Himalaya. I wanted to get into
Tibet.

That for the time being proved impossible, and my thoughts
wandered off to the far eastern part of Asia. I had read a book called
"On the Amur," by Atkinson. Not altogether a very veracious book,
but a fascinating book for all that. In it were alluring pictures of the
broad, placid river. Rich forests came down to the water's edge. And
on its surface were depicted delightful rafts and canoes. To glide
down such a river, to camp on its banks and plunge into the forests
which clothed them, seemed a joy second only to the joy of
scrambling about the Himalaya. So with Mr. H. E. M. James--now
Sir Evan James--I went to Manchuria, not, indeed, to reach the
Amur itself, but to discover the source of its great tributary the
Sungari, and to follow it down through the forests and over the
plains for several hundred miles.

Now, what I want to impress upon you is that in all these cases it
was the Natural Beauty which was the attraction--it was the picture I
made to myself of what these countries would be like that drew me
on. And I am sure it is with others as it was with me. Natural Beauty
is at bottom what incites the traveller.

And, whether I had to go where I was taken or could go where I
chose, it was the Natural Beauty that stuck in my memory. And
when I returned it was of the Natural Beauty that I wished to tell my
friends. And this, again, is the experience of others also. To this day,
though I have never since seen them, I remember the beauties of
Cader Idris and Dolgelly, Snowdon and Carnarvon, in North Wales,
and of the rugged cliffs and long Atlantic waves on the Cornish
coast. The Dart, here rippling over boulders and between rocky
banks, here in deep, clear salmon pools, here merging into a long
inlet of the sea and everywhere framed in wooded hill-sides, I have
often again seen. But even if I had not, its beauty would never have
departed from my memory. And it is the same with the first view of
the Alps from the Jura, the view of Lake Geneva, of the Jungfrau, of
the Pyrenees from Pau, and of the valley of the Loire. I have never
seen those parts of Switzerland and of France since then, but their
beauty remains with me to this day. And it is of their beauty that I
have ever afterwards been naturally inclined to speak. When I talk
about the Loire I do not tell my friends that it rises in a certain place,
is so many miles long, at certain parts has a certain width, depth, an