Page:Scented isles and coral gardens- Torres Straits, German New Guinea and the Dutch East Indies, by C.D. Mackellar, 1912.pdf/404

312 [Alas! for Tibet and all its mysteries and mahatmas and hidden wonders—our British soldiers and explorers have knocked all that on the head.]

Colonel Olcott remembered very well Count Carl Leiningen, now passed away, who had been a Theosophist, and had himself told me that he had entered the supposed mysterious Tibet, and had been “beyond the portals” into the Unknown, where I could not follow because I had not knowledge or faith enough. Colonel Olcott was much interested in all I told him about that strange, ghost-haunted, one-time monastery, Billigheim, the home of the Leiningens (the head of which family was Queen Victoria’s half-brother), and how the Erbgraf Carl had, I supposed, projected his astral body over 11 miles into Schloss Neuburg on the Neckar, where I was living. It took my memory back to far other scenes—to strange days and people long passed away. [Billigheim, with its gay old Count—so fat he could scarcely get through the doors—its ghost-haunted rooms, and its more interesting, amiable young Theosophist hereditary Count, are all gone—wiped out as if they had never been! So strange is life! So kaleidoscopic!]

After a night and two days—all cold and wet and dull—we arrived late at Nagasaki, and I had my first glimpse of Japan, which was looking its worst, everything sodden with wet, and mud a foot deep in the streets. It was from this place Jimmu Tenno set out on his career of conquest, and from here the expedition of the Empress Jingo Kogo against Corea started.

Here, too, Mendez Pinto and the Portuguese landed, and the still-powerful Satsuma Clan and their Prince, before the new régime in 1868, held sway. After the expulsion of the Portuguese and