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0350 Southern Tibet : vol.2
南チベット : vol.2
Southern Tibet : vol.2 / 350 ページ(白黒高解像度画像)

New!引用情報

doi: 10.20676/00000263
引用形式選択: Chicago | APA | Harvard | IEEE

OCR読み取り結果

Kawaguchi has no high idea about the Europeans who have travelled in Tibet.¹
He mentions only Rockhill, Csoma de Körös and myself. As to Csoma I have never
heard any European pretend that he had spent many years in Lhasa.

We leave him now. Priests are often wonderful people. Abbé Huc's book
reads like a romance. Kawaguchi's is very romantic also, and though he dislikes
the western explorers we cannot help liking him and his lonely ways through the
land of the Lamas. In the geographical world of the West such exploration as the
following is, however, not accepted: »I wished to take a north-easterly direction, so
as to reach a certain post-town; but having no compass, I could not ascertain my
bearings, and seem to have strayed off to the south-east and eventually due south,
instead of north-east, as I should have done.«² Kawaguchi has not cleared up a
single geographical problem. He has unintentionally and in a harmless way turned
some of the facts we have known for years upside down. He has no idea of absolute
heights, distances, dimensions of rivers and lakes and carries not even a compass with
him. Where we knew the water running from the Manasarovar to the Rakas-tal, he
makes it run the opposite way. Where the Kubi-tsangpo is some 30 yards broad
he makes it over a mile. To him Gaurisankar, Chomo Lhari and Mount Everest are
one and the same peak. So it cannot be said to be an exaggerated compliment to
Burrard and Hayden, Ryder and Rawling, Waddell and some other British experts and
travellers to say that Kawaguchi's book is »probably the best and most up-to-date
description of a country which is bound for some time to come to exercise a myste-
rious fascination over the Western reader.«³ To the mysterious author of these
words Tibet will certainly for ever remain a mystery.