So late as the early years of the sixteenth century England was but a poor country, with less inhabitants than are now crowded within the London area. There was not much to spare, either of money or men, for ventures which could only be regarded in those days as sheer gambling speculations. The splendid records of a successful voyage must have been greatly discounted by the many dismal tales of failure, and nothing but an indomitable impulse, bred of international rivalry, could have led the royal personages and the few wealthy citizens who backed our earliest enterprises to open their purse-strings sufficiently wide to find the necessary means for the equipment of a modest little fleet of square-sailed merchant ships. National tenacity prevailed, however, in the end. The hard-headed Islander finally succeeded where the more impetuous Southerner failed, and England came out finally with most of the honours of a long commercial contest. It was in this way that we reached India, and by degrees we painted India our own conventional colour in patches large enough to give us the preponderating voice in her general administration. But as we progressed northward and north-westward we realized the important fact that India--the peninsula India--was insulated and protected by geographical conformations which formed a natural barrier against outside influences, almost as impassable as the sea barriers of England. On the north-east a vast wilderness of forest-covered mountain ranges and deep lateral valleys barred the way most effectually against irruption from the yellow races of Asia. On the north where the curving serrated ramparts of the north-east gave place to the Himalayan barrier, the huge uplifted highlands of Tibet were equally impassable to the busy pushing hordes of the Mongol; and it was only on the extreme north-west about the hinterland of Kashmir, and beyond the Himalayan system, that any weakness could be found in the chain of defensive works which Nature had sent to the north of India. Here, indeed, in the trans-Indus regions of Kashmir, sterile, rugged, cold, and crowned with gigantic ice-clad peaks, there is a slippery track reaching northward into the depression of Chinese Turkestan, which for all time has been a recognised route connecting India with High Asia. It is called the Karakoram route. Mile upon mile a white thread of a road stretches across the stone-strewn plains, bordered by the bones of the innumerable victims to the long fatigue of a burdensome and ill-fed existence--the ghastly debris of former caravans. It is perhaps the ugliest track to call a trade route in the whole wide world. Not a tree, not a shrub, exists, not even the cold dead beauty which a snow-sheet imparts to highland scenery, for there is no great snowfall in the elevated spaces which back the Himalayas and their offshoots. It is marked, too, by many a sordid tragedy of murder and robbery, but it is nevertheless one of the northern gates