JANuaRY 7, 1904] 
NATURE 225 
CENTRAL ASIAN EXPLORATION. 
R. SVEN HEDIN’S latest book possesses an 
interest for the great world of travellers which 
is apart from its intrinsic merit as a traveller’s record. 
The blank spaces of the world’s map are becoming so 
narrow; there is so little left for the exploring enthu- 
siast to mark with his pioneer footsteps, that books 
of this nature must necessarily grow scarcer as the 
world grows older. This may be one of the last of a 
grand series which has educated the world (in divers 
tongues) since the days of Herodotus. 
The finger of | 
the North Pole still beckons to us, as does that of the | 
South; there are still a few sand wastes in the interior 
of Arabia, and a few thousands of forest leagues in 
the interior of South America which have not yielded 
up their secrets to the keen eye of scientific inquiry— 
but that is about all. It is the unattractive empti- 
ness of the wildest and most desolate wastes which 
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still remains to be explored, so that the tale which has | 
yet to be told of them will be told by none but men 
of the true race of the world’s heroes of research 
men of the stamp of Peary and Sven Hedin—who ex- 
plore because, to them, the first acquisition of know- 
ledge of the unknown is the one thing that 
makes life worth living. 
The story that is now told by Sven Hedin 
is one of stirring personal adventure lead- 
ing to discoveries in a very old world rather 
than in a new one, and instinct with the 
interest of human history. He tells it well, 
introducing to us the companions of his 
travels one by one, making us acquainted 
with their weaknesses and their strength, 
familiarising us with his surroundings, his 
horses, and his dogs (and even those usually 
uninteresting brutes, his camels), until we 
can see the whole of this little Central 
Asian caravan moving across the deserts 
and through the mountain defiles as if we 
were one with them, hoping their hopes, 
fearing their fears, and deploring with 
them the loss of those brave helpers who fall 
by the way. No novel could carry the 
reader along with the course of its plots and 
its evolutions until the final dénouement 
more completely. Sven Hedin is a good 
English scholar himself, and he is to be 
congratulated on his choice of a translator. 
Very few books of travel written, as this is, 
in diary form avoid -the Scylla of dulness 
without wreck on the Charybdis of untruth. <A little 
poetic licence is usually necessary to enliven the 
narrative. But here any man who has seen anything 
of those remote Asiatic fields which Sven Hedin: de- 
scribes, recognises at once the atmosphere of absolute 
truthfulness in which the drama moves. There is not 
—_—_—§r 
| Tagh 
a rislx incurred, not a danger (and the whole record is | 
full of them) escaped, which is not the natural sequel of 
the daring conception of each phase of the three years’ 
journeying—not one which any traveller could reason- 
ably have hoped to avoid had he marked out for him- 
self Sven Hedin’s expeditions with Sven Hedin’s 
courage. 
His first enterprise, the voyage down the Tarim 
River, to its ending in the desert, illustrates the marvel- 
lous patience and pertinacity of the man. To most 
people it would have been enough to glide gently down 
the stream watching the changing lights and shadows 
and the glorious autumn tinting of the poplar woods, 
and to have made a record at the end of each day’s 
1 **Central Asia and Tibet.” By Sven Hedin. Vol. i., pp. xvii-+608 ; 
vel: il,, pp. xiv-+664. (London: Hurst and Blackett, Ltd., 1903.) Price 42s. 
net. 
NO. 1784, VOL. 69] 
run of its general direction and its terminal latitude. 
This was not good enough for Sven Hedin. Hour 
after hour he sat at his work in the boat, mapping each 
turn, each curve, in the twisting, winding stream, 
noting its depth, the strength of its current and its 
peculiarities, until sometimes sixteen hours a day of 
intermittent work was achieved without once leaving 
his table. If genius is an ‘‘ infinite capacity for taking 
pains,”? then indeed does Sven Hedin possess that 
desirable attribute. It must be noted, too, that in a 
desert like that of the Takla Makan, such natural 
hydrographic features as exist must inevitably change 
almost from year to year. There is no more per- 
manency about the course of the Tarim River than 
there is about the ‘‘locus’’ of Lop Nor. All Sven 
Hedin’s magnificent map making may require serious 
correction within the next few years. 
The very centre of interest in Central Asian geo- 
graphy lies in the Lop Nor region. The former exist- 
ence of a high road across the desert connecting the 
outlying city of Western China, Sachow (Saitu), with 
Yarkand and Kashgar by a route skirting the northern 
spurs and outlying ridges of the Altyn Tagh (Astyn 
according Sven Hedin) to Cherchen, and 
to 
Fic, 1.—Tibetan Soldiers. 
(From ‘“‘ Central Asia and Tibet.”) 
thence following the Cherchen River until it again 
touches the northern foot hills of the Kuen Lun, and 
thus extends itself to Nia and Khotan, has long been 
recognised; but we must now accept the theory of a 
more direct road westward connecting Sachow with the 
ancient city of Lou Lan, so well described in Sven 
Hedin’s book. Lou Lan was a small and independent 
State in the early centuries of our era, dovetailed as a 
buffer between China and the Turkish Hun tribes, who 
together appear to have rendered its political life as 
uneasy as more modern buffer States have found such 
a life to be. That this isolated State existed only by 
grace of the existence of the Lop Nor Lake is 
sufficiently proved by its total disappearance when the 
waters of Lop Nor (the old bed of which lake is placed 
further north by Sven Hedin than our existing maps 
show it—about midway between the Altyn Tagh on the 
south, and the Kurruk Tagh on the north) shifted 
southward. This was no case of sand burying. 
The whole water supply of the district gradually 
withdrew to another position, forming new lales on the 
inconceivably flat surface of the desert some fifty miles 
away; and the extraordinary feature about this move- 
