Through Asia, Volume 2

Right in the heart of Asia, where Britain, Russia and China stretched encroaching fingers towards a possible meeting, lies the mysterious tract of country passed over in half a page in our geography books, and omitted, except in vague and general outline, from our atlases. It is a region about which people have inquired little. North and South have been eagerly explored; the Pole and Sahara are brought, so to speak, to our doors. But the centuries have passed with but few at tempts to penetrate the core of the mysterious East. There is something about the very name of Khotan, of the Pamirs, of Mus-tagh-ata, which tickles the imagination, and we confess to something of a superstitious thrill in opening Dr. Sven Hedin's book. For if the hidden Lama is to be unveiled, surely we have a right to expect portents. But what do we find? That Dr. Hedin visited the Temple of the Ten Thousand Images and ' had tea ' with the ' Living Buddha! ' Yet that was a mere incident, disposed of in a few lines of a book whose every page is alive with serious interest. Dr. Hedin has plenty of humour, and of good humour, but his book is one to be taken seriously. He has traversed thousands of miles where no European had ever before set foot; his adventures and experiences have been in themselves extraordinary, and his discoveries of far-reaching importance; but perhaps the charm of the book lies, as much as anywhere else, in the writer's art of telling his story simply and unaffectedly and of keeping the warm human interest alive from first to last. There is hardly a more fascinating or a more thrilling travel book. The descriptions of the various attempts to scale the Mus-tagh-ata, of the wonderful scenic effects, of the mental and physical sensations of the traveller, and the grand invincibility of the Father of the Ice Mountains, are enough to set the nerves a-tingling in the bare reading.