This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
THE GREATEST THING IN THE WORLD
111

of the trip for the sake of the resulting collections. He had butterflies by the hundreds, great jewel-winged creatures of every color, with iridescent shadings and velvet bloom that were a delight to the eye. Tibet may still be worth penetrating for unknown butterflies, but from the early visits of French priests and English travelers down to the recent visit of Pundit Chandra Das, of native members of the Geological Survey of India, and of the Japanese Buddhist priests, about all that the world in general wants to know about Lhasa is known. Photographs of its streets and monasteries prove the correctness of the old engravings; Dr. Waddell has translated and edited the very complete local guide for Lhasa; and three women have gone as near to Lhasa as any explorer since Abbé Hue. All the blue-eyed travelers naturally failed to disguise themselves, and the Japanese had least difficulty in the enterprise.

Long before daylight the next morning we started in chairs in frosty darkness, a sky full of glittering stars lighting dimly the gigantic white shadows so strangely high in the sky. We passed through the military station and sanatorium of Jelapahar, along the side of the knife-ridge to Ghoom, and up to the isolated summit of Tiger Hill, fifteen hundred feet higher than Darjiling, where nothing interrupts the view of the whole range of snow-peaks from Kunchinjinga to Mount Everest. We sat in the lee of a boulder, wrapped in rugs and razais, our veins freezing in that thin, icy, mountain-top air, while the mixed lot of coolies and horse-boys accompanying