The Roof of the World'

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXII, Issue 32, 11 August 1904, Page 5

The Roof of the World'

The Cential Asian plateau, accoichng to the histouans and archaeologists, is the ciadlc ol the human i ace. One part of it lies to the west of the Himalayas and anotheL to the noith-easl. Ip to Wic tune of the Rusm m invasion undei Skobeleit, in the eaily 'eighties, the totmei. was jn unknown country. It was known that there was a city in it away towaids the Afghanistan honlier called Merv, and known all over the East as ' The Queen of the Woiid ' .No white man had over sei foot' mi Ihe place, at least for many generations, owing tio the threatening aspect ot the natives. H "'a^ Ml for ;mi Irishman 1 n peneirate the mystery. Forging ahead of the Russian armies, Edmund O'Donovan boldly lode into the forbidden city. For .sometime lie was a suspect, but in the course of a few weeks, as he desciibes so delightiully m his ' Merv Oasis,' the natives were m the habit ot coming before him in the evenings and playing their tom-toms, for he had been elected one of ihe thiee duels ot the .stionghold. His only chance of saving his life was to help his new subjects to prepaLe loi

The Russian Attack

and lie (Li! mj, with icsults that astonished the Russian cnmmandei -> The ' (,)ueen ol the Worikl ' fell, and has since been ,i plain Russian lo'\\n, with a 1 ail way . from iht' Caspian on the west, and iiom Samanand on the north, limnin'j: into it daily It was the last mysterious tiiy oi vhe Kasl but one Lhasa, on the other side ol the Himalayas, was e\en more saeied than \lerv, foi it was the <entie of the u,ieat Buddhist faith. Situated on what has been (ailed the ' ioof of the wOl Id,' it was altogether out oi the way of either Kuiopean 01 Vsiatic de\elnpinent The State of "which it was the capital had always Kept itself aloof from the test oi tlie woild, and although it was supposed to be a vassal piovince oi China, the authorities at PeKin semi ne\ei to lu\e mteileied with its internal aflairs. Tibet, indeed, was

V Closed Book Io the East, a-, well as to the West. Lhasa was visile d in iMil by Father (irueber, « Jesuit A Capuchin. mission entered Lhasa in 1708. and remained there, oft and on, tor almost thutv years The mission seems to have been evpelled liom Tibet m 1715, and to have Sound leluge fot a time in Nepal. Some lifty \olumes, howevei, the lelics of the mission library, were m 1817 iecei\ed ftom Lhasa Vy Mr. Biyan Hodgson, through the ci.uitesy <>f the (Irand Lama himself, and "weie transmitted as an oflermg to Pius IX Two Jesiiits again managed to teach the sacred city early in the 18th centuiy, and alter them two scholars, one of them of Leyden, and the other of Cambudge. In the middle of the last centuty two French La/anst pnests also succeeded m entetmg Lhasa Since then the only successful traveller in that region wa-, iho late Pundit Nam Smgli, who managed to penetrate to Ihe Tibetan capital m 187 1 From that day to th-s, however, no white man has cnleml the "-aued city, although many attempts have been made; by dating ttavellers. and although the whole unions woild is waiting with feverish expectancy to read a description of the City of the Dalai Lama.