UNEXPLORED.

Colonist, Volume LV, Issue 13802, 27 August 1913, Page 8

UNEXPLORED.

Marion Pineenza, the Italian Alpinist, who has just distinguished himself by remaining for ten hours on the (summit of Mount Numkan, may have enjoyed the sensation of looking over a wide country still unexplored by man. In the high Himalayan country, Workman discovered a broad highland into which' no white man, at least, had ever penetrated before; and adventurers may feel happy to think that there are romantic blank spaces here and there etill left on the. map. In some pases, the men already in the field have delayed the cause of the physiographer. Borneo, has large sections of territory not yet described owing to the inhospitality o fthe head hunters, who blow little poisoned arrows through bamboo pijf>es. New Guinea wastes its attractive features upon . fierce blacks ready to repulse a geographer's advances. .Southern Arabia does not sound inaccessible, yet the great plains of Dahna and the land beyond, a region of over two hundred and fifty square miles, remain still unknown to whits men. '"This mysterious land stirs the fancy more than any other," says a recent commentator, :'i'or on its boundaries, are buried cities and beyond them may be ruined towns standing in the naked sunlight, or there may be a paradise of flowers."' He-re the desert difficulties bar the w«y; and thirst also guards the virgin territory of "West Australia, known only conjecturally as n vague, waterless waste. Africa's blank spaces include the vast desert region whero caravans never go. Central Sahara may contain nothing but desert, and its surface may be hundreds of feet below sea level, as speculative science declar s. "But should we bravo the oppressive barrenness of its sandy borderlands, what might we r.ot 'find of breezy ferti.e uplands, of great lakes and rivers flowing into them —what discoveries to /comfort science and thrill t'jie Avorld!" Then when Abruzzi climbed Mount Elena, in the Riunzori Rani.c, he reached au unknown plateau and a jungle that may remain for generations unexplored. When Miss IVck scaled iiuarascan, sho might .see the boundary oi: La Montana, where lies a terra ineog.nita of great exfoht. Here ancient Peruvian'tribts may be living on in the imperial fashion that prevailed in ancient <i«\s. i:3teiV.;i»son has confirmed his own thco-y of finding blonde Eskimos in the A:etic; and now lio hopes to iind the- manners of our Stone Ago ancestors still retained by isolated Eskimos in tiic- newly-disoovered Crocker's Land, near the Pole. F'.ying will perhaps sobc most problems. The bird-men ha\e already begun upon the Sahara, and possibly all blank spaces on our maps may soon be filled at loR&t '•■■ a "bird1 e< eye view."