Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 125.djvu/186

172 "Thank you; here is the key. You think you shall never forget where that desk is, Giles?"

"Never! such a thing is quite impossible."

"If I am gone when you return, you are to open that desk. You will find in it a letter which I wrote about three years ago; and if I have ever deserved well of you and yours, I charge you and I implore you to do your very best as regards what I have asked of you in that letter."

 

 From Blackwood's Magazine.

heard of an American backwoodsman who, on finding some people camping about twenty miles from his log cabin, rushed back in consternation to his wife and exclaimed, "Pack thee up, Martha — pack thee up; it's getting altogether too crowded hereabouts." The annoyance which this worthy complained of is very generally felt at present; and, go almost where he may, the lover of peace and solitude will soon have reason to complain that the country round him is becoming "altogether too crowded." As for the enterprising and exploring traveller who desires to make a reputation for himself by his explorations, his case is even worse. Kafiristan, Chinese Tibet, and the very centre of Africa, indeed remain for him; but, wherever he may go, he cannot escape the painful conviction that his task will ere long be trodden ground, and that the special correspondent, the trained reporter, will soon try to obliterate his footsteps. It was not so in older times. The man who went out to see a strange country, if he were fortunate enough to return to his friends alive, became an authority on that country to the day of his death, and continued so for generations afterwards if he had only used his wits well. An accurate description of a country usually stood good for a century or two at least, and for that period there was no one to dispute it; but the Khiva of 1872 is fundamentally different from the Khiva of 1874; and could we stand to-day where Speke stood sublimely alone a few years ago at Murchison Falls, when he was accomplishing the heroic feat of passing (for the first time in authentic history) from Zanzibar to Cairo, through the ground where the Nile unquestionably takes its rise, we should probably see an English steamboat, with Colonel Gordon on board, moving over the waters of Lake Victoria Nyanza. For the change in the relations of one country with another, which has been effected by steam as a means of propulsion, is of a most radical kind; and it proceeds so rapidly, that by the time the little girls at our knees are grandmothers, and have been fired with that noble ambition to see the world which possesses the old ladies of our own day, it will be only a question of money and choice with them as to having a cruise upon the lakes of Central Africa, or going to reason with the Grand Lama of Tibet upon the subject of polyandry. Any one walking along the Strand may notice advertisements of "Gaze's annual tour to Jerusalem, Damascus, Nineveh, Babylon, the Garden of Eden, &c. &c." No doubt that sort of thing will receive a check occasionally; there has been a refreshing recurrence, within the last two months, of brigandage in Sicily and the Italian peninsula, which may serve to create a vacuum for the meditative traveller: and if a party of Cook's tourists were to fall into the hands of Persian or Kurdish banditti, the unspeakable consequences would probably put a stop to excursions to the Garden of Eden for some time to come; but still the process would go on of bringing together the ends of the earth, and of making the remotest countries familiar ground.

Such a process, however, will always leave room for books of travel by the few who are specially qualified either to understand nature or describe mankind; and there are regions of the world, the natural conformation of which will continue to exclude ordinary travellers, until we have overcome the difficulty of flying through the air. Especially, are such regions to be found in the Himáliya — which, according to the Sanscrit, literally means "The Abode of Snow" — and indeed in the whole of that enormous mass of mountains which really stretches across Asia and Europe, from the China Sea to the Atlantic, and to which Arab geographers have given the expressive title of "The Stony Girdle of the Earth." It is to the loftiest valleys and almost the highest peaks of that range that, in this and two or three succeeding articles, I would conduct my readers from the burning plains of India, in the hope of 