Part 1

[Frontispiece: The Summit of Mount Everest. (_By permission of the Mount Everest Committee._)]

THE LAST SECRETS

The Final Mysteries of Exploration

By JOHN BUCHAN

THOMAS NELSON AND SONS, LTD. LONDON, EDINBURGH, AND NEW YORK

_First Impression, September 1923_

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN AT THE PRESS OF THE PUBLISHERS

TO THE MEMORY OF BRIG.-GEN. CECIL RAWLING, C.M.G., C.I.E. WHO FELL AT THE THIRD BATTLE OF YPRES AN INTREPID EXPLORER A GALLANT SOLDIER AND THE BEST OF FRIENDS

PREFACE

The first two decades of the twentieth century will rank as a most distinguished era in the history of exploration, for during them many of the great geographical riddles of the world have been solved. This book contains a record of some of the main achievements. What Nansen said of Polar exploration is true of all exploration; its story is a "mighty manifestation of the power of the Unknown over the mind of man." The Unknown, happily, will be always with us, for there are infinite secrets in a blade of grass, and an eddy of wind, and a grain of dust, and human knowledge will never attain that finality when the sense of wonder shall cease. But to the ordinary man there is an appeal in large, bold, and obvious conundrums, which is lacking in the _minutiæ_ of research. Thousands of square miles of the globe still await surveying and mapping, but most of the exploration of the future will be the elucidation of details. The main lines of the earth's architecture have been determined, and the task is now one of amplifying our knowledge of the groyning and buttresses and stone-work. There are no more unvisited forbidden cities, or unapproached high mountains, or unrecorded great rivers.

"The world is disenchanted; oversoon Must Europe send her spies through all the land."

It is in a high degree improbable that many geographical problems remain, the solving of which will come upon the mind with the overwhelming romance of the unveilings we have been privileged to witness. The explorer's will still be a noble trade, but it will be a filling up of gaps in a framework of knowledge which we already possess. The morning freshness has gone out of the business, and we are left with the plodding duties of the afternoon.

Some of the undertakings described in these pages have not been completed. The foot of man has not yet stood on the last snows of Everest, or on the summit of Carstensz. One notable discovery I have not dealt with--the great Turfan Depression in the heart of Central Asia, far below the sea level, the existence of which was first established by the Russian, Roborowski, before the close of last century, and the details of which have been described by Sir Aurel Stein in his _Ruins of Desert Cathay_ and _Serindia_. But Sir Aurel's interest was chiefly in the antiquities of the place, and the more strictly geographical results have not yet been given to the world. Today, if we survey the continents, we find nothing of which the main features have not been already expounded. The Amazon basin might be regarded as an exception, and only a little while ago men dreamed of discovering among the wilds of the Bolivian frontier the remains, perhaps even the survival, of an ancient civilization. It would appear that these dreams are baseless. The late President Roosevelt did, indeed, succeed in putting upon the map a new river, the Rio Roosevelt, 1,500 kilometres long, of which the upper course was entirely unknown, and the lower course explored only by a few rubber collectors--a river which is the chief affluent of the Madeira, which is itself the chief affluent of the Amazon. But now all the tributaries have been traced, and though there is much unexplored ground in the Amazon valley, it consists of forest tracts lying between the rivers, all more or less alike in their general character, and with nothing to repay the explorer except their flora and fauna. Africa is now an open book, even though many parts have been little travelled. The map of Asia alone holds one blank patch which may well be the last of the great secrets--the Desert of Southern Arabia, which lies between Yemen and Oman, 800 by 500 miles of waterless sands. Long ago there were routes athwart it, and hidden in its recesses some great news may await the traveller. But its crossing will be a hazardous affair for whoever undertakes it, since he will have to lean upon the frail reed of milk camels for food and transport. For the rest, the problems are now of survey and scientific enquiry rather than of exploration in the grand manner.

I have many acknowledgments to make. My thanks are due in the first place to Mr. Charles Turley Smith, who has contributed the chapters on Arctic and Antarctic Exploration, subjects on which he is specially equipped to write; and, in order to put the conquest of the two Poles in its proper light, has supplied a sketch of the long story of Polar exploration. I am deeply indebted to Mr. Arthur R. Hinks, the Secretary, and to Mr. Edward Heawood, the Librarian, of the Royal Geographical Society for their help and advice. I have also to express my thanks to Messrs. Constable and Company for permission to reproduce illustrations and to quote from works published by them; to Major G. H. Putnam and Messrs. Seeley, Service, and Company for the same kindness; to Major F. M. Bailey, C.I.E., the British Political Officer in Sikkim, for the story of the Brahmaputra Gorges; and to my friends of the Mount Everest Committee for their assent to my use of their beautiful photographs of that mountain.

J. B.

CONTENTS

I. Lhasa

II. The Gorges of the Brahmaputra

III. The North Pole

IV. The Mountains of the Moon

V. The South Pole

VI. Mount McKinley

VII. The Holy Cities of Islam

VIII. The Exploration of New Guinea

IX. Mount Everest

LIST OF PLATES

The Summit of Mount Everest ... _Frontispiece_

View of the Potala Monastery at Lhasa, with the Chortan in the foreground

Ruwenzori from the Hill near Kaibo

The Valley to the West of Mount Baker

Mount McKinley: View of the Southern Approach

The Summit of Mount McKinley

View of Medina

View of Mecca

New Guinea Canoes

New Guinea Pygmies contrasted with ordinary Natives

The _massif_ of Mount Everest

The Chang La from the Lhakpa La, with Mount Everest on the left

LIST OF MAPS

The Expedition to Lhasa

The Gorges of the Brahmaputra

North Polar Regions

The Peaks and Valleys of Ruwenzori

The Route to Ruwenzori

South Polar Regions

Mount McKinley

Wavell's Journey to Mecca

The Exploration of New Guinea

The Route of the Mount Everest Expedition

I

LHASA

LHASA

(_Map_, p. 24.)

Till the summer of 1904 if one had been asked what was the most mysterious spot on the earth's surface the reply would have been Lhasa. It was a place on which no Englishman had cast an eye for a hundred years and no white man for more than half a century. In our prosaic modern world there remained one city among the clouds about which no tale was too strange for belief. The greatest of mountain barriers shut it off from the south, and on the north it was guarded by leagues of waterless desert. Explorer after explorer had set out on the quest, but all had stopped short before the golden roofs of the sacred city could be seen from any hill-top. Even in early days the place had never been explored, for the visitors had been jealously watched and hurried quickly away. In the Potala might be treasures of a culture long hidden to the world, lost treatises of Aristotle, unknown Greek poems, relics, perhaps, of the mystic kingdom of Kubla Khan, riches of gold and jewels drawn from the four corners of Asia.....

And then suddenly in 1904 we went there, not as apologetic travellers taken by side paths, but as an armed force marching along the highway to the very heart of the mystery, and letting loose at once upon the world a flood of accurate knowledge. For a moment we were carried centuries away from high politics and every modern invention, and were back in the great ages of discovery: with the Portuguese in their quest for Ophir or Prester John, or with Raleigh looking for Manoa the Golden. It was impossible for the least sentimental to avoid a certain regret for the drawing back of that curtain which had meant so much to the imagination of mankind. The shrinkage of the world goes on so fast, our horizon grows so painfully clear, that the old untiring wonder which cast its glamour over the ways of our predecessors is vanishing from the lives of their descendants. With the unveiling of Lhasa fell the last stronghold of the older romance.

I

Tibet had always been a forbidden land, and, as a rule, adventurers only penetrated its fringes. Somewhere about the year 1328 a certain Friar Odoric of Pordenone, travelling from Cathay, is said to have entered Lhasa; and in the middle of the sixteenth century, Fernao Mendes Pinto may have reached it. In 1661 the Jesuits, Grueber and D'Orville, made a journey from Peking to Lhasa, and thence by way of Nepal into India. In the early part of the eighteenth century there was a temporary unveiling, and a Capuchin Mission was established in the Holy City. Various Jesuits also reached the place, notably one Desideri; and in 1730 came Samuel Van der Putte, a Doctor of Laws of Leiden, who stayed long enough to learn the language. In 1745 the Capuchin Mission came to an end, and the curtain descended. In 1774 George Bogle of the East India Company was in Tibet on a mission from Warren Hastings, but the first Englishman did not reach Lhasa till 1811, when Thomas Manning, of Caius College, Cambridge, a friend of Charles Lamb, arrived and stayed for five months on his unsuccessful journey from Calcutta to Peking. Till 1904 Manning was the solitary Englishman who was known for certain to have entered the sacred city, though there was a tale of one William Moorcroft reaching the place in 1826, and living there for twelve years in disguise. In 1844 the French missionaries, Huc and Gabet, reached Lhasa from China, and recorded their experiences in one of the most delightful of all books of travel. They were the last Europeans to have the privilege up to the entry of the British army. But throughout the last half of the nineteenth century Indian natives in the Government service were employed in the survey of Tibet, men of the type of the Babu whom Mr. Kipling has described in _Kim_. The whole business was kept strictly secret. The agents were known only by the letters of the alphabet, and when they crossed the Tibetan borders they were aware that they had passed beyond the protection of the British Raj. More than one reached Lhasa by fantastic routes, with the result that the Indian Government had accurate information about the city filed in its archives, while the world at large knew the place only from the story of Huc and Gabet, and from the drawing of the Potala made by Grueber in the seventeenth century.

Of the later European travellers none reached the capital. Mr. Littledale in 1895 was not stopped by the Tibetan authorities till he was within fifty miles of the city, and Sven Hedin in 1901 got within fourteen days of Lhasa from the north. But meantime events were happening which were to impel the Government of India to interfere more actively in Tibetan policy than by merely sending native agents to collect news. The traditional policy was to preserve Tibet as a sanctuary, but a sanctuary is only a sanctuary if all the neighbours combine to hold it inviolate.

In 1903 the position of Britain and Tibet was like that of a big boy at school who is tormented by an impertinent youngster. He bears it for some time, but at last is compelled to administer chastisement. The Convention of 1890 and the Trade Regulations of 1893 were outraged by the Tibetans in many of their provisions; our letters of protest were returned unopened; and, since news travels fast upon the frontier, our protected peoples began to wonder what made the British Raj so tolerant of ill-treatment. This was bad enough for our prestige in the East, but the danger became acute when we discovered that the Dalai Lama was in treaty with Russia, and that an avowed Russian agent, one Dorjieff, was in residence at his court. The two powers in Lhasa were the Dalai Lama, who speedily fell under Russian influence, and the Tsong-du, or Council, composed of representatives of the great priestly caste, who suspected all innovations, and were in favour of maintaining the traditional policy of exclusion against Russia and Britain alike. China, though the nominal suzerain, was impotent, her Viceroy, the Amban, being partially insulted by both parties.

In these circumstances Britain could only make her arrangements by going direct to headquarters. Dorjieff had played his cards with great skill, and seemed to be winning everywhere. The Dalai Lama was wholly with him, and had received from the Tsar a complete set of vestments of a Bishop of the Greek Church. The Russian monarch was recognized as a Bodisat incarnation, representing no less a person than Tsong-kapa, the Luther of Lamaism; and Russia was popularly believed to be a Buddhist Power, or, at any rate, the sworn protector of the Buddhist faith. It is difficult to overestimate the significance of these doings; but at the same time Russian influence was rather potential than actual. The Cossacks who accompanied Sven Hedin were headed off from the Holy City as vigorously as any English explorer, and the tales of arming with Russian rifles which filtered through to India were rather intelligent anticipations than records of facts.

There were thus two parties in Tibet pulling against each other, but both in different ways hostile to our interests. The Dalai Lama and Dorjieff favoured a departure from the traditional Tibetan policy in favour of Russia. The Tsong-du and the Lamaist hierarchy in general were all for exclusion, but in their wilfulness declined to observe treaties or behave with neighbourly honesty. This internal strife, which alone made possible the success of our expedition, also made its dispatch inevitable, for neither party was prepared to listen to any argument but force. Few enterprises have ever been undertaken by Britain more unwillingly, and her decision was only arrived at under the compulsion of stark necessity. There were many who reprobated what they assumed to be a violation of the sacred places of an ancient, pure, and pacific religion. But there was no need for compunction on that score, since Lamaism was the grossest perversion of Buddhism in all Asia. Spiritually it had more kinship with the aboriginal devil-worship of Tibet than the gentle creed of Gautama. Practically it was a political tyranny of monks, who battened upon a mild and industrious population and ruled them with coarse theological terrors. Our reception by the monasteries was sufficiently gruff; but to the common people we came rather in the guise of friends.

In July, 1903, Colonel Younghusband, as he then was, Mr. White, and Captain O'Connor went to Khamba Jong, a place in Southern Tibet, just north of Sikkim. There they met the Abbot of Tashilhunpo and certain emissaries from Lhasa, but nothing could be done; and, with the concurrence of the Indian Office, it was arranged that a Mission should go to Gyangtse, the chief town of Southern Tibet, accompanied by a small escorting force. While troops were being collected, the Commissioner, Colonel Younghusband, went to Tuna, on the bleak plain above the Tang La, where he waited through three weary winter months. Meanwhile General Macdonald, a soldier who had had a distinguished record in Central Africa, took up his quarters at Chumbi, while Major Bretherton, the chief transport and supply officer, accumulated stores in that valley and prepared the line of communications. Those were anxious months of waiting for the Mission, for the Tibetans were in force in the neighbourhood, and daily threatened to attack the small post; but nothing happened till the escort joined them in the end of March, 1904, and all things were ready for the advance.

It is worth while looking back upon the road to Tuna from the plains of Bengal, surely one of the most wonderful of the Great North Roads of the world. At Siliguri the little toy railway to Darjeeling runs up the hill-side; but the path for the troops lay along the gorge of the Teesta River, through forests of sal and gurjun, which give place in turn to teak and bamboo, till the altitude increases and the tree-fern and rhododendron take their places, and at last the pines are reached and the fringe of the snows is near. From the glorious sub-tropical vegetation of Gangtok, the capital of Sikkim, the road runs through difficult ravines till it passes the tree-line at Lagyap and climbs over the frozen summit of the Natu La. From this point Tibet is visible, with the majestic snows of Chumulhari hanging like a cloud in the north. Then you descend to the Chumbi valley, the Debatable Land of Tibet, where stands Ta-Karpo, the great White Rock which recalls a famous passage in the Odyssey. Right under Chumulhari and just south of the Tang La, lies Phari Jong, the first of the minor Tibetan fortalices, which looks as if it were a bad copy of some European model. A little farther and you are over the pass and on the great plateau of Tuna, where icy winds blow from the hills and drive the gritty soil in blizzards about the traveller. There are few places in the world where in so short a time so complete a climatic and scenic change can be experienced.

II

On the 31st March the expedition left Tuna; and after an unfortunate encounter with the Tibetans, which cost the latter many lives, and in which Mr. Edmund Candler, the distinguished war correspondent, was wounded, the enemy made a further stand at Red Idol Gorge. Nothing of importance, however, occurred till the town of Gyangtse was reached and occupied without a shot. Very soon it became apparent that no more could be done here than at Khamba Jong, and the Government of India were obliged to sanction a farther advance to Lhasa. For this preparations must be made; so the Commissioner, with a small escort, took up his quarters at Gyangtse, while General Macdonald returned to Chumbi for reinforcements. The jong was found to be deserted, but, unfortunately, was neither held nor destroyed, the Mission residing in the plain below.

At first the waiting among those iris-clad meadows was pleasant and idyllic enough; the country people brought abundant supplies, and members of the staff rode through the neighbourhood and had tea with various dignitaries of the Church; but early in May things took a turn for the worse. It was reported that the Tibetans were fortifying the Karo La, the next pass on the Lhasa road; and, since it is the first principle of frontier warfare to strike quickly, Colonel Brander was dispatched with the larger part of the garrison to disperse them. He performed the task with conspicuous success, and the incident is remarkable for one of the strangest pieces of fighting in our military history. It was necessary to enfilade a sangar in which the enemy was ensconced, and a native officer, Wassawa Singh, with twelve Gurkhas, was detached for the work. They climbed by means of cracks and chimneys up a 1,500 feet cliff--an exploit which would have done credit to any Alpine club, even if the climbers had not been cumbered with weapons, exposed to fire, and labouring at a height of nearly 19,000 feet.

During the engagement disquieting news arrived from Gyangtse that the jong had been reoccupied by the enemy and that the Mission was undergoing a continuous bombardment. Colonel Brander hurried back, to find that the world had moved fast in his absence, and that there was a new type of Tibetan army to be faced--a type possessed of both dash and persistence, with some notion of strategy, and with guns which, at short range, could do real execution. So began the blockade of the Mission house; an imperfect blockade, for the telegraph wires remained intact, the mail was delivered with fair regularity, and the besieged endured no special privations. "The honours," says Mr. Perceval Landon,* "were pretty evenly divided. Neither the Tibetans nor we were able to storm the other's defences; a mutual fusillade compelled each side to protect its occupants by an elaborate system of traverses; and straying beyond the narrow tracts of the fortifications was, on either side, severely discouraged by the other."

* _Lhasa_, by Perceval Landon.

An attempt to cut our communications failed, and by the capture of Pala the garrison greatly strengthened its position. Our troops had an experience of the type of fighting which has scarcely been known since the great sackings of the Thirty Years' War. In an upland country we expect attacks on fortified hilltops, and long-range encounters, such as we saw in South Africa. But in an episode like the capture of Naini, it was mediæval street fighting that we had to face. The Castle of Otranto provided no more endless labyrinths than those Tibetan monasteries. "Bands of desperate swordsmen were found in knots under trap-doors and behind sharp turnings. They would not surrender, and had to be killed by rifle shots fired at a distance of a few feet."

On the 26th June General Macdonald arrived with a relieving force, and soon after came the Tongsa Penlop, the temporal ruler of Bhutan, a genial potentate in rich vari-coloured robes and a Homburg hat. The Tibetan offensive had weakened, but the jong had to be taken before the Mission could advance. Down the middle of the precipitous south-eastern face of the great rock ran a deep fissure, across which walls had been built. It was decided to breach these walls by our gun fire and then to attack by way of the cleft. The actual assault was a brilliant and intrepid exploit, for which Lieutenant Grant of the 8th Gurkhas most deservedly received the Victoria Cross. With our guns battering the walls above, he and his men scrambled up the ravine, while masses of rubble poured down on them, and every now and then carried off a man. Then the Gurkhas' bugles warned the guns to cease, and the last climb began up a face so steep that there was no possible shelter from the enemy's fire. By such desperate mountaineering the invaders at last reached the wreckage of the Tibetan wall. Grant and one of the Gurkhas were the first two men over, and to the observers below their death seemed a certainty. They were two against the whole enemy force in the Jong, and had the Tibetans reserved their fire and waited at the bastions, they could have picked off every man of the assault as his head appeared above the breach. But the bold course proved the wise one, and presently the garrison surrendered. Rarely has the Victoria Cross been better earned, and it is satisfactory to know that Lieutenant Grant reaped the reward of perfect fearlessness and received only a slight wound.

III