Western countries. The substitution of the shorter line of caravan travel via the Chumbi valley to Darjeeling would diminish the national expenditure for transportation by a considerable amount—probably would cut it in half. But, short as that line is, its profile is such as to make railway construction and permanent railway operation fall beyond the bounds of practicability. Invention must make some other great conquest of nature's secrets ere the Himalayas be scaled by other transport than the crawling caravan.
Let us not fancy, then, that we shall be able to bless the Tibetans with our civilisation, which is distinctly that of steam, marked in a hundred ways by steam ; set off by steam in a hundred ways from the European civilisation which preceded it ; and which, indeed, being without steam, resembled the Tibetan civilisation more than it resembles us. We are its children, indeed, but children who have seen. another light.
In Tibet, where the country is particularly stubborn against the engineer's attacks, we may find in the years to come our only refuge in all the civilised world from the clangour of our Frankenstein's bells. Let us here and now offer up thanks to a foreseeing Providence for that the Himalayas have been made high and steep.
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