Page:Mongolia, the Tangut country, and the solitudes of northern Tibet vol 1 (1876).djvu/27

Rh cure me. But this dam is a poisonous air, and rises out of the ground everywhere. If you walk ten paces it makes you sick, and if you picket your horse on it, it spurts from the hole you drive your peg into, and knocks you senseless at his heels.'

Huc, whatever his cleverness as a painter of striking scenes, was not only without science, but without that geographical sense which sometimes enables a traveller to bring back valuable contributions to geographical knowledge, even when without the means of making instrumental observations.

A succession of political events during the last twenty years has greatly changed the state of things in Upper Asia, and has tended to the rapid widening of geographical knowledge. The chief of these events have been the revolt of the Mahommedan subjects of China in Eastern Turkestan and Dzungaria, followed by the advance of Russian authority into the basin of Ili, and by our own communications with the new authorities in the Kashgar Basin; the results of war with China in the establishment of Europeans at Peking, and the gradual abatement of the barriers that excluded them from the exploration of the interior provinces of China Proper; and, lastly, the rapid spread of Russian power over Western Turkestan.

The journey of the unfortunate Adolphus Schlagintweit to Kashgar, where he was barbarously murdered in 1857, was the first achieved from the Indian side.

In the last twelve years Col. Montgomerie has been indefatigable in his organisation of expeditions into the Unknown region by trained Pundits. First Yarkand was reached; then Lhassa; and a variety of other geographic raids were made upon Tibetan territory by this kind of scientific light-horse. But much as they have done to fill up blanks upon our maps, and to amend their accuracy, it is impossible for us to regard these vicarious achievements with the same satisfaction that we derive from geography conquered by the daring and toil of