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.
Who can doubt that all the above-named are not now, in this month of November 1904, writing for their lives, so as to produce at the earliest opportunity the results of their scientific or literary labours in the shape of books that will give valuable information to the serious student, or prove a substantial contribution to literature?