THE UNKNOWN LANDS.

Otago Witness, Issue 2105, 28 June 1894, Page 42

THE UNKNOWN LANDS.

No room remains in Africa for discoveries of the first magnitude, no more snow-clad ranges, no more lakes of boundless horizon, no more rivers to rank with tbe Nile, Congo, and Niger remain in hiding, but there is scope for centuries of accurate turvejingand scientific study.

A few years ago, when Mr Jame3 published his " Unknown Horn of Africa," the Somaliland Penisula was forbidden ground. White travellers could only enter it by evading the orders of their own Government and risking the humour of the warlike Somal tribes who fought and ruled in the interior. Vast gaps are still left in this region, and £or many year 3it will -afford sport for adventurous travellers to whom danger brings joy. Rscent journeys have shown that the chiefs may be pacified by judicious treatment, and that much information may be collected amongst the people by the exercise of tact and good nature. Arabia is physically a dependency of Africa, but Africa has been for 500 years commercially a possession of the Arabs. Here travel has its most romantic possibilities The sacred cities of Mecca and Medina would be entirely unknown were it not fothe marvellous Orientalism of Burton, Palgrave, and a few other Europeans, who, disguised as devout Mussulman pilgrims, made their way to holy places where a mere suspicion of their fraud would have meant instant death.

The true Arab, removed from the degrading influences of town life, travelling in patriarchal state with his flocks and his herds of incomparable horses, is the finest gentleman in the world. Even the most degenerate scoundrels who poison Africa with their slave raids, and can only boast a traditional trace of Arab blood, retain manners which are the admiration of every white traveller -who has come their way.

Again and again Arab slavetraders have saved and brought to the coast Europeans whom they knew to be the bitterest enemies of themselves and their system, and this without promise of reward. But the stately Arab at home keeps within the habitable area of which a little definite information exists, and the vast red sand desert filling Southern Arabia from Nejd to the Hadramaut coast range is uninhabited, if not untraversable. Here is an absolutely unknown region, where no traveller has been able to face the shifting sands, the extremes of temperature, and the absence of water. Again and again in other parts of Asia similar conditions are found, always associated with blank spaces in our map. More than 1,000,000 square miles of absolute desert exist in that continent, and this tJesert is growing. Places which five centuries ago were mighty cities roaring with the trade of the highroad between Europe and Cathay, and frequented by merchants of every nation, are now almost unrecognisable, heaps of ruins gradually being ingulfed in shifting sand.

Owing to its progressive drying up, Central Asia is less known now than it was when Marco Polo made bis great journey in the fourteenth century. "The native of Turfan," Bays Grijmailo, a recent Russian traveller, " is digging his own grave when he 'draws off the water from the hill slopes to irrigate his fields."

The land, deprived of its natural moisture, ■can no longer support the grass which holds it together, and co the surface resolves itself into loose sand, which drifts across the irrigated fields and even invades the town?. Against this sand there can be no resistance. The ruined cities of the Gobi attest its past victoriea.

In the wild 3of the Tarim river and round the shrinking salt lake Lob Nor, into which that vast stream flows, that Russian explorer Projevalski and his successors have discovered many wonders previously unsuspected. They raw the wild horse and the wild camel, which breed in the still unknown valleys of the ranges buttressing the loftiest plateau in the world. They reached isolated communities, shut out from neighbouring settlements by the extending deserts, and many such must still exist unknown. In one lonely spot this notice was found displayed on the shores of a small lake : —

"It is forbidden, under penalty of instant death, to violate the tranquillity of this holy land. There must be not only no shooting and no tree cutting, but cattle may not even be pastured here, that they may not trample under foot the herbage belong ing to God's creatures."

But no one appeared to enforce the penalty. The difficulties of travel amongst the interminable mountains, over passes deep in snow at midsummer, across pla> teaus 15,000 ft above the sea, where, with an almo&t tropical sue, the wind blows aB keenly at it does in Greenland, have besn vividly deEcribed by Rockhill, Bonvalot, and the Russian explorer?, and it is cause for wonder that so liuHe land still lies unmapped in these regions.

Approaching the Himalaya range, which shuts off the Indian frontier from Central Asia, the country becomes less known still. Political obstacles are added to the physical difficulties. No white stranger is admitted

across the passes to Thibet from the border States on the Himalyas, the Indian Government forcing this restriction, and taking no responsibility even for British officers who venture on surveying expeditions into the prohibited area.

The sacred town of Lehassa has beca the dream of many an ardent explorer, but eir.co Hue's visit 50 years ago, everyone has been turned away. W. W. Rockhill, the scholarly American diplomatist, who this year received the gold medal of the Royal Geographical Society forhis remarkable travels in Thibet, could not get within three days' journey of the eacred city, and others since have been equally unsuccessful.

Trained native surveyors from India have visited Lehassa in disguise, and, by an ingenious adaptation of the rosary and prayer wheel of the devout Buddhist, they have been able to take notes and make valuable observations without excltirg suspicion.

Less known than Thibet, and in some ways more interesting, is the little State of Kafiristan, a nation of " unbelievers," wedged in between Mohammedan tribes. So absolate was the exclusion of foreigners, and so hopeless appeared the prospect of getting into the country, that Sir Henry Yule- declared publicly in 1880 :—

" When Kafiristan shall have become thoroughly known, the time will hive come for tbe Geographical Society to close its doors, for its work will be then pretty well concluded."

Three years later MacNair, an Indian survey officer, succeeded in visiting the country, and now, with a British agency at Chitral, on its borders, its exploration will speedily be accomplished, but the end of geography is not yet.

Coasting along China and Corea the merchant skipper passes town after town where he is forbidden to land, and where no foreign trade of any kind can be done. China is, however, comparatively well mapped, the only really unknown region being Ordo3, in the great bend of the Yellow river in the country beyond the Great Wall. For many years Corea justified its nickname of the hermit nation.

Self-contained, with a more than Chinese exclusiveness, it felt no need of outside help and refused to welcome " foreign devils to its shores." Now it has open ports and foreign representatives at its court, and only in the centre of the peninsula and northwaid toward the Maochurian border are there patches of mountain where the foreign foot has not yet trod.

The vast archipelago that unites Asia and Australia, although almost the first part of the true Orient to be visited by traders from the west, retains much of tbe unknown. Java alone has been surveyed and studied as minutely as a European country.

The huge interior of Bome"b teems with possibilities of exploration, and in its central mountains it locks up one of the most interesting problems yet unsolved regarding the geographical distribution of animals.

New Guinea also has its mountain problem. Although the Owen Stanley range in the east was surmounted by Sir William Macgregor two years ago, the Charles Louis range in the west remains an untouched field, rearing snow-clad crests almost at the equator to the height of over 20,000 ft. In New Guinea the pestilential climate of the coast strip and the savage character of the natives have proved too much for most of the attempts at exploration. The difficulties are akin to those besetting African travel at its worst, and the inducements to persevere are enormously less. It would seem tbat the people shun the mountains, looking on the lofty elopes with horror, and in some places, at lexst, believe them to be tenanted by the ghosts of their dead chiefs, rendered terribly dangerous by the Uncongenial region which they are forced to inhabit.

In Australia we are hardly surprised to find a considerable area still untraversed. Wherever the squatter could find grazing lands for his sheep, or the miner could detect traces of ore, the land has been overrun and more or less settled, and a rim of known territory encircles the continent, widest on the east and narrrowest on the west.

Occasionally intrepid explorers with horses, or latterly camels, have made their way across tide arid regions of the interior in various directions, or' perished of thirst and starvation on the desert. A great overland telegraph line running from the southern to the northern coasts of South Australia bisects tbe continent, and it is to the west of that line that the largest unexplored areas Btill remain.

Here in the Great Victoria Desert on the south a tract of land larger than the British Islands has never been entered by a white man, and in the Great Sandy Desert further north the unknown territory is hardly less.

The obstacles which have so long guarded the unknown regions are almost entirely physical. There are hostile natives who resent the high-handed intrusion of the white strangers, and these natives are perhaps the most degraded and least attractive of all primitive people. Bat they are few 1n number, and not formidable to armed travellers.

The chief difficulty is want of water and a climate not only extreme but exceptionally uncertain. While there is no rain there can be no grass, and this makes it all but impossible to employ beasts of burden or to expect game for food. Bat in Australia the aridity is aggravated by vast tracts of otherwise barren ground covered by thorny groves of scrub.

Now it is mulga, like a dense carpet concealing the ground, again mallee, a dense growth like reeds, too high to see over, and too close to push through. And in places where there is grass it ig of the spinifex kind, uneatable by cattle, and woundiDg even the feet of horsas with ita dagger-like leaves.

There is regular desert, too, in plenty — undulating expanses of red sand, heaped into dunes by the prevailing wind, or flat clay pans whitened by salt, the remsant of some evaporated lake. Here and there are waterholes or links of aimless river bed, with no apparent begincicg or end. And anywhere the typical dsserc climate of unbearable extremes makes travel an intolerable burden.

Only at times—perhaps years apart — heavy rains fall in the deserts, foaming torrents dash down the gullies, the water-

holes expand into lakes, and a rim of verdure widens over the sand, to wither and vanish as the common climate returns. Once a party was confined to its tents for days by deluges of rain in a desert where rain had never been seen before. — St. Louis Rspublic