4 - 
THROUGH ASIA 
taking. To His Majesty King Oscar of Sweden and 
Norway I accordingly addressed the following particulars 
of my plan, which I give here, as they will best show 
how far and in what manner I succeeded in fulfilling 
the task 1 set myself. Somewhat abbreviated, my memo- 
randum ran as follows : — 
In the heart of Asia, between the two highest chains 
of mountains on the earth, the Kwen - lun and the 
Himalayas, is the most stupendous upheaval to be found 
on the face of our planet — the Tibetan highlands. Its 
average height is 13,000 feet, and in the north it attains 
as much as 15,000 feet. Its area, therefore, of 'jjOjOOO 
square miles (two and a half times that of the Scandi- 
navian peninsula) is on a level with the highest peaks 
of the Alps. According to the Chinese maps its northern 
parts, which constitute one of the least known tracts of 
Asia, appear to consist of a system of uninhabited lake- 
basins possessing no outflow. Farther south the 1 ibetan 
and Mongol nomads lead a wandering shepherd life ; and 
it is only in the extreme south of the region that there 
is any population. 
Tibet lies aside from the great highways used by travel- 
lers of the nineteenth century. Only a few of the more 
adventurous Europeans have done their share towards 
collecting the scanty material upon which our present 
knowledge of the country is based. Its desolate scenery, 
its lofty, inaccessible mountains, and its extreme remote- 
ness, situated, as it is, in the heart of a vast continent, 
have deterred travellers, and driven them to find scope 
for their activity in other parts of the world— in the Polar 
Regions, among the oceanic islands, or where the coast 
lias provided a certain point of departure to unknown 
regions lying within comparatively easy reach. And yet 
there is scarcely any part of the world in which the ex- 
plorer is so richly rewarded for his pains, or finds such 
an inexhaustible field for observation of every kind, as in 
Tibet ; the country whence the light of holiness streams 
forth upon the world of Lamaism, just as its waters, in 
the form of mighty rivers, stream forth to give life and 
