"My country is farther from St. Petersburg than St. Petersburg is from here," I replied. "It lies nearly under our feet; and if we could go directly through the earth, that would be the shortest way to reach it."
"Are your countrymen walking around there heads downward under our feet?" asked the Grand Lama with evident interest and surprise, but without any perceptible change in his habitually impassive face.
"Yes," I replied; "and to them we seem to be sitting heads downward here."
The Grand Lama then asked me to describe minutely the route that we had followed in coming from America to Siberia, and to name the countries through which we had passed. He knew that Germany adjoined Russia on the west, he had heard of British India and of England, — probably through Thibet, — and he had a vague idea of the extent and situation of the Pacific Ocean; but of the Atlantic and of the continent that lies between the two great oceans he knew nothing.
After a long talk, in the course of which we discussed the sphericity of the earth from every possible point of view, the Grand Lama seemed to be partly or wholly convinced of the truth of that doctrine, and said, with a sigh, "It is not in accordance with the teachings of our books; but the Russians must be right."
It is a somewhat remarkable fact that Dr. Erman, one of the few foreigners who had seen the lamasery of Goose Lake previous to our visit, had an almost precisely similar conversation concerning the shape of the earth with the man who was then (in 1828) Grand Lama. Almost sixty years elapsed between Dr. Erman's visit and ours, but the doctrine of the sphericity of the earth continued throughout that period to trouble ecclesiastical minds in this remote East-Siberian lamasery; and it is not improbable that sixty years hence some traveler from the western world may be asked by some future Grand Lama to give his reasons for believing the world to be a sphere.
