I had arrived at this vale of peace.

Sufficient is to tell that in New York one night, reading over what is
perhaps the most sensational of my books--"The Poppies and Primulas of
Southern Tibet," the result of my travels of 1910-1911, I determined to
return to that quiet, forbidden land. There, if anywhere, might I find
something akin to forgetting.

There was a certain flower which I long had wished to study in its
mutations from the singular forms appearing on the southern slopes of
the Elburz--Persia's mountainous chain that extends from Azerbaijan
in the west to Khorasan in the east; from thence I would follow its
modified types in the Hindu-Kush ranges and its migrations along the
southern scarps of the Trans-Himalayas--the unexplored upheaval, higher
than the Himalayas themselves, more deeply cut with precipice and gorge,
which Sven Hedin had touched and named on his journey to Lhasa.

Having accomplished this, I planned to push across the passes to the
Manasarowar Lakes, where, legend has it, the strange, luminous purple
lotuses grow.

An ambitious project, undeniably fraught with danger; but it is
written that desperate diseases require desperate remedies, and until
inspiration or message how to rejoin those whom I had loved so dearly
came to me, nothing less, I felt, could dull my heartache.

And, frankly, feeling that no such inspiration or message could come, I
did not much care as to the end.

In Teheran I had picked up a most unusual servant; yes, more than this,
a companion and counselor and interpreter as well.

He was a Chinese; his name Chiu-Ming. His first thirty years had been
spent at the great Lamasery of Palkhor-Choinde at Gyantse, west of
Lhasa. Why he had gone from there, how he had come to Teheran, I never
asked. It was most fortunate that he had gone, and that I had found him.
He recommended himself to me as the best cook within ten thousand miles
of Pekin.

For almost three months we had journeyed; Chiu-Ming and I and the two
ponies that carried my impedimenta.

We had traversed mountain roads which had echoed to the marching feet of
the hosts of Darius, to the hordes of the Satraps. The highways of the
Achaemenids--yes, and which before them had trembled to the tramplings
of the myriads of the godlike Dravidian conquerors.

We had slipped over ancient Iranian trails; over paths which the
warriors of conquering Alexander had traversed; dust of bones of
Macedons, of Greeks, of Roma