530 EXPLORERS' JOURNEYS IN HIGH TIBET.
Tibet, resembling Kashmir in appearance, and giving access to the gold-mines east of the Jamdok Lakes.»
But no expedition has ever penetrated into that region, although it would, I am certain, yield a richer geographical harvest than the great Lhasa expedition. Younghusband, himself a distinguished geographer, was actively interested in the idea of such an expedition. Indeed all preparations were made, and Captain Ryder was appointed chief of the enterprise. But the very day before they were to start from Tschaksam, there came a message from Simla countermanding the undertaking. Candler complains of the unreasonableness of the military authorities : »They had come through so far without a single disaster, and it seemed that no scientific or geographical considerations could have any weight with them in their determination to take no risks.»
Another geographical task which the English officers were expected to accomplish was to connect their own route from India with the network of itineraries which I had traced in Central "Tibet. The gap which confronted them here was even smaller than that along the Brahmaputra and much easier to bridge over; but the project of bridging it over met with the same fate: it was prohibited. Candler is quite right when he says: »An expedition to the mountains bordering the Tengrinor, only nine days north of Lhassa, would have linked all the unknown country north of the Tsangpo with the tracts explored by Sven Hedin, and left the map without a hiatus in four degrees of longitude from Cape Comorin to the Arctic Ocean. But military considerations were paramount.» *** He might have said however two degrees of latitude, for the hiatus in the long distance from Cape Comorin to Cape Tscheljuskin is no more. Dschallok, the point at which I was compelled to turn back, is situated according to my observations, in 31° 45' I,!2 N. lat. and 9o° 46' E. long. or 240 km. from Lhasa. By means of the postal system, organised in the Chinese way, a letter can be sent, as I learned, from Dschallok to Lhasa in a single day. It was considered that a caravan like mine would require five days to perform the journey, and not half a month, as Waddell tries to make out in his book (p. 451); and if the journey were taken in easy stages, and some attention bestowed upon the Tengri-nor in passing, it could be done, as Candler suggests, in nine days.
It would not however be sufficient to connect cartographically with the lowest point reached by me, it would also be essential to link up with the itineraries of other travellers. When you study a map of Tibet, with the routes of travellers plotted on it, you see how the majority of them converge upon Lhasa. Prschevalskij, Bonvalot, Bower, Rockhill, Dutreuil de Rhins, Littledale, and I were all compelled to turn back when within a more or less short distance of that city. The 102 officers of the English expedition were masters of Lhasa for five weeks: they were like the spiders at the middle of the web the strands of which were broken off quite near to them. Had the opportunity been seized, by means of small parties radiating out from the centre, to pick up as many of these loose ends as possible, the expedition would have been entitled to high rank from the geographical point of view. But
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