[TIBET AND THE LAMAS.][7]
Some years ago we had taken our passage for Alexandria on board a packet from Valletta. The Ægyptus, spick and span new from the Toulon dockyard, with the tricolor flaunting over her stern all resplendent with gilded sphynxes, lay, steam up and ready for departure, near the centre of the Great Harbour, amid that glorious cluster of cities which the knights of St John reared round the banner of the Cross, when Christendom was forced to shorten her cords and draw in her outposts before the swelling power of the unbelievers. Berth selected, baggage stowed away, and hour of dinner ascertained, we were at leisure to enjoy the familiar but never palling glories of the sky and scenery, and to amuse ourselves in watching the travellers of various nations who, party by party, mounted the deck, speculating the while on whatever promised in the first aspect of those who were to be our messmates on the five days' voyage. They were not numerous or very interesting—a party of French artists, bloused and bearded, who returned from their brief circuit of Valletta as full of the stalwart figures and novel costume of its garrison (the Forty-Second) as of the picturesque grandeur of its palaces, or the Titanic sublimity of its bulwarks—a grey-haired English veteran proceeding to his divisional command in India, with wife and daughters, and a most ante-Napierian baggage-train, received by M. le Commandant with scowling courtesy, as if the stately dame were perfide Albion in proper person—then one or two half-Frenchified Moslems, returning from their studies in Paris with a complement of Western vice and science—and lastly, in coarse brown robe, sandalled feet, and shaven crown, with shining breviary beneath the arm, three Capuchin monks, going forth to make disciples for Holy Church in the far East. Each of the latter had his trunk—one of those lanky, hog-backed articles in which the continental European rejoices—and on the trunk his name and destination painted. Two, if we remember, were bound for Agra—the destination of the third we never can forget. On his coffer the painter had inscribed, as coolly, we daresay, as a railway porter would ticket your portmanteau for York or Glasgow,
"Fr. Anastasio
Tibet."
"It is a far cry to Loch Ow;" and whether brother Anastasius and his long pack ever reached their destination as per ticket we know not. But Tibet and its capital have since been visited by two brethren of his Church, though not of his order; and we have to thank Mr Prinsep for calling attention to their narrative in the very able abstract which he has published.[8]
To many readers, possibly, the name of Tibet calls up but a vague and shadowy image of a sort of eastern Lapland, which serves as a top-margin to the map of Hindostan, and produces lamas, generally understood to be a species of shawl goats from whose fleece the Messrs Nicol make world-renowned paletôts. Our purpose, then, is to define our ideas of the region called Tibet, and to gather together as we may, from old and new sources, some picture more or less dim and fragmentary of the land and its inhabitants.
Conquerors and congresses may make rivers the frontiers of polities and zollvereins, but mountains are the true boundaries of races.[9] The Rhine may part Germany from France, but the Vosges, not the Rhine, parts the German from the Frenchman. Not Tweed, but the Grampians, have marked in our native land the marches of Celt and Saxon. On the side of the Five Rivers the Indian population shades gradually from the true Hindoo into the shaggy robber of the valleys west of the Indus; at the extremity of the peninsula the Tamul tribes of the continent have peopled the coast of Ceylon, as the ancient Belgæ peopled the coast of Kent. But along the northern limit of India runs a barrier which,
"With snowy ridge the roving Tartar bounds,"
dividing the Caucasian from the Mongolian race now as completely as it did two or three thousand years ago.
From the plains of the Punjab, hard baked beneath the blazing May sun—from the dusty levels of Sirhind, where meagre acacias cheat the eye with promise of shade—from the long lines of thatched pyramids that greet the traveller in the Doab, as he approaches a British cantonment—eastward through the rich misgoverned tracts of populous Oude, that year by year pour forth their streams of stalwart soldiers, servants, and labourers, to push their fortune in the service of the Kumpanee Buhadoor or its representatives—still eastward from the fertile prairies of Tirhoot and Purneea—from the bamboo thickets and rice swamps of northern Bengal—yet far eastward from the ultima Thule of Anglo-Indian power, where the majestic flood of Burrampooter sweeps down into Assam from the unknown hills—from all these