period with nothing but sketch matter and let you come to life, in detail, from Quetta 1920 onwards. But of course you must read the whole – for one thing, G.W.B. would want to be sure that you wouldn't consider yourself libelled, before he printed it. And as there wouldn't be a smell of a chance of you giving it even 5 minutes after you got back to India and the turmoil of your new job, I must make some shift to get it done before you leave.

It is only the other day that I was able to unload onto the Oxford University Press (Humphrey Mitford's) the infernal grind which has kept me from my original writing these fifteen months past, and now, naturally, I find that the wheels of composition grind slowly, and the stuff they turn out is exceeding small.! But, with renewed life injected into the mechanism by all this intensive reading about the places you and I were so fond of, there seems a chance that things will go more quickly, and that possibly the result may be even worth finishing.

I've kept to the end my hearty congratulations on what is really your main piece of news. Nepal. I'm very, very glad, Bailey, and I wish you every luck in what bids fair to