Nikolay Przhevalsky

“ It is not like a tame camel; its limbs are very thin, and it is altogether slim built, I have seen them in the desert together with herds of wild horses. They are not timid, and do not run away at the sight of a man. They do nothing unless attacked; they then run away, or else they turn and attack the huntsman; they are very fierce, and swift in their action as an arrow shot from the bow; they kill by biting and trampling under foot, and they kick too like a cow. ”

“ We have indulged in that digression after wild camels, which Prejevalsky denied himself. He passed on into the lofty and uninhabited desert of Northern Tibet, which extends for a width in latitude of some 500 miles, at an altitude of 14,000 to 15,000 feet above the sea, and reached the upper stream of the Great Yangtse, known there to the Mongols as the Murui-ussu or Winding Water. In this region, uninhabited by man, wild animals abound; wolves, argali or wild sheep, antelopes of various sorts, and above all the wild yak, are found in vast numbers. ”

“ Elias: 'The Dchiahours ... occupy the country commonly called San-tchouan—"Three Valleys,"—the native district of our camel-driver Samdadchiemba. The Dchiahours have all the rascality and craft of the Chinaman without his civility and polished language; so they are feared and detested by all their neighbours. When they fancy their rights infringed on it is always with the dagger that they seek redress. Among them the man held in most honour is always the one who has committed most murders. ”

“ The later writings of Huc, pieces of pretentious and untrustworthy bookmaking, have thrown some shadow upon the original narrative; some of his own countrymen have been disposed to look on his work as half a fiction; and stories have even reached me from Russian sources which professed to recount confessions made by Huc of his having invented his own share in the narrative, and of his having received from Gabet on his deathbed, 'on board a boat in the Canton river,' or taken from his luggage after his death, the true journals on which the popular story of the Journey to Lhassa was founded. ”

“ Huc, whatever his cleverness as a painter of striking scenes, was not only without science, but without that geographical sense which sometimes enables a traveller to bring back valuable contributions to geographical knowledge, even when without the means of making instrumental observations.
A succession of political events during the last twenty years has greatly changed the state of things in Upper Asia, and has tended to the rapid widening of geographical knowledge. ”

“ The Pass is that feature in a mountain range which most interests travellers, and which they hear most frequently named; passes always have names; ranges, among people who have no books of geography, are apt to have none. ”

“ One of the most novel and remarkable circumstances that come out in this narrative is the existence of an intensely moist mountain region in Kansu, to the north of the Hoang-ho, and on the immediate east of Koko-nor. This tract [25] constitutes there what Prejevalsky calls the 'marginal range,' a feature everywhere characteristic of the plateau of Mongolia, i.e. a belt of mountain following and forming the rim of the plateau and the descent from it, but also rising considerably above the level of the plateau itself. ”

“ But voluntary incarnation is the peculiar privilege of those sin-free souls alone which have wrought their way out of the toils of transmigration. Transmigration, in short, from a Buddhist point of view, is a natural, whilst reincarnation is a supernatural process.
This doctrine, no doubt, had early seeds, but it expanded to its full development only in the fifteenth century, and in the Yellow Church of Tsongkaba.
The Dalai Lama of Lhassa is always looked on as the incarnation of the Bodhisatva Avalokite^vara, the special guardian of Tibet. ”

“ The Chinese seem generally to regard the River Min, which flows through the city of Chingtu-fu, and joins the Yangtse at that of Siu-chau-fu, as the true river. But there is no question that the river which comes from Tibet is much the longer, and probably little question that it is also much the larger. ”

“ No one moves about without a little store of them. If you go to pay a visit of ceremony, or to ask a favour of anyone, or to return thanks for one received, you begin by displaying the khata; you take it in both hands and present it to the person whom you wish to honour. If two friends who have not met for a long time chance to forgather, their first care is the reciprocal offer of the khata; . . . also when a letter is written it is customary to fold up along with it a small khata. The finest phrases, the handsomest presents, all are of no esteem without the khata ”

“ In this range, after a short and easy ascent from the side of the table-land, at a distance of only twenty-seven miles from the arid desert of Ala-shan, the travellers found themselves on a fertile soil, abounding in water, where rich grass clothed the valleys, dense forests darkened the steep slopes of the mountains, and animal life appeared in great abundance and variety. ”

“ But the chief and royal city is all built with walls of black and white, and all its streets are very well paved. In this city no one shall dare to shed the blood of any, whether man or beast, for the reverence they bear to a certain idol which is there worshipped. ”

“ Whenever one or other shuffles off this mortal coil he proceeds to resume it again under the form of a child born to succeed to the dignity, and indicated by miraculous signs as the reincarnation of the departed Pontiff. This is the system of supernatural succession of those reborn saints whom the Mongols term Khubilghân.
The history of its institution is buried in obscurity; but the old Red-cap hierarchy, at least in some of its sects, had established the hereditary character of the higher ecclesiastical dignities. To preserve this was impossible under the celibate enforced by Tsongkaba ”

“ After these come the commoner herd of re-incarnates, who are numerous, insomuch that a great many monasteries in Mongolia and Tibet have an incarnate saint, or 'Living Buddha,' as they are sometimes called by travellers, for their abbot. These are the Chaberons of Huc; the Gigens of Prejevalsky. And the Red-caps themselves, who in former times admitted of succession by natural descent, have now adopted this supernatural system. ”

“ The thorough-going development of the priestly power, both in itself and in its relations towards the laity, and, closely bound up with that, the erection of an outward, visible, and sovereign Church and ecclesiastical State, exercising rule over people and provinces;—these form the essential character by which Romanism is distinguished from the older Christianity, and by which Lamaism is distinguished from the old Buddhism of India. ”

“ Prejevalsky was born in the government of Smolensk of parents belonging to the class of landed gentry. He received his education at the gymnasium or public school of Smolensk, finishing his studies at the Academy of the Staff Corps. From early life he displayed a strong love for natural science, and it was to gratify these tastes that he applied for and obtained permission to serve in Eastern Siberia. ”

“ In 1868 he visited the province of Szechwan, and advanced into the independent and hitherto entirely unknown Tibetan highlands on its NW. frontier, and thence into the eastern part of the Koko-nor territory. On this and previous journeys he claims to have discovered forty new species of mammals, and more than fifty of birds. Among the former are two new monkeys, living in very cold forest regions of the hill country just mentioned, and a new white bear. There has as yet been no publication in extenso of the journeys of this ardent and meritorious traveller. ”

“ The human Buddha performing his work upon the earth has a celestial reflexion, or representative, in the world of forms, who is a Dhyâni Buddha. A Bodhisatva is one who has fulfilled all the conditions necessary to the attainment of Buddahood (and its consequent Nirvâna) , but from charity continues voluntarily subject to reincorporation for the benefit of mankind. ↑ See Prejevalsky, i. pp. 11-13. This is the personage whom Huc calls Guison Tamba. ↑ P. Armand David tells a curious story of the 'living Buddha' of a monastery in the Urat country, north of the Hoang-ho. ”

“ The first rose out of the Western Sea, and bore on its summit a celestial palace which served as a rest-house to the Bodhisatvas on their errands to earth. This is the true and heavenly Potala. Another lay in the China Sea opposite Chekiang, and is in fact the famous ecclesiastical island of Puto near Chusan. ”

“ For the individual animal also is of enormous bulk, an old male reaching to a weight of 1,600 lbs., measuring six feet to the hump, and eleven feet in length without the tail.
Their guns thus provided them with animal food in abundance, supplemented only with barley-meal and brick-tea. But their camels were utterly worn out and their funds exhausted, and thus within less than a month's journey of Lhassa they were compelled, with bitter regret, to turn their backs on that almost unvisited city. ”

“ Thus, certain of the hierarchy were allowed to live in the married state until an heir was born; others until the son also had an heir. And the sacred dignities were thus often hereditary in the literal sense.
In the middle of the fourteenth century arose the great reformer of Lamaism in the person of Tsongkaba, born in the province of Amdo, at the spot now marked with consequent sanctity by the great monastery of Kunbum. [29] Tsongkaba was a reformer, manifestly, not in the spirit of Luther or Calvin, but rather in that of Francis or Dominic ”

“ Captain (now Lieut.-Col.) Prejevalsky was already known as an able explorer, when, in 1870, he was deputed by the Imperial Geographical Society of St. Petersburg, under the sanction of the War Department, to conduct an exploration into Southern Mongolia. With his companion he left Kiakhta on November 29, 1870, for Peking, where they remained till the spring.
The time was unfavourable for such a journey as was proposed; for the Mahommedan rebellion in NW. China and the adjoining regions was in full blaze. ”

“ And moreover there are three roads on towards Lhassa from the point where the river is crossed. [7]
In cases 1 and 2 it is probable that Huc was filling up a mere skeleton diary from memory, and the experience of many will recognise that in such a process natural features will sometimes exchange characteristics in the recollection. This has, possibly, been the case with the Pouhain-gol and the Tsaidam river in Huc's narrative; whilst it is by no means made certain that there are not routes, more or less diverse, and parallel to one another, which are adopted according to circumstances. ”

“ And on the other hand, Prejevalsky himself (i. p. 135) mentions having seen, at one of the R. C. missions in Mongolia, Samdadchiemba, the servant of Huc and Gabet, whom their readers remember as well as we remember Sancho or Sam Weller. 'He is of mixed Mongol and Tangutan race. He is fifty-five years of age, and enjoys excellent health; he related some of his adventures to us, and described the different places on the road.' Here there is no insinuation that Samdadchiemba's stories were inconsistent with Huc's. Mr. Ney Elias was also acquainted with Samdadchiemba. ”

“ It was impracticable, however, in such a state of things to carry out the journey projected, and in the meantime Colonel Prejevalsky determined on undertaking a preliminary and experimental journey to the busy town of Dolon-nor and the salt lake of Dalai-nor in Eastern Mongolia. Returning to Kalgan, he reorganised his little caravan, and on May 15 again ascended the Mongol table-land, and travelled westward parallel to its southern margin, and through the Tumet country, [12] till they struck the western extremity of the Inshan mountains on the northern bank of the Hoang-ho. ”

“ Huc speaks only of crossing the Murui-ussu (or Upper Yangtse) , after passing the Baian Kara; but the Lhassa road lies along its banks the whole way up to its source in the Tang-la mountains, a distance of some 200 miles.
Now, Nos. 4 and 6 are, as Mr. Ney Elias has already pointed out, mistakes of Col. Prejevalsky 's own. Huc does mention the Tsaidam river; he does not represent
the Shuga range as very steep: 'Le mont Chuga était peu escarpé du côté que nous gravissions' (ii. 213) . ”

“ This species is intermediate between the cats and the lynxes, but its tail is much longer than that of the lynx and its ears are not pencillated. It is said to possess one tearing tooth fewer than the typical cats; but still it belongs to the genus Felis. In its general habits it differs from all its congeners, being found in bleak and exposed places, generally among rocks, where it seeks its food by chase rather than by stratagem. That food consists chiefly of hares and other rodent animals ”

“ The Yellow are stated always to have a prince at their head who becomes a cleric and wears the yellow robe. Sifan seems, undoubtedly, often to be employed in Chinese for people of the Tibetan race generally ”

“ The name does not seem to be applied in any sense of race, but simply to be the popular name by which Chinese Mahommedans are known among the Turki-speaking people of Central Asia, and on the Russian frontier. ”

“ It describes a journey to the Suniút country and the Great Kuren, i.e. Urga. This is the basis of the passages on that subject in the Souvenirs (vol. i. pp. 133 seqq.) .
In the same volume, p. 118, we have an extract from a report by Gabet, which continues the narrative of Huc's letter in vol. xix. down to their exit from Tibet. It is vague and dull, and presents a great contrast to his comrade's vivacity. At p. 223 there is a fuller account by Gabet of their residence at Lhassa. ”