HUNTING LOST EXPLORERS

Dunstan Times, Issue 2488, 5 July 1909, Page 7

HUNTING LOST EXPLORERS

The fortunes of eight men who are about to sail from Denmark for the coast of North-East Greenland will be followed with much interest because their mission is almost unique. They are going to search for the records of lost explorers. In 1907 Mylius Krichsen and two comrades from his large party completed the mapping of the coasts of Greenland. The great achievement- cost their* lives, for they perished of hunger and cold while groping their way southward toward their ship iu the growing darkness. Only the body of Bionlund, the native Greenlander, was found last spring; and in a bottle, swung around his neck, were the priceless survey sheets. These crumpled pages filled the gap remaining on our maps, and now we know the whole outline uf the largest island in the world and can make a map picture of its actual shape. The two largest facts revealed are that Northwest Greenland is penetrated by mountain-walled fiords from forty to eighty miles deep, and that a great peninsula extends so far east that the end of it, Northeast Foreland, is only about 280 miles from Spitzbergen. If we were to visit the largest unknown area of the world, outside the polar regions, we should go to inner Arabia, where two or three expeditions will try, this year, to throw new light upon its vast, dark spaces. But- if we should go to the part of the world where pioneer exploration is to-day most active, we would join the French in the Sahara Desert, where the network of routes ’s being traced in all directions through that wide area of desolation. Something may soon he told of the forgotten settlements and cities that explorers are beginning to dig out of the Arabian sands ; but attention is first due to a phase or two of the wonderful work in the Sahara from which so many new fads are coming that it is hard to' keep maps abreast of them. The latest “Bulletin” of the Oran Geographical Society contains twenty pictures and plans of monuments, walls, inscriptions, potteries, implements, and other objects that have just been discovered in the Sahara, with a map showing their distribution in the heart of the desert, half-way between Algeria and the -Sudan These are vestiges of an old civilisation that once thrived in the midSahara ; and all that the Tuaregs and other nomads can say about them is that their fathers told them a race ol giants had built towns so long ago that the earliest traditions reported them merely as ruin heaps. Very likely the scholar's who are now to study the inscriptions may throw light upon their origin. ]jf M. A. Stein has just returned from another two years of exploration in central Asia with fifty camel-loads of ancient manuscripts and other antiques, and many new geographical facts. He made the curious discovery that the Great Mall of China is much longer than it was supposed to be. It had been traced two thousand miles from the eastern edge of China to Nan-shan Mountains iu Kansu; but Stein has found it stretching farther west, where it was evidently built to protect the oases along the Nan-shan against Mongol excursions. Greatly to his surprise, he found a second wall extending southward, at right angles to the first, and built only four or five centuries ago. The later wall was erected to close the great trade routes towaird central Asia when China resumed her attitude of seclusion front which she is now emerging. It turns out that the great mountain range in Tibet, which Dr Sven Hedin calls the Trans-Himalaya, is not exactly a now discovery. Several explorers ha\e crossed it, but Hedin’s merit is that he has crossed it ten times and proved its great length.