magnificent spectacle. It was as though a living avalanche were
sweeping down upon us. A moment more and we should be annihilated!
We held our weapons ready. On came the Tibetans in one long line
stretching across the plain. We counted close upon seventy in all.
In the middle rode the chief on a big handsome mule, his staff of
officers all dressed in their finest holiday attire. The wings
consisted of soldiers armed to the teeth with gun, sword, and lance.
The great man, Kamba Bombo, pulled up in front of our tent." After
removing a red Spanish cloak and hood he "stood forth arrayed in a
suit of yellow silk with wide arms and a little blue Chinese skull-cap.
His feet were encased in Mongolian boots of green velvet. He was
magnificent."

"You will not go another step towards Lhasa," he said. "If you do you
will lose your heads. It doesn't the least matter who you are or where
you come from. You must go back to your headquarters."

So an escort was provided and sorrowfully Sven Hedin turned his back
on the jealously guarded town he had striven so hard to reach.

The expedition, or rather mission, under Colonel Younghusband in 1904
brings to an end our history of the exploration of Tibet. He made his
way to Lhasa from India; he stood in the sacred city, and "except for
the Potala" he found it a "sorry affair." He succeeded in getting a
trade Treaty signed, and he rode hastily back to India and travelled
thence to England. The importance of the mission was accentuated by
the fact that the flag, a Union Jack bearing the motto, "Heaven's Light
our Guide," carried by the expedition and placed on the table when
the Treaty was signed in Lhasa, hangs to-day in the Central Hall at
Windsor over the statue of Queen Victoria.

The veil so long drawn over the capital of Tibet had been at last torn
aside, and the naked city had been revealed in all its "weird
barbarity." Plans of the "scattered and ill-regulated" city are now
familiar, the Potala has been photographed, the Grand Lama has been
drawn, and if, with the departure of Younghusband, the gates of Lhasa
were once more closed, voices from beyond the snowy Himalayas must
be heard again ere long.

[Illustration: THE WORLD'S MOST MYSTERIOUS CITY UNVEILED: LHASA AND
THE POTALA. From a photograph by a member of Younghusband's expedition
to Tibet and Lhasa, 1909(?).]

CHAPTER LXXI

NANSEN REACHES FARTHEST NORTH

No names are better known in the history of Arctic exp