uisition, their witchcraft, their incantations, their ordeals
by fire and boiling oil, but in every aspect of their daily life.

I question if ever in the history of the world there has been another
occasion when bigotry and darkness have been exposed with such
abruptness to the inroad of science, when a barrier of ignorance created
by jealousy and fear as a screen between two peoples living side by side
has been demolished so suddenly to admit the light of an advanced
civilization.

The Tibetans, no doubt, will benefit, and many abuses will be swept
away. Yet there will always be people who will hanker after the medieval
and romantic, who will say: 'We men are children. Why could we not have
been content that there was one mystery not unveiled, one country of an
ancient arrested civilization, and an established Church where men are
still guided by sorcery and incantations, and direct their mundane
affairs with one eye on a grotesque spirit world, which is the most real
thing in their lives--a land of topsy-turvy and inverted proportions,
where men spend half their lives mumbling unintelligible mantras and
turning mechanical prayers, and when dead are cut up into mincemeat and
thrown to the dogs and vultures?'

To-morrow, when we enter Lhasa, we will have unveiled the last mystery
the of the East. There are no more forbidden cities which men have not
mapped and photographed. Our children will laugh at modern travellers'
tales. They will have to turn again to Gulliver and Haroun al Raschid.
And they will soon tire of these. For now that there are no real
mysteries, no unknown land of dreams, where there may still be genii and
mahatmas and bottle-imps, that kind of literature will be tolerated no
longer. Children will be sceptical and matter-of-fact and disillusioned,
and there will be no sale for fairy-stories any more.

But we ourselves are children. Why could we not have left at least one
city out of bounds?

LHASA,
_August 3._

We reached Lhasa to-day, after a march of seven miles, and camped
outside the city. As we approached, the road became an embankment across
a marsh. Butterflies and dragon-flies were hovering among the rushes,
clematis grew in the stonework by the roadside, cows were grazing in the
rich pastureland, redshanks were calling, a flight of teal passed
overhead; the whole scene was most homelike, save for the bare scarred
cliffs that jealously preclude a distant view of the city.