THE ENGLISH EXPEDITION TO LHASA. 533
were pulled up ... The rain came down in dead earnest, and ... we soon had to go out and dig a trench all round the tent to head off the water. And on the 8th August I noted : »All night it poured with rain.»
In a word it rains in my book far more than it does in all the books of the war-correspondents taken together, and it is an error to suppose that the Tibetan rain was one of the extremely few geographical discoveries of the English expedition.* Still it would be ungracious to dwell any longer upon such small matters. Young-husband's paper is written in the simple but fascinating style which distinguished his earlier works. Nor must we indeed forget that the object of the expedition was political, and that its scientific results will no doubt be published in due time.
* In a criticism of my book Central Asia and Tibet, printed in the Literarisches "Zentralblatt, Prof. A. Kirchhoff says also: »Die Fabel vom niederschlagsarmen Tibet muss fortan aus der Wissenschaft schwinden. Vielmehr erscheint uns Tibet als das Wunderland, wo auf Tage wüstenhafter Trockenheit, an denen der Boden unter ärgster Verdunstung in zahllosen Rissen berstet, die furchtbarsten Entladungen von Gewitterstürmen, Hagelschlägen, Schnee- und Regenfällen intensiver Art und mehrtägiger Dauer folgen.»
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