Produced by Asad Razzaki and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) Transcriber's Note: Variations in spelling and hyphenation have been retained as in the original. Some typographical and punctuation errors have been corrected. A complete list follows the text. Words italicized in the original are surrounded by _underscores_. The 'oe' ligature is represented as oe. The asterism sign is represented as [*]. TO LHASSA AT LAST [Illustration: LHASSA. From a photograph. _By permission, from "Black & White"_] TO LHASSA AT LAST BY POWELL MILLINGTON AUTHOR OF 'IN CANTONMENTS' 'IN AND BEYOND CANTONMENTS' ETC. Far hence, in Asia, On the smooth convent roofs, On the gold terraces Of holy Lassa, Bright shines the sun. MATTHEW ARNOLD WITH A FRONTISPIECE _SECOND EDITION_ LONDON SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE 1905 [_All rights reserved_] TO CAPTAIN S. H. SHEPPARD, D.S.O. R.E. A COMRADE IN TIBET AND ELSEWHERE THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED BY THE AUTHOR _November 1904_ PREFACE When the Sikkim-Tibet Mission Force marched to Lhassa, it carried along with it, besides fighting men and diplomatists, a strong contingent that represented literature and the deeper sciences. We were full of brains in that Lhassa column. There were men in it who had made the subject of Tibet their own before they had set foot in the country, and were already qualified to discourse upon it, whether in its political, its topographical, its ethnological, or its archæological aspect. There was a man who came with us armed only with a bicycle wheel and a cyclometer, with which he has corrected all preconceived notions of Tibetan distances. There was a man with a hammer (the 'Martol Walah Sahib' the natives called him), who, if his pony stumbled over a stone, got off his pony and beat the stone with his hammer, not really vindictively but merely to find out what precious ore the stone might contain. Then there was a man with a butterfly-net, who pickled the flies that got into his eye, and chased those that did not with his butterfly-net and pickled them also. There was a man too with a trowel, who did a lot of useful weeding by the roadside. There was a committee too of licensed curio-hunters, who collected curios with much enterprise and scientific precision for the British Museum. Lastly, there was a select band of press correspondents, who threw periodical literary light on our proceedings from start to finish.