, there will be no necessity for us to
enter so deeply into the under-currents that guided those relations, as
was necessary in the preceding chapter, where we detailed the rivalry of
Russia and Kashgar. While England could hold out a hand of friendship to
the Athalik Ghazi, because he sought to please us by making commercial
concessions, Russia felt doubly piqued with the man who for long refused
her a similar foothold, and who, for a brief space, went still farther
in his defiance, secure--as he thought--under British protection. Our
government could not fail to see, in the bold conduct of this ruler, the
result of a mistaken notion of what it would do in the event of a war in
Central Asia, and it strove to bring home to the mind of Yakoob Beg and
his emissaries a sense of our determination not to interfere beyond the
Karakoram. Looking back now on the old legends that successive
travellers brought us from Eastern Turkestan, where such strange things
had been wrought, where the Chinese had been expelled, and a new king
from Khokand enthroned, and regarding them in the light of our greatly
extended information, even since Mr. Shaw penned his interesting volume
on High Tartary, it will not be without some interest to trace back the
story of how Yakoob Beg's name first became known to us, and how, for
eight or nine years, a large section of Englishmen wove a romance round
his name, and converted "the land of the six cities" into a fertile and
populous region, which might serve as a barrier to Russian progress, and
which, like Cabul elsewhere, should extend as another "cushion" from the
mountains of Hindostan to the Celestial range of the Chinese. Those
dreams have vanished now, and in their place has risen up the very
unromantic and matter-of-fact spectacle of a Chinese triumph.

Whoever has chanced to reside in the valleys of the Himalaya--Mr. Shaw
is the authority--must experience a desire to know of the countries
beyond that range. The desire is natural, but the obstacles of nature
are stupendous. To enter Tibet has been the object of numerous
Englishmen, from the time of Warren Hastings, yet that object has been
only attained by three of our countrymen, the latest sixty-six years
ago. There are forty or fifty passes of various degrees of
practicability leading into Tibet from Nepaul, Sikhim, and Bhutan; and
to act as a spur to the explorer there is a highly civilized and
peaceable race just beyond our border of whom w