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0515 Innermost Asia : vol.2
Innermost Asia : vol.2 / Page 515 (Grayscale High Resolution Image)

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doi: 10.20676/00000187
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Sec. v]   FROM SISTAN TO INDIA AND LONDON   981

While paying a short visit on my way through Lahore to Sir Michael O'Dwyer, then Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab, I had the great satisfaction of learning from this kind old friend that the splendid services which my old surveying companion Rai Bahadur Lai Singh had during a lifetime rendered to Government were to be recognized by a ' Jâgir' or grant of land. It was a reward I had always wished to secure for him ever since my journeys had acquainted 'me with his indefatigable zeal an d energy.

Finally, after the middle of March, I reached Kashmir, which had been the base for all my Collection

Central-Asian expeditions and from which that now concluded had started close on two years and deposited at

Snnagar.

eight months before. There at Srinagar the 182 cases of my collection of antiquities from Chinese territory had safely arrived by the previous October. It was no small satisfaction to me that with the sanction of the Indian Government I was able to entrust the arrangement and detailed examination of the collection to the expert care of my old friend Mr. F. H. Andrews, who since acting as my valued collaborator at the British Museum had been appointed Principal of the Technical Institute of the Kashmir State. Mr. Andrews had been closely associated with all the work on the collections of antiques resulting from my first two expeditions. It was all the more fortunate that I could now leave the latest collection also in his experienced charge, and at a place climatically so favourable to the preservation of ancient relics, because war risks would have made its temporary transmission to London, as originally contemplated, a very unwise course.

Instead I decided to transfer only myself across the seas in order to employ a stay in England Return to on the preparation of a preliminary record of the work achieved and on the completion of the heavy England. work resulting from my second journey which I had been obliged to leave unfinished when setting out for the third. I returned to England, after two years of the greatest struggle which the history of mankind has known, prepared for great changes. But fortunately they were not allowed to affect my labours. The helpful interest shown in my scientific efforts by the Indian Government and by scholar friends continued throughout unabated, and in the very kind welcome accorded to me, on my first arrival in London, by Mr. (now Sir) Austen Chamberlain, then H.M.'s Secretary of State for India, I found a source of encouragement which has been remembered by me with deep gratitude throughout the labours now concluded.

FINIS.

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