Page:Further India; (IA furtherindia00clif).pdf/22

 from India to China, it has been the fate of these countries to be overshadowed from the beginning by the immensity and the surpassing fascination of their mighty neighbours. Thus, even when India and Cathay had emerged at last from the nebulous haze of myth, superstition and conjecture with which the imaginations of Europeans had early enshrouded them, southeastern Asia continued to be wrapped in obscurity, such knowledge of it as was possessed being practically confined to a bare acquaintance with its coast-lines, with a few ports of call, and with the seas traversed by ships in their passage from the shores of Malabar to the southern provinces of China. Similarly, in our own time, while every schoolboy can point out Canton or Peking, Delhi or Peshwur, as a matter of course, not one educated man in fifty can put his finger unhesitatingly upon the spot on the map which represents Chieng Tong or Bhamo, Pahang or Pnom-Penh. The real exploration of this region, beyond the limits of a narrow zone of coastlands, was not accomplished until during the latter half of the nineteenth century, while the work done in this direction by Francis Garnier and a host of smaller men is even less known in these islands than are the localities in which their labours were performed.

It is not easy to realise to how late a period in their history the Greeks remained in almost total ignorance of the Eastern world, or indeed of any inhabited lands lying at a distance from the seaboard of the Mediterranean. It was not until the invasion of Xerxes forced the fact upon