t 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 archaeological 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?

Apart from the above enterprises, a flood of Blue-books, compiled by the
authorised political and military officials, will doubtless also shortly
appear, even though that appearance may in some cases be but a swift
transference from the printing-press to the pigeonhole.

Surely, then, for one who is not ordered by authority to compile a
Blue-book, who has no gospel of Tibetan scientific discoveries to
proclaim to the world, and who has no harvest--in the shape of letters
previously sent to the press and capable of republication--ready at hand
for reaping, to sit down and write a book on Tibet, merely because he
happens to have been to Lhassa and back, is a work of supererogation
which needs a word of apology.

My apology is that this book will be avowedly a book by a 'man in the
street'--a man, that is, who occupied an inconspicuous single-fly tent
in a back street of the brigade camp. As such it will throw no searching
light upon the subject, but may afford a s