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THE MYTH OF SHANGRI-LA:  TIBET, TRAVEL WRITING AND THE WESTERN CREATION OF SACRED LANDSCAPE

Chapter 5:  Outside Time and Space (1875-1914)

In 1904 The Times's special correspondent, Perceval Landon, accompanying the British expedition fighting its way to Lhasa, paused to visit the Nyen-de-kyi-buk monastery. After tea with the abbot, Landon asked permission to see one of the immured monks for which the monastery was famous. These monks had taken a vow to live in darkness, each walled up and entombed within a small cell just large enough for him to sit in meditation. Some monks entered this rock-hewn home for six months, others for three years and ninety-three days, and many for life. Landon followed the abbot into a small courtyard and watched, 'with cold apprehension', whilst three sharp taps were administered to a stone slab that covered the entrance to one of these cells. 'It was,' he wrote, 'the most uncanny thing I saw in all Tibet. What on earth was going to appear when that stone slab, which even then was beginning to quiver, was pushed aside, the wildest conjecture could not suggest.' [1] At first the stone seemed to be stuck, or else the anchorite behind was too weak to move it.

Then very slowly and uncertainly it was pushed back and a black chasm revealed. There was a pause of thirty seconds, during which imagination ran riot, but I do not think that any other thing could have been as intensely pathetic as that which we actually saw. A hand, muffled in a tightly-wound piece of dirty cloth, for all the world like the stump of an arm, was painfully thrust up, and very weakly it felt along the slab. After a fruitless fumbling the hand slowly quivered back again into the darkness. A few moments later there was again one ineffectual effort, and then the stone slab moved noiselessly again across the opening.

Normally this happened just once a day, to provide the recluse with unleavened bread and water. Now Landon bitterly regretted his selfish curiosity:

... a physical chill struck through me to the marrow. The awful pathos of that painful movement struggled in me with an intense shame that we had intruded ourselves upon a private misery ...

Finding the 'Tibetan mind' incomprehensible, Landon eagerly welcomed his return to the warm sunlight. He believed that such a life was one of  'painfully useless selfishness', a 'hideous and useless form of self-sacrifice.'  These recluses seemed to embody, albeit in an extreme form, the more general malaise of Buddhism in Tibet. Travelers constantly referred to the ignorant, monked people and to the idleness of its monks. It seemed as if the lamas had an omnipotent grip over the Tibetan imagination. [2T he event impressed itself deep in Landon's memory. 'Even now' he reflected, on his return:

the silver and the flowers and the white linen and the crimson-shaded lights of a dinner table are sometimes dimmed by a picture of the same hand that one shook so warmly as one left the monastery, now weakly fumbling with swathed fingers for food along the slab of the prison in which the abbot now is sealed up for life: for he was going into the darkness very soon.

This incident highlights the encounter between two utterly opposite cultures. Explorers represented the extreme vanguard of an extroverted, aggressive, expansionist culture which valued above all else involvement in the world, individuality, earnestness and will. To this cultural idea of 'manliness', the extreme introversion and world-denial of hermits and recluses was a form of madness. The idea of someone voluntarily walling himself, or herself, up in a cave for life defeated the muscular imagination of Victorian travelers. The absolute immobility of these 'buried anchorites' seemed to mock the exertions of Western explorers, their agonizing  journeys across the vast open spaces of Tibet.

Not only did these anchorites seem indifferent, even hostile, to geographical space, they also denied historical, social time. For the West in the nineteenth century, such action was almost blasphemous. Landon was not merely viewing an alien ritual, he was confronting the annihilation of Victorian ontology. Here was otherness in its darkest, most absolute form. Yet strangely enough, his reaction was not one of anger, nor of crusading, missionary zeal, but of shame and melancholy.  Clearly he felt that he was clumsily intruding not just upon an individual's meditation, but into the innermost soul of Tibet. Tibet was not a land of ignorant savages but for the West at the close of the nineteenth century, a place that quietly demanded respect. Despite its excesses, Tibet offered something unique and indispensable to many. The disgust and frustration of travelers was always tempered by fascination, the urgent calls for modernization and progress always deflected by a longing, by a hope and a promise of something that only Tibet seemed able to provide.

An International Community of Tibetophiles

The classic age of Tibetan exploration began in 1872 when Colonel Nikolai Prejevalsky of the Imperial Russian army set off on the first of his four great expeditions. Attempts to enter Tibet and to reach Lhasa increased at a staggering rate as the century neared its close. The exploits by the Indian pundits, especially those of Sarat Chandra Das in 1879 and 1881, seemed to sting Europeans and Americans into action. [3] From Russia came not only Prejavalsky but also his protege Kozlov, who actually met the Dalai lama in 1905; [4] Captain Grombtchevsky explored the extreme west of Tibet between 1888 and 1890; Pievtsoff covered similar terrain at about the same time.

France, like Russia and Britain, also had its own well-established tradition of Tibetan and Central Asian exploration, beginning with Huc and Gabet, Fathers Fage, Desgodins, Thomine, Renou and Brieux. In addition to these men of religion, Gabriel Bonvalot and Prince Henry of Orleans traveled across northern Tibet between 1889 and 1890. Grenard and Dutreuil de Rhins (who was murdered) also struggled painfully across the vast northern Tibetan landscape between 1891 and 1894. From America came the well-respected Tibetan scholar and ethnographer William Rockhill, who visited Tibet from China between 1888 and 1889. From Holland and Canada came the missionaries Susie and Petrus Rijnhart on their tragic journey of 1898, during which both their young child and Petrus died.

British explorers were relatively reticent until Captain Hamilton Bower, a 'sort of damn them all man', traversed northern Tibet in 1891. [5] The British, however, had long been active in Central Asia with explorers such as Forsyth, Johnson, Shaw, Younghusband and Bell. [6] Then in 1892 Annie Taylor, fired by missionary zeal, set off, with just four Tibetan and Chinese companions, to make the immense journey from China to Lhasa. She was the first known Western woman to enter Tibet. [7] Mr. and Mrs. St. George Littledale, accompanied by their nephew, 'a rowing Blue from Oxford', and their fox terrier, struggled towards Lhasa between 1894 and 1895. Henry Savage Landor tried to bully his way across Tibet in 1897, only to be captured and tortured by the Tibetan authorities. A.D. Carey, Ney Elias, Dalgleish (also murdered), Captains Malcolm and Wellby, made up the long list of British explorers in Tibet. Then of course there was the Swede Sven Hedin, one of the most famous Central Asian and Tibetan explorers of his time. [8] In addition to those who set their sights on Lhasa, there were dozens of travelers along the border with Tibet in Ladakh, the Himalayas and western China.

By the 1880s, a whole generation had been raised on the stories of Tibetan travel. Tibetan travel writing was a well-established genre by the close of the century, even though most of the books were published only in the final two decades. Himalayan travel literature had already found its way into the second-hand bookshops. [9]

In 1895 one British journalist exclaimed, 'Tibet may be said to be at present in a state of siege.' [10] Indeed, since 1888 not only had Tibet to contend with scores of hopeful explorers, it had also been involved in sporadic and quite bloody border clashes with British troops. [11] But it was Lhasa, far from the frontier, that was the greatest lure, the long-sought-for goal. As Landon commented in 1904:

'In the whole history of exploration, there is no more curious map than that which shows the tangled lines of travelers' routes towards this city, coming in from all sides, north, south, east and west, crossing, interlocking, retracing, all with one goal, and all baffled ...'. [12]

By the close of the century much of Tibet was known. Only the region around Lhasa completely resisted Western penetration; hence its special status, already high, became enhanced. Travelers competed with each other, if not in actually reaching Lhasa itself, then in coming the closest to it: in 1895 the Littledales came within seventy miles; Rockhill in 1889 was thwarted only 110 miles from Lhasa; Bonvalot was turned back in 1890 just ninety-five miles from that impossible city. Annie Taylor was arrested in 1892 barely three days' ride away. But such claims did not pass without dispute. For example, Waddell, no doubt out of hurt British pride, insisted that the party led by the Frenchman Bonvalot had been stopped a full week from Lhasa, and not the single day that they claimed. [13]

Landon was quite correct about the weaving of explorers' tracks around Lhasa. Grenard reported crossing the routes previously taken by Bower,  Prejevalsky and Rockhill. Bonvalot intersected Prejevalsky's route, as also did Younghusband on several occasions. [14] Rockhill followed Huc's old route for a considerable distance. Macauley's path in 1884 constantly coincided with the one taken by Hooker over thirty years before. [15] Knight kept company with Bower and Durand in Ladakh just before their famous journey into Tibet. Carey joined company for a while with Ney Elias, also heading for Turkestan. Whilst crossing the Akka-tagh Mountains in 1896, Hedin observed that he made camp just ten minutes from the place where the Littledales had stopped ten years earlier. On the same journey he also intersected the route taken by Bonvalot seven years before. In China he met the Rijnharts shortly before they left on their tragic journey into Tibet. [16]

All these explorers were conscious of forming a community. They read each other's journals, disputed each other's claims, met or just missed each other en route. In response, the peoples of the Himalayas, Tibet and Central Asia began to absorb the Western travelers into their own stories. Prejevalsky, for example, quickly became a legend. [17] Grenard reported a lively discussion among a group of Tibetans about the West, its inventions and its explorers -- 'of Bonvalot, of the French Prince, of the "Captain" (Captain Bower), of Mr. Rockhill ...'. The Tibetans even incorporated the rival imperialist leaders into their frame of reference. So, the Russian czar was deemed to be the reincarnation of the great fourteenth century Tibetan monk and religious reformer Tsong-ka-pa. Queen Victoria was likewise thought to be the reincarnation of the goddess Palden-Llamo. Appropriately, in Lhasa, where anti-British feeling was prevalent, the form of Palden-Llamo was imagined as wrathful and war- like, whereas in Tashi Lumpo, which was more sympathetic to Britain, the goddess was envisaged in her more peaceful, benign manifestation. [18]

In addition, travelers frequently used locals who had accompanied previous expeditions. Parpi Bai, a Turkestani, employed by Hedin, had traveled across Tibet several times with many different explorers, including Carey and Dalgleish, Bonvalot and Prince Henry, Dutreuil de Rhins and Grenard, as well as several minor Russian expeditions. Grenard called him a 'veteran of exploration'. [19] On his journey Grenard also met a Chinese political agent who was proud to have traveled with Rockhill. Bonvalot used the services of an interpreter named Abdullah who had once accompanied the famed Prejevalsky. The Littledales employed a Ladakhi who had traveled for a while with Dutreuil de Rhins. Younghusband was accompanied by Liu-San, who subsequently went to Tibet with Rockhill. In Ladakh in 1904, the solitary Scottish traveler Jane Duncan used the services of Aziz Khan, who had also been Younghusband's servant. [20] Lhasa was not only encircled by the crisscrossing routes of travelers, it was also at the centre of a web of fantasies and people's lives.

The intensity of Western exploration in Tibet reached a crescendo by the turn of the century, not just in terms of the numbers of travelers, but also in terms of the country's cohesion and its status as a special world of its own. No wonder Millington called his account To Lhassa at Last! One can almost hear the sigh of relief. [21]

The Crisis of Time and Space

This flurry of Tibetan exploration took place during a period when Western culture was experiencing a profound crisis in its basic values. Study after study has called attention to the suddenness of the transformation in these values between 1870s and the onset of World War I. [22] Modernism had upset the equilibrium and confidence of mid-Victorian culture: the promise of harmony between religion and science, capital and labor, city and country, art and nature, aristocracy and democracy. Shannon writes: 'Crucial to the sense of crisis in the later nineteenth century was an awareness of the sheer unprecedentedness of the predicament of a civilization confronted with the cultural consequences of fully developed industrialization.' [23]

Indeed, the changes were overwhelming, both in Europe itself and in its overseas possessions. Imperial expansion and rivalry were intense. It has been estimated, for example, that the British Empire expanded by one-third in the final years of the nineteenth century, the age of the 'New Imperialism'.  By 1900 Britain ruled over one-fifth of the globe, and it was not alone in this rapid expansion: Russia, Germany and France were also partners in the imperial scramble. [24] Yet this expansion was not accompanied by unequivocal support and confidence at home. The 'New Imperialism' had many critics. [25]

Social, technical, artistic and intellectual changes were also causing anxiety. Kern puts it succinctly:

From around 1880 to the outbreak of World War I a series of sweeping changes in technology and culture created distinctive new modes of thinking about and experiencing time and space. Technological innovations including the telephone, wireless telegraph, X-ray, cinema, bicycle, automobile, and airplane established the material foundation for this reorientation; independent cultural developments such as the stream-of-consciousness novel, psychoanalysis, Cubism, and the theory of relativity, shaped consciousness directly. [26]

Intense debates ensued about time. Was the past a source of freedom or of inertia? Did the historicism of the nineteenth-century sciences and philosophies cramp the myriad perspectives of which human imagination was capable? The present seemed dominated by a new simultaneity as communication systems spread around the globe. Was the future a source of hopeful expectancy, or did it promise only cultural degeneracy? As Western culture embraced the globe, limitless space disappeared. The globe appeared to be shrinking under the dual demands of imperialism and internationalism. [27] In contemporary literature, according to Kern, there was an increasing feeling of claustrophobia at home, yet also a sense of overpowering emptiness overseas. Reactions to these vast spaces, so newly discovered and claimed by imperialism, ranged from intoxication to depression, from inspiration to horror. [28]

The world seemed to become increasingly homogenized, placeless. [29] Geopolitics emerged to dominate global thinking. Friedrich Ratzel had first proposed this perspective in 1882. Geography, for him, was a science of distances, whilst modern politics was a 'school of space'. He taught that 'among nations the struggle for existence is a struggle for space. In the great new empires that sprawl over ever greater distances, spatial extension is a source of spiritual rejuvenation and national hope.' [30] Britain had its own spokesperson and theorist for geopolitics in Mackinder. For him, the end of unlimited space, the development of global electronic communications and the extension of worldwide transportation systems were creating a new globalism. He believed that the world was moving towards a single dominant global empire, and that whoever controlled what he called the 'Asian heartland' would control the world. [31] Such ideas were popularized through journals such as the National Geographical Magazine (1889), Annales de Giographie (1891), The Geographical Journal (1893) and the Geographische Zeitschrift (1895). [32] Lord Rosebery, British Foreign Minister in 1893, insisted:

It is said that our Empire is already large enough, and does not need extension. That would be true enough if the world were elastic, but unfortunately it is not elastic. We have to consider not what we want now, but what we shall want in the future. [33]

The sense of space and time was changing. The concept of empty space became important when it was discovered that virtually none was left. Measures were taken to protect the rapidly vanishing wilderness regions. [34]  Reflection began on the importance of 'the frontier' to the cultures of both America and Britain.

Each nation appeared to have its own unique attitude towards time and space. Austria-Hungary seemed convinced that its time was running out, whilst Russia felt it had time to spare. Germany believed it needed more space. Austria-Hungary thought its space was excessively heterogeneous and disintegrating. Russia was universally viewed (and feared) as the country with boundless space. [35] Fears about the Russian capacity to control and utilize their vast spaces were symbolized by the completion of the trans-Siberian railway in 1903. [36] The unprecedented Russian expansion in Central Asia was viewed with increasing alarm by the British in India, especially as the subcontinent came to be seen as the heart of the British Empire, crucial both to its coherence and to its very meaning. [37]

In 1886 British India could envisage no threat from another European power that would justify an intervention in Tibet. [38] By 1902, however, such a threat from the Russians was perceived in very real terms and entirely reversed Britain's former Tibetan policy. Tibet had suddenly become the most important site of Anglo-Russian competition. In addition to Russian expansion, there was also a belief that the Chinese Empire was on the verge of collapse. Such an event would release a vast area of the globe into a kind of spatial anarchy. [39] The British also had strong fears about French expansion in South-East Asia. Some considered their annexation of Tibet to be a very real possibility. It was little wonder, then, that so many late-nineteenth-century British travelers in and around Tibet had the backing of military intelligence. [40]

Late-nineteenth-century imperialism was concerned with contesting, controlling, reordering and redefining geographical space. It was also concerned with the stories told about such annexation and reorganization, about the identity of nations in the Global Age.

Fin-de-siecle Tibet

Tibet was not just any place, not just one among many within the Western global imagination. For a few years at the turn of the century it became the place. It was for the fin de siecle what Tahiti and China had been for the eighteenth century, what the Arctic was for the early-to-mid-nineteenth century and the source of the Nile for the late nineteenth century. The acclaim given to explorers of Tibet and Central Asia was exceptional; it was as if Tibet touched some fundamental surface of the era's imagination. Tibet consistently provoked powerful images, beginning in the 1870s with Blavatsky's claims about spiritual masters living in the Himalayas, mahatmas who guided the destiny of the world. [41] The lama in Kipling's story Kim also captured the British imagination. [42] As we shall see, references both to Blavatsky's mahatmas and Kipling's lama abounded in Tibetan travel writing at the time.

Two other seminal works of fiction assigned small but critical roles to Tibet. After Sherlock Holmes survived his plunge into the Reichenbach Falls, locked in mortal combat with the arch-criminal Professor Moriarty, he went to Tibet disguised as a Norwegian explorer named Sigerson. [43] It was from Tibet that Arthur Conan Doyle had Holmes reborn; Tibet marked the furthest point of his absence. Holme's historical reality and his presence in London were both so strong that only Tibet, outside such constraints of time and space, could provide him with sanctuary during his missing years. So too, Tibet figured in Riders Haggard's classic tale She. After their encounter with this immortal woman somewhere in nineteenth-century Africa, the main protagonists summarily declared that they would go to Central Asia and Tibet, 'where, if anywhere on this earth, wisdom is to be found, and we anticipate that our sojourn there will be a long one. Possibly we shall not return'. [44] Doyle's Tibet was unknown, far away, almost totally other: a geographical underworld of unknown landscapes replaced that of industrial society. A detective took time out to become an explorer. Haggard's Tibet lay at the end of an aspiration; it set some exemplary standard in spiritual wisdom. It was where one went when all else failed, or had been attempted -- a place not of absence and return, but of promise and transcendence. Kipling's lama was totally unworldly, utterly indifferent to, and ignorant of, historical time and global geography. Blavatsky's mahatmas were formless, disembodied, floating, unfixed by either space or time.

The unconscious of this era could therefore be seen not only in the individual psychopathologies of patients in Vienna and Zurich but also, strongly, in its geographical fantasies. Geographical exploration, in its widest sense, was as crucial to the shaping of ideas about time and space as was the work of Freud, Bergson and Durkheim. [45] I am not implying a simple relationship here -- for example, that explorers read Durkheim or Bergson (although some, like Younghusband and Rockhill, did), or vice versa. However, the radical theorizing in the social and physical sciences was a response to a common milieu and, indeed, contributed to that milieu. Images of Tibet and other places, like those of the personal unconscious, provided the era with both a vessel for the enactment of its fantasies and a means for resolving its identity crisis. [46]

Tibet and Orientalism

Said has pointed out that 'Orientalism ... is not an airy European fantasy about the Orient, but a created body of theory and practice in which ... there has been considerable material investment.' [47] The late nineteenth century witnessed an intensification of Tibetology. In Britain, the Royal Geographical Society continued to fund and direct exploration. [48] Botany, geology, philology, ornithology and surveying were joined by anthropology, archaeology and folklore, as the grid of Western science threw itself over the Himalayas and Central Asia. [49]

This was part of a more general tightening of global imagining, a redefining and reclassifying of geographical places. As Said says, 'there emerged a complex Orient suitable for study in the academy, for display in the museum, for reconstruction in the colonial office, for theoretical illustration in anthropological, biological, linguistical, racial and historical theses about mankind and the universe.' [50]

The scattered fragments of knowledge about Tibet were reassembled and given a new coherence under the stimulus of the renewed Cold War with Russia. In addition to volumes such as Sandberg's The Exploration of Tibet (1904), most accounts of Tibetan travel began with a detailed summary -- a litany, almost -- of Western exploration in that country. Such constant retelling served to legitimize Western aspirations. The Royal Geographical Society, in particular, through activities of men such as Clements Markham, did not only bring coherence to disparate texts; it was involved in what Foucault calls the production of knowledge. [51] As the well-known explorer Francis Younghusband insisted in 1910: "I shall ... emphasize ... that there has always been intercourse of some kind between Tibet and India ... Tibet has never been really isolated.' [52] Such claims gained intensity as the British sought to justify their 1904 armed intervention into the country. Not only were the Tibetans seen as intransigent, disruptive and aggressive along the common frontier with India, their policy of exclusion was made to appear more like a rejection of long established customs. [53]

There were, of course, many imaginative Tibets produced at the turn of the century: Hedins heroic landscapes; Younghusband's enthusiastic blend of politics and mysticism; Blavatsky's home of occult masters; Landor's adventure playground; Rockhill's ethnographic paradise. But they all seemed to issue from a common centre, each reflecting a fragment of some shared, overall concern. Said has insisted that 'Orientialism depends for its strategy on this flexible positional superiority, which puts the Westerner in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without ever losing him the relative upper hand.' [54] But Tibet seemed always to have the ability slightly to elude the total embrace of Western Orientalism. It always sustained an independent Otherness, a sense of superiority, albeit limited.

While the renewal of the 'Great Game' with Russia after 1875 activated Tibet in Western fantasies, this fin-de-siecle Tibet can by no means be reduced to the requirements of imperialism. Although ostensibly outside the matrix of historical space and time, Tibet was in fact integral to it -- indeed, vital to the stability of this matrix in Central Asia. As we shall see, imperialism kept Tibet firmly connected to the struggle over global space and time. Yet its role was as a no-man's-land, a limbo place, a buffer zone, outside history and territorial acquisition.

Tibet promised a different order of time and space outside the strictures of European modernism. Here was a paradox: should this place be penetrated or protected, assimilated or upheld in its autonomy, educated into the twentieth century or preserved as a vital link in the West's connection with the Ancients of its imagination? As we shall see, this dilemma went beyond the needs of imperialism and expressed, in an essential way, the spiritual and psychological unconscious of that era.

Beyond Time and Space: No-man's-land

As we have seen in previous chapters, Tibet was initially conceived to be on the other side of the frontier with India, but the threatened collapse of the Chinese Empire in Central Asia and Russian expansion into that region forced the British to reassess the frontier question. [55] The Crimean War frustrated Russian aspirations in the Balkans and caused their efforts in Central Asia to be intensified. [56] Their empire in that region was consolidated in just thirty years: in 1860 Russian troops captured Tashkent and in 1868 a treaty was signed with Bokhara. General Kaufmann entered Khiva at the head of a substantial army in 1873, whilst Khokand was annexed in 1876. The Russian frontiers with Persia and Afghanistan were finally fixed in 1885 and 1895. The construction of the trans-Siberian railway between 1891 and 1903 symbolized this dynamic -- and to the British threatening -- eastward rush of Russian influence. [57]

After 1894, with the imminent disintegration of the Chinese Empire uppermost in their minds, Anglo-Indian strategists began to create 'buffer zones' along the land frontier of India. Previously, Chinese territory had separated rival European empires; now such a separation had to be a matter of deliberate policy. [58] In the west, an independent Afghanistan had by 1881 become a relatively stable frontier zone. By 1896 the British had established Siam as a buffer against French imperial expansion from the east. [59]

Imperial philosophy at the turn of the century stressed the absolute necessity for empires to avoid common frontiers. These, it was argued, would inevitably promote friction and lead to wars. Neutral zones of mutual non-interference were considered essential between the aggressive boundaries of the Western empires. When the vast spaces of Central Asia offered scant resistance to the Russian momentum eastward, Russophobia reached a new pitch in India. Such fears became an inevitable part of the atmosphere of travel in that region. Every traveler seemed, officially or unofficially, to be part of the 'Great Game'.

While travelers mused on the possibility of making Tibet a British Protectorate, or of annexing that part known as the Chumbi Valley 'as a health resort', politicians talked about Tibet as a buffer zone. As Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India, insisted in 1901, 'Tibet ... must be a buffer between ourselves and Russia.' [60] The natural strength of the Himalayas was beginning to be thrown in doubt as true mountaineers crossed them with relative ease and as Russian intrigue moved closer to India. [61] Also, from 1880 onwards, there was constant political and social unrest along this long frontier, increasing India's feeling of vulnerability. [62] Above all, however, there was a sense -- mentioned again and again by British travelers [funded by British Intelligence] -- of Britain's low prestige on the border with Tibet, due to a vacillating and weak attitude towards the Tibetan question. [63]

The British hesitation over Tibet was a result of their policy of mutual exclusion in that region. As Landon wrote:

We have no wish to interfere with Tibet so long as Tibet does not imperil our tranquility in Bengal. While we ourselves seek no exclusive rights in that country, we have at the same time no intention of allowing any other power to secure them. [64]

This was written in 1904 and betrays a certain doubt. Earlier, in 1887, another British traveler was more confident: 'as long as Lhasa remains closed to us, it will remain closed also to Russia'. [65]

With the image of Tibet as a buffer zone, the northern frontier of India suddenly gained considerable depth. But how secure was it? The strength of Tibet as part of India's frontier depended upon its own internal stability. It also required a reliable British intelligence network to monitor what was going on in that country. Above all, such a defensive buffer role depended upon the natural strength of Tibet's vast wilderness. All three factors gradually came under grave suspicion once the Anglo-Indians began to treat Tibet as a vital part of their northern frontier. In 1883 there were riots in Lhasa against Nepalese merchants. It was generally believed that the city was verging on political chaos, its government in disarray and many of its citizens hostile even to the Dalai lama. [66]  Also, despite Kipling's account in Kim, British Intelligence was notoriously inept. In 1900 the Buriat Mongol monk Dorjieff, who was resident at Lhasa, adviser to the Dalai Lama and at the very centre of the international political storm rising over Tibet, managed to travel quite freely and totally undetected through the length of India. Dorjieff's easy journey -- he was obviously a political agent and not, as the Russians claimed, merely a monastic representative -- prompted Lord Curzon to assume personal responsibility for military intelligence on this frontier. [67]

Finally, even the much-vaunted wilderness of Tibet was causing anxiety. The closing years of the century saw an unprecedented increase in British and European exploration of its northern frontier. Grenard called the Akka-tagh Mountains, which mark this boundary, 'the most absolute of frontiers, a frontier for the sky as well as for the earth, for birds as well as for men'. It was, he wrote, a region 'where nothing dies since nothing lives there ...'  [68] To the north of these mountains lay the feared Gobi and Takla Makan deserts; to the south was the vast wilderness of Tibet's northern plateau. It seemed a formidable barrier. Bower, too, was certain of its effectiveness against Russian penetration. [69] However, the subsequent discovery that Tibet was not all wasteland weakened its image as an impassable barrier. Landon, for example, warned: 'We have discovered for the first time the true nature of Southern Tibet. It is far from resembling the dreary waterless deserts of the north, so well described by Sven Hedin and others ...' [70] It was feared that these fertile fields of southern Tibet, would provide an invading force with a marvelous base for its final assault across the Himalayan frontier of India.

With the removal of Chinese authority and the collapse of internal government, it was possible that Tibet would degenerate from being a buffer zone into a power vacuum, especially one that would be filled by the Russians. Lamb comments that in 1894, 'Tibet did not seem to be a dangerous "power vacuum" because of its geography', [71] but by 1902 it had openly become the site of Anglo-Russian competition. Both sought to influence its politics, yet also to ensure its status as a no-man's-land: Many British travelers in the region speculated freely about this situation. [72]

By the beginning of the twentieth century, Tibet was firmly located as a strategic absence from the 'Great Game'. It seemed as if the country's desire for isolation and the preservation of its traditional way of life dovetailed with imperial requirements. But although a Tibet in limbo, unchanging and static, was an ideal, it had its dangers. Tibetan otherworldliness always made it seem vulnerable to the sophistication and aggression of modern politics. It was felt that some cautious communication with Tibet had to be established just to ensure that it remained a no-man's land.

While imperial politics provided the architectural plans which built Tibet into India's northern frontier-wall, Tibet was not just another buffer state. The flamboyant Lord Curzon, who masterminded the expeditionary force into Tibet, gave a lecture in 1906 entitled Frontiers. He spoke of the fascination with boundaries, the romance of frontiers, the kind of literature inspired by them, the type of 'manhood' fostered by them -- even the effect on national character of being engaged in expansionist frontier struggles. He saw the American West's pivotal place in American culture as a parallel to Britain's frontier struggles, particularly in the north of India. [73]

In addition to being places where something begins, frontiers are essential to a fantasy of completion. Empires have boundaries which are well marked, well established, and firmly defended. Curzon warned that the Roman Empire collapsed because it could not maintain its boundaries. [74] He wrote of 'silent men in clubs tracing lines upon unknown areas'. The frontier of an empire marks the boundary between the known and the unknown. Frontiers were 'the razor's edge'. Tibet was entangled in this frontier imagination, imbued with a mixture of both the romance of the unknown and the defence of the known -- locked, in the most direct and tangible way, into the heart of both imperial strategy and its mythologizing. It was, as Knight wrote in his popular travel book, a place 'Where Three Empires Meet'. [75]

This brief but special conjunction between imperial India and Tibet, mobilized imaginative themes about that country which had been quietly gathering for over a hundred years. Travelers' attitudes towards Tibet, its landscape, its culture, its peoples, cannot be naively reduced to political exigencies. As we have seen, Tibet had its own story in the British imagination, its own historical momentum. True, this creation of Tibet was always related to the growth of British imperialism, but it was never wholly determined by it. The country's unique qualities transformed a turn-of-the-century imperial political crisis into a mythological event, one that somehow expressed the soul-drama of the age. All the imaginative themes surrounding Tibet suddenly came to fruition; all seemed to echo the same concerns about space and time.

Once upon a Time

To understand how it was that Tibet came to glow with aura of other-worldliness, we have to leave imperial strategy behind and listen closely to the travelers' direct encounter with that elusive place, their experience of being outside space and time.

1. Outside History

Captain Hamilton Bower, in his famous 1892 journey across northern Tibet, remarked: 'These lamas press with a heavy burden on the necks of the people, and the poor Tibetans, timid and superstitious, bear the yoke quietly.' [76] Bower argued that in order to protect their privileges, the lamas persuaded the people to oppose the entry of Westerners. Such a belief was common among travelers at that time. Louis, in his influential 1894 book The Gates of Tibet, wrote: 'The lamas have ... realized that every contact with the outer world meant a narrowing of their power and dominion.' [77] In addition, many believed that the lamas were so backward in worldly affairs that they would not be able to relate to the outside world even if they wanted to. Others argued that the Tibetans, with or without the lamas' prompting, were just basically traditionalists. Landon wryly remarked: 'A thing is so in Tibet because it has always been so; research is not encouraged; progress is a form of heresy.' [79] Grenard, with some humor, wrote: 'the Tibetan, unlicked highlander that he is, does not want to see anything new; and when, by chance circumstances make him come out of his hole, he is uncomfortable, bewildered, and thinks only of returning home at the earliest possible moment ...' [80]

Whilst most travelers were scornful, or condescending, about Tibet's refusal to enter Western history, or to acknowledge its own inclusion on the West's new global map, a few were angry. In 1895, for example, Whitley expostulated: 'It affords a striking illustration of the determination of ignorance and superstition to resist the advance of progress and civilization.' [81] Others were not so sure of the benefits of this 'progress'. In 1899 William Carey exclaimed: 'Round three of its sides, like seas breaking on a rocky coast, rich empires have risen up rolled on, and disappeared ... [Tibet's] peoples have watched from their high station, with listless eyes, all the procession of the past.' Such grandiose, vain struggle, he continued, 'affected little, if at all, the rough race dwelling on the roof of the world ... Through all the centuries Bodland [Tibet] stood still, impassive, looking down like some grim image on a grassy green, while all this many-colored life bloomed and danced about its feet.' [82]

Clearly, a position outside history was also a possible source of dour wisdom. The Russian mystic Madame Blavatsky, of course, had earlier taken such a belief to its logical conclusion, eternalizing the dimensionless and personifying it in the timeless figures of the mahatmas. [83] They were one voice of wisdom from the axis mundi, from outside time and space. When Landon wrote that 'Lhasa never changes', one suspects that he wanted it always to be that way. [84] Imperial politics and Tibetan isolationism coincided in some strange way with a deep inner need of many Westerners.

2. An Absence on The Map

Even before they set out, the travelers' attention was drawn to Tibet by its absence on the colorful new global maps. To such a map-conscious era, this lacuna was magnetic. Bower, for example, wrote of 'the true Tibet, a huge white blank on our maps; and that blank', he insisted, 'I determined to visit'. It was, as Landon called it, 'the last country to be discovered by the civilized world'. [85] Hensoldt asked, 'How is it that so vast a portion of our planet's surface should, for centuries, have remained terra incognita to our Western civilization ...?' The experienced mountaineer, Douglas Freshfield, standing on the Jonsong-la in 1899, looking into Tibet, commented: 'Far as the eye could reach, the unknown, unnamed mountains of Tibet indented the bright horizon with their spears and horns.' In so many ways, Tibet marked 'the limits of the Unknown'. [86]

3. Threshold to another World

'Tibet is the most forbidding country to be found on the globe. It towers above the clouds the largest and loftiest mass of rock in the world.' William Carey went on to call it 'the enchanted land'. [87] Indeed, just to be 'above the clouds' placed Tibet into the 'once upon a time', the 'land far away, of fairy-stories.  Like the giant's castle at the top of the beanstalk, or the palace of the gods atop Mount Olympus, Tibet was 'above the clouds', ethereal, not of this world, a land of dreams. Even the border war between Britain and Tibet in 1888 was hardly taken seriously. 'It has one characteristic', commented The Spectator, 'which takes it out of the range of common conflicts. It has been waged ... above the clouds ... and not remote from the ... line of eternal snow.' [88] To be above the clouds was to be close to eternity, to the timeless. In 1904 The Spectator again could not quite treat the capture of Lhasa by British troops as a serious event: 'It is more like the adventure which children love as "Jack and the Beanstalk', than any ever recorded by grave historians.' One writer playfully described the attitude of some people towards Tibet in terms of Brunnhilde 'asleep in her mountain top,' with the viceroy playing 'the part of Siegfried'. [89]

Time and again, on the border with Tibet, travelers, no matter where they came from, felt that they were stepping into another world: 'Before us -- all that vast silence of mountains muffled in snow -- that is Tibet. Look at it well ... One step more and you have crossed the threshold.' [90] As Louis rested at this evocative boundary, he mused:

I remained there alone, enjoying the scene of indescribable grandeur, solitude and silence around me ... The earth itself seems absorbed into the infinity of space; a dark blue sky, dazzling white snow, and grey moving mist intermingling with sky and snow, as if snowy slopes and summits and mist had detached themselves from the earth below to join hands with the eternal vault above ...

He felt transported 'into regions of peace, unknown, not of this world'. [91] Hensoldt similarly commented: 'The world of Tibet differs so completely from everything south of the Himalayas -- and for the matter of that, from every other region on the face of the globe -- that we seem as if transferred to another planet ... [92]

Tibet was not always experienced as an enchanted otherworld. Landon, for example, wrote: 'The first sight of Tibet ... is not without a sombre interest of its own ... All is bare and dull.' Later he continued:

Crossing the Tang la into Tibet proper was a terrible experience. The frozen mist, laced with splinters of ice, was blown horizontally into our faces by the wind which never sleeps over this terrible Pass ... We had crossed the frontier ... and we trudged over as forbidding a floor as exists on earth.

He called it 'the accursed, frozen waste'. Earth time seemed to have no relevance in such a place. [93]

4.  An Initiation

William Carey, wrote with a typical rhetorical flourish, 'One step more, and you have ... passed through the mysterious portals; you have entered the Forbidden land.' [94]  Louis also wrote of the 'gates of the promised land of Thibet'. [95] For many, to enter Tibet seemed like ritually stepping through the well-guarded doorway of a temple -- an initiatory experience. Stone, a deputy inspector-general of police, graphically described his entrance whilst on a hunting trip: 'We passed between jagged rocks into Tibet, with a roaring wind at our backs.' [96] The soldier-Buddhologist Waddell, too, captured the uncanniness of the moment as he stood atop a pass leading into Tibet: 'The cold was bitter, but the piercing wind that swept the top was much more trying than the cold itself ... Yet thousands of tiny birds ... annually migrate over such exposed passes to and from Tibet ...' [97] On another such pass, he commented: 'So cold was the wind that a young eagle fell dead a few yards from my tent ...' [98] One is reminded of the very first entrance into Tibet in modern times by a Briton, Bogle, in 1774. His first sight was similarly of death -- a funeral, and one of Tibet's seemingly macabre burial grounds.

The entry into Tibet claimed its share of victims, its sacrifices, both human and animal. Of 3,500 yaks assembled by the British army in 1904, only 150 survived the crossing into Tibet. [99] Hedin, on one of his Tibetan explorations, grimly referred to the lengthening 'death-register' of animals. [100] Littledale reported that 'not a day passed but several animals had to be shot or abandoned. It is a gruesome subject which I will not pursue further'. [101] Grenard sorrowfully told a similar tale: 'Our road was marked by the carcasses of our horses.' 'In the end,' he continued, 'all our beasts died, with the exception of two camels. The neighbourhood of the camp became a charnel-house infested with crows and even more horrible huge vultures ...'. [102]

Frostbite killed several soldiers in 1904 as the British crossed the Jeylap-la. Bonvalot had to bury one of his Muslim companions in the frozen ground. Grenard's leader, Dutreuil de Rhins, was killed by Tibetans in 1891. Even more tragic was Dr. Susie Rijnhart, who lost both her small son and her husband whilst trying to reach Lhasa. Grenard, as always, expressed the melancholy of such losses: ' ... all these miseries, added and multiplied together, gave me the impression that I was sinking into a dark and silent depth from which there is no returning!' [103]

As well as birds dropping dead from the sky, other uncanny images seemed to be conjured up as travelers entered Tibet. Both Landon, from The Times, and Chandler, from the Daily Mail, reported seeing a frozen waterfall, 'which might', wrote Chandler, 'be worshipped by the fanciful and superstitious as embodying the genius of the place ...' . Landon also saw a white rainbow just before crossing into Tibet. [104]

5. The Carnival and the Underworld

The journey into Tibet was often experienced as a nekyia, a descent into the Underworld, a topsy-turvy, upside-down place [105] -- an entry into a region of extreme cold and heat, of death and yet also of hope. When confronting the landscape, Stone wrote of 'the topsy-turviness with which one gets familiar in the land of the Lamas'. [106] Where else could one get sunburnt on one side of the body whilst being frostbitten on the other? It was a land of simultaneous extremes, like the black-and-white check of a harlequin's jacket. Travelers constantly reached for adjectives such as 'fantastic', 'illogical', 'weird'. Chandler, for example, struggled to describe his experience of the scenery as he entered the country. It had, he wrote, 'an intangible fascination, indescribable because it is illogical'. [107] Macaulay, on his 1884 diplomatic mission to Sikkim, mused playfully: 'the journey of an Englishman to Lhasa ... has been considered something about as visionary as a voyage to Laputa or Atlantis would have appeared to a contemporary of Swift or to a disciple of Plato.' [108]

The Tibetans were renowned for misleading Western travelers and giving wrong directions. 'It is almost impossible to get the correct names of places or lakes in Tibet, as every Tibetan lies on every occasion on which he does not see a good valid reason for telling the truth', wrote an exasperated Bower. Elsewhere, he exclaimed: 'it is terribly hard work trying to get geographical information out of Tibetans, and when in exceptional cases, as does occasionally happen, a vein of truth runs through their statements, it is so fine as to be almost impossible to discover'. [109] Even the Tibetans' own relationship to their land seemed perverse -- locking themselves up in a cell for life; covering the landscape with stone walls and monuments that had no conceivable practical purpose; living in filth amidst natural beauty; refusing to fish despite abundant lakes. Knight summed it up: the Tibetan, he wrote, 'despises the beautiful, [but] has a love for the grotesque in nature'. [110]

The apparent craziness of Tibet, a land outside the normal order of things, had its influence upon the Western imagination. So when the British contemplated invading Tibet, they dreamt up a bizarre range of pack-animals that it was felt would be needed to tackle such a paradoxical place. In addition to the ill-fated yak-corps, there were the zebrules.  Like something from a mythological bestiary, zebrules were a cross between a zebra and a Clydesdale mare. They were not a success. [111] Perhaps this sense of the absurd was most succinctly revealed in a story from the 1888 border conflict between Britain and Tibet. It was reported that British troops nervously fired a volley into a patch of giant rhubarb plants, mistaking them for Tibetan soldiers. [112]

This strange world was not always experienced with such humor. At one point on his journey, Grenard described it as a 'monstrous chaos'. [113] The madness of the landscape at times seemed merely to echo the general absurdity of Tibetan religion and culture. For example, the Tibetan's lack of any sense of time was notorious among travelers. Rockhill described their calendar:

Tibet has preserved its own system of reckoning time ... Days are divided into lucky and unlucky ones. The latter are disposed of by being dropped out; thus, if the thirteenth is unlucky, they skip it and count the fourteenth twice. As at least half the days of the year are unlucky, this must be a most confusing system. [114]

Surely an understatement. Indeed, frequently, when dealing with Tibetan officials, travelers' journals read like Alice in Wonderland. When Chandler reported the negotiations between the defeated lamas and the officers from the British army encamped outside Lhasa, he was perplexed:

'Instead of discussing matters vital to the settlement, the Tibetan representatives would arrive with all the formalities and ceremonial of durbar to beg us not to cut grass in a particular field, or to request the return of empty grain bags to the monasteries.' [115] The British government officially acknowledged, somewhat wearily, 'that the utmost patience is necessary in dealing with the Tibetans'.  Francis Younghusband, that paragon of patience and determination, called the Tibetan negotiators 'exasperating', 'inept', 'an intangible, illusive, un-get-at-able set of human beings ...' [116]

When added to the incessant and seemingly meaningless rotation of prayer wheels and the corresponding prohibition against wheels for transportation, the belief that magic charms would stop bullets and that painted symbols on rocks would stop the British army, one can understand Grenard exclaiming: 'thus is Tibet made to spin distractedly, without rest or truce, in religion's mad round'.  [117]

6. Backwards in Time

Time just seemed to have stopped in Tibet. For example, Grenard wryly mentioned finding 'a box containing six cakes of scented soap, which were the only specimens of soap that could be discovered within the radius of Lhasa in the month of January 1894 and which their purchaser was delighted to sell to us after having them for forty years in his shop'. [118] Even the landscape seemed absolutely static. Landon described a scene: 'In this broken ground underneath precipitous mountainsides, where the rocks lay as they had fallen for a thousand years'. [119] Nothing ever seemed to have changed or moved.

Not only did time seem to stand still, or to slow down to a standstill, travelers also continually felt transported back in time. Chandler called the Tibetans 'obsolete anachronisms, who have been asleep for hundreds of years'. [120] He reflected: 'The Tibetans are not the savages they are depicted. They are civilized, if medieval.' [121] This medieval quality was highlighted in the only attack that took place on British-Indian soldiers occupying Lhasa. Chandler reported that a lama 'ran amuck outside the camp with the coat of mail and huge paladin's sword concealed beneath his cloak, a medieval figure who thrashed the air with his brand like a flail in sheer lust of blood. He was hanged medievally the next day within sight of Lhasa.' [122] The more standard weapons of the Tibetan soldiers were scarcely more advanced than those of this mail-armored monk: rusty matchlocks, slings, bows and arrows. Indeed, as Waddell pointed out, 'the Tibetan word for "gun" is "fire-arrow" ... and their commanders are still called "lords of the arrows". [123] British soldiers advancing on Lhasa heard rumors of soldiers in chain mail waiting up ahead, and at one point were bombarded by large red and gold bullets made from copper. [124]

The Tibetans seemed to inhabit a pre-Copernican world. The flat-earth theory had long been a source of amusement in the West, a sign of medieval ignorance and stubbornness, if not lunacy. Younghusband reported a conversation with the head abbot of the Tashi Lumpo monastery, near Shigatse. He was, wrote Younghusband, 'a courteous, kindly man', 'a charming old gentleman'. However, he firmly interjected when Younghusband 'let slip some observation that the earth was round'. Younghhusband continued: '[he] assured me that when I had lived longer in Tibet ... I should find that it was not round, but flat, and not circular, but triangular, like the bone of a shoulder of mutton.' [125] It all seemed like medieval scholasticism gone mad.

Yet there was a charming side to this. Freshfield, while just over the border from Tibet, witnessed a Tibetan Buddhist ritual:

The scene and its setting were most fascinating, a picture primitive and fantastic, real and at the same time almost incredible in its antique air. In the priestly procession and the simple rites, the ancient world seemed to live again, protected from the changes of centuries. [126]

Grenard thought the relationship between people and priests similar to that of 'the Italians of the middle ages'.  [127]

But Tibet also drew the Western imagination back even deeper into time, beyond the medieval and into the archaic. For Landon, 'the Golden Roofs of Potala' were an 'image of that ancient and mysterious faith which has found its last and fullest expression beneath the golden canopies of Lhasa'. [128] While a connection between Tibet and Ancient Egypt had been made many times before, only in this period was Tibetan Buddhism fully imagined to be a direct descendant from that revered ancient religion. It was viewed as a late, and perhaps final, flowering of the world's archaic mystery religions. According to Hensoldt in his paper 'Occult Science in Thibet, (1894), whilst Tibet was not the source of archaic wisdom, it was 'the very fountain head of esoteric lore'. [129] Such a belief found its most cogent expression in Blavatsky's monumental writings. Her first major book on the 'mahatmas', published in 1877, was titled Isis Unveiled, thus establishing the firmest of imaginative connections between Egyptian and Tibetan religions. [130] Naturally Blavatsky claimed that her global travels had taken her to both Egypt and Tibet and included study with 'Adepts' in both places. 'The Brotherhood of Luxor' is mentioned alongside 'the Tibetan Brotherhood', in The Mahatma Letters. [131] It was an ironic coincidence that British imperial policy in Egypt decisively influenced their activities in Tibet at the turn of the century. As Landon reported, 'It is an open secret that our policy in Egypt just then demanded that we should be on good terms with Russia ...' [132]

7.  Prehistorical

John White, the political agent for Sikkim, Bhutan and Tibetan Affairs between 1887 and 1908, witnessed the first visit to India by a high Tibetan lama. Of the accompanying retinue he wrote: 'They were an extraordinary collection of wild, only partly civilized creatures, especially those from Tibet.' [133] At one point, Dutreuil de Rhins confided to Grenard that 'he had found it easier to get on with the savages of Africa, than with the Tibetans. [134] Deeper than even the medieval and the archaic lay the prehistoric and the primitive. For the Victorians these meant the most elementary, primeval, forms of human life. Hensoldt wrote:

it would be folly to shut our eyes to the fact that the Thibetans occupy a very low position in the scale of human advancement ... Their culture is inferior to that of the most semi-barbarous races, comparing unfavorable even with that of certain Indian tribes of the American continent, such as the Pueblos, Zunis, etc.

Even in their physiognomy they seemed to be 'the most ill-favoured of Turanian races'. [135] Grenard, too, was reminded of 'American Redskins' by some of the Tibetans. Bonvalot remarked that they had an 'animal intelligence'. [136] Tibet was viewed as a unique laboratory or museum, a protected place where social evolution could be observed in the making, in its most elementary form. Landon wrote that in Tibet we can see 'processes and ideas which in other parts of the world are almost pre-historic'. [137] Waddell was of the same opinion:

For Lamaism is, indeed, a microcosm of the growth of religion and myth among primitive people; and in large degree an object-lesson of their advance from barbarism towards civilization. And it preserves for us much of the old-world lore and petrified beliefs of our Aryan ancestors. [138]

Even the landscape seemed 'primeval'. Sometimes the vast plains, with their prolific numbers of animals, were reminiscent of Africa. It was like a land before the arrival of humans. 'In every direction antelope and yak in incredible numbers were seen ... No trees, no signs of man ... seemingly given over as a happy grazing ground to the wild animals.' [139] In the midst of this primeval landscape, the imagination of Westerners suddenly began to be drawn towards rumors of wild, hairy men.

The first mention of such creatures by a Westerner was made in 1832 by Brian Hodgson, the British Resident in Kathmandu, who simply reported a Nepalese tale, [140] but nothing more was heard about these 'wild men' until the 1880s. In 1889 Waddell was traveling high in the Himalayas:

Some large footprints in the snow led across our track and a way up to the higher peaks.  These were alleged to be the trail of the hairy wild men who are believed to live amongst the eternal snows, along with the mythical white lions, whose roars are reputed to be heard during storms ... These so-called hairy wild men are evidently the great yellow snow bear. [141]

Five years earlier, Colin Macaulay, on a diplomatic mission to Sikkim, had also come across similar tracks at an altitude of 15,700 feet. The Tibetan guide drew his attention 'to a pair of huge footprints going due west ... and visible for a long way across the snow'.  Macaulay was told that these belonged to the 'wild men who live in the snow'. Most Tibetans readily believed in these creatures, although none had actually seen one. 'The footprints, continued Macaulay, 'were certainly remarkable, very large and very broad, quite twice the size of a man's. I suppose they were a bear's.' [142]

Another report came from the respected American Tibetologist Rockhill. On his 1886 journey into Tibet he was told a story by an old lama on his way home from Lhasa: 'Several times, he said, his party had met hairy savages, with long, tangled locks falling around them like cloaks, naked, speechless beings, hardly human ...' [143] Rockhill continued: 'This story of hairy savages I had often heard from Tibetans, while at Peking ...'.  Like Waddell and Macaulay, he believed that such stories referred to bears. Rockhill returned to these creatures later in his journal. This time, a Mongolian reported seeing 'innumerable herds of wild yak, wild asses, antelopes and geresun bamburshe. This expression means literally, 'wild men'. [144] He referred to a similar report in 1871, by Prejevalsky, who called them kung guressu, or 'man beast'. Like the good ethnographer he was, Rockhill situated such tales within the folk history of Central Asia. Such legends, he wrote, were common, especially in the Middle Ages. They were derived from an ancient worship of bears. 'This is certainly the primeval savage of eastern Tibet, the unwitting hero of the many tales I had heard of palaeolithic man in that country.' [145] Finally, Rockhill recounted a story about 'men in a primitive state of savagery' living in Tibet. Again they were described as very hairy, but this time they wore primitive garments made of skin and probably lived in caves. [146]

While stories about wild hairy men had long been integral to the folklore of the Tibetans and other Himalayan peoples, they now entered the mainstream of Western imagining and assumed new shapes. The lack of similar stories before the 1880s seems strange: by then the Himalayas had long been 'the happy hunting ground' for experienced British big-game hunters. [147] Were these tracks not seen by them, or were they not considered worthy of mention? Either way it seems peculiar that a flurry of reports should occur within a few years of each other. Western interest in these stories was still only either ethnographic or an amusing illustration of the native's superstition and lack of scientific discrimination. It would be many years before the hairy wild man would become the unprecedented focus of a Western attention far outstripping, for a few years in the 1950s, the importance given to him even in Tibetan and Nepalese cultures. [148] Divested of any palaeolithic characteristics, the yeti would then be imagined as a remnant of a pre-human missing link, or an evolutionary dead end: it would become part of an entirely different imaginative context. But for the late Victorians this creature merely emphasized the primevalness ombet, both in its fauna and landscape and in the superstitions and customs of its people.

Although the medieval and archaic metaphors were clearly associated with spiritual connotations, even the apparent primitiveness of Tibet had subtle overtones of wisdom and vitality. Blavatsky had visited Canada, even before going to Tibet, and reported learning occult secrets from the medicine men of the American Indians. In New Orleans it was said that she investigated voodoo rituals. [149] Such activities were in keeping with her close relationship to the shamanic tradition in Russian religion. Hutch has pointed out that such a tradition was integral to the religious revival that occurred in Russia during Blavatsky's formative early years. [150] Nevertheless, the elevation of shamanism to a level of respect that equaled archaic and modern religions in Western fantasies would have to wait for over fifty years. Tibetan Buddhism would then be linked with the religions of Australia, North and Central America and elsewhere, as part of a primal tradition which emphasized direct, ecstatic religious experiences in harmony with nature. Significantly, both shamanism and the yeti would then simultaneously capture Western fantasies.

In 1879 Prejevalsky, on his Tibetan expedition, discovered the original horse in the remoteness of Mongolian Central Asia. It was a species which had flourished in the Pleistocene period and had survived in a region too remote for humanity to domesticate. He had discovered one of the wild strains from which our modern horse is a degenerate descendant in terms of toughness and fierceness. [151] Here was the answer to the riddle of the famous ponies of Genghis Khan and the Mongol armies. The Mongols obtained their mounts by domesticating half-castes of these wild horses. They were the original, the archetypal source of vigor and life-energy uncorrupted by civilization. Bonvalot even reported that his small Tibetan horses were carnivorous, feeding on raw flesh'. [152] What powerful metaphors of primal vitality for the horse-worshipping Victorians!

8. The Dream Land

Landon referred to the Tibetans as 'these turbulent children'. Younghusband described the Tibetan officials as 'sulking' at the negotiations. [153] Such an image was commonly used, particularly by British travelers, in the nineteenth century. Perhaps its use was related to Britain's colonial presence in India, with its patronizing attitude towards the Indians. Here too, the local people were frequently referred to as children, [154] but in Tibet this labeling was different. Here the children held power; they were in control of the nation's affairs, and the British had to deal directly with them as diplomatic equals.

For the Victorians, childhood was associated with a period of pre-responsibility and a kind of pre-adult sense of space and time. Given the spectrum of imaginative contexts already discussed -- topsy-turvy land, fairy stories, myth, madness, medieval, archaic, primitive, primeval -- the image of the child is particularly revealing. At the turn of the century many in the West bracketed the mentality of children and primitives with dreams and psychopathological states, viewing them as congruent with fundamental -- almost pre-socialized -- psychological processes. [155] Such a primary functioning of the mind was also discussed in terms of the primeval and the instinctual. Myth and fairy story commonly began to be used as examples of pre-rational thinking. Similarly, to be archaic or medieval was to be pre-scientific, even pre-rational. Nowhere was this bracketing more pronounced than in psychoanalysis. In his pioneering works of 1900 on sexuality, dream and the unconscious, Freud readily drew upon these areas to construct his psychodynamic models. In doing this he was merely expressing commonly held associations. [156]

In accounts about Tibet, such associations, while stated less explicitly than in psychoanalysis, were nevertheless assumed. The Tibetans' bewildering attitude towards sexuality -- permissive, polyandrous, polygamous, monogamous and celibate in equal measure -- was attributed to a kind of childlike pre-moral mentality rather than an adult immorality. As Landon put it, 'in the conventional sense of the word, morals are unknown in Tibet'. [157] Their indifference to -- even celebration of -- their own filth also suggested a pre-responsible mentality. Even rumors of matriarchy, then popularly considered to be one of the earliest forms of human social organization, were touched upon in several travel texts. [158]

Children, primitives and psychotics were imagined to move in a world outside the 'normal' laws of time and space, in a reality separate from society and history. They were believed to be closer to the instinctual unconscious, further from the constraints of the superego, the civilizing imperative. For Freud, the past -- whether in an individual's life, in the life of a culture, or in the evolution of the human species -- was a source of hope, healing and vitality, as well as of ignorance and irresponsible destruction. This forgotten, repressed past was the unconscious. Tibet, as portrayed in these fin-de-siecle travel accounts, had all the characteristics that symbolized the Western notion of the unconscious. Even the tyranny of the lamas, when compared with the childlike peasants, was couched in a language that suggested a renegade, unbalanced superego ruled by a willful child, the Dalai Lama. [159]

No wonder, then, that Tibet should be imagined as a dream world and that Western explorers at the turn of the century should be irresistibly drawn to it in exactly the same way that their introspective colleagues were being drawn to the idea of the individual unconscious. Both were symbols of a complexio oppositorum. Both attempted to bring some cohesion to a Western imagination that had been fragmented into a bewildering range of apparently irreconcilable opposites. Landon compared the romantic fantasies conjured up by 'the Golden Roofs of Potala' with those of Rome in 'the opium-sodden imagination of De Quincey'. [160] Even the landscape seemed to echo this impression: 'There was a lack of proportion and perspective that produced a strangely unreal effect. It was like a land in a dream.' [161] As the twentieth century progressed the unconscious would cease to be viewed mainly negatively, as a place of repressed memories, and would gradually under the influence of Jung and the Surrealists, be seen as a source of wisdom, creativity and religious inspiration. As we shall see, Tibet would by then be well prepared to step into the vanguard of this new fantasy of the unconscious.

9. Boundless Space, Boundless Light

As travelers journeyed into Tibet they moved into a world full of light and boundless space. Grenard, a member of the ill-fated scientific expedition sent to Tibet by the French government in 1891, exclaimed: 'Spread throughout the whole of Tibet are great spaces covered with snow and rocks and occupied by rugged slopes on which nothing grows.' [162] The relentless Swedish explorer Sven Hedin wrote of 'the boundless wilds of Tibet'. [163] Bonvalot complained: 'there seems to be no end to these lofty tablelands, and the westwind blows incessantly'. [164] Those coming from the north felt that they were utterly alone, cut off from human life: 'the usual monotony of our horizon ... produced the effect of a country which is uninhabited, or which has been.' [165]

Carey, traveling across northern Tibet during two years' leave from the Bombay Civil Service, groaned: 'For 80 days we had not seen a single human being outside the caravan, and my men were naturally gloomy and dispirited.' [166] Such a reaction to the apparently endless emptiness was common. Bonvalot, traversing a similar region, wrote wearily about 'the solitude being deeper and weighing heavier than ever'. [167] The boundless and windswept spaces consistently evoked their direct opposite, a dense and weighty depression. Grenard, in his usual evocative prose, wrote of 'immense countries where nothing passes but the wind, where nothing happens but geological phenomena ... For sixty days, man attracted our attention only by his absence.' He continued, 'the barrenness was absolute'. The reaction was not surprising: 'Our men, terrified at this endless mountain desert were seized with an ardent longing to escape from it, to see something different.' [168] Landon referred to one part of Tibet as the accursed frozen waste'. [169] Sometimes travelers simply did not know whether to describe Tibet as wretched and barren or sublime and awe-inspiring. [170]

Crossing such vast spaces caused travelers gradually to lose their sense of distance and the passing of time. 'It is difficult', wrote Bonvalot, 'to imagine how hard it is to find one's way among these highlands, where a man loses all sense of perspective, his eye wandering over immense spaces without seeing ... either trees, houses, human beings, animals ...'. [171] The deceptive distances added to the sense of an illusion, to the feeling of being in an entirely alien, dimensionless space.

Time, too, seemed to dissolve into a boundless -- sometimes 'sublime' -- monotony. [172] As his party approached the northern frontier of Tibet, Grenard described a land that 'was barren, dull, silent as death and infinitely desolate'.  Further along, the experience was still the same: 'We heard nothing but the incessant harsh, furious whistle of the west wind ... We saw nothing but a succession of dismal hills ... Nothing grew ... Nothing moved in the sky or on the ground.' Encountering a great lake, he wrote that it was 'motionless ... as if it were sleeping in the absolute silence of surrounding nature ...' [173]

Whilst most travelers felt crushed beneath the formlessness of this vast silence, space and stillness, a few experienced moments of cosmic reverie. Younghusband, for example, recounted how, after the treaty with Tibet had been signed at the Potala in Lhasa, after all the struggles, fighting, bloodshed, frustrations and diplomacy of the previous months, he

went off alone to the mountainside ... The scenery was in sympathy with my feelings ... I was insensibly suffused with an almost intoxicating sense of elation and good-will ... Never again could I think evil, or again be at enmity with any man ... Such experiences are only too rare, yet it is these few fleeting moments which are reality ... that single hour on leaving Lhasa was worth all the rest of a lifetime. [174]

Some years earlier, taking seventy days to cross the Gobi desert, the seeds of such an experience were sown: 'Anyone can imagine the fearful monotony of those long dreary marches seated on the back of a slow and silently moving camel ... But though these were very monotonous, yet the nights were often extremely beautiful ...'.  He concluded: 'When we have been for months cut off from civilization, when there are none of the distractions of daily life to arrest our attention, then, in the midst of the desert, or deep in the heart of the mountains, these truths approach realities.' [175] The spiritual Younghusband embraced the immense spaces and welded such experiences into a unique -- almost ecological -- mysticism. Others, too, felt these stirrings. [176] Silence and solitude were sometimes healing to travelers weary of the crowded confusions of urbanized life. So Bonvalot wrote of being 'lost in space', and continued:

the steppe, the desert, is a very fascinating place of sojourn for one who has lived in large cities, and has been put out of humor by the petty miseries of civilization. Solitude is a true balm, which heals ... its monotony has a calming effect upon nerves made over-sensitive from having vibrated too much; its pure air acts as a douche which dries petty ideas out of the head. [177]

Not only was the space boundless, the light in Tibet also seemed to possess a unique luminosity. It evoked astonishing, almost unreal colors from the landscape and sky. Landon referred to Tibet as a 'land of thin, pure air and blinding light ...'.  Grenard similarly wrote of 'the pure light'. High in the Himalayas, Freshfield could not contain his enthusiasm as he experienced 'a marvelous expression of space, light, color; an example of Nature at once luxurious and sublime ... The atmosphere was transfused with light, and the earth robed in transparent colors.' [178]

Crossing the fertile plains around Lhasa, Landon was overcome with the beauty of the light:

The color of Tibet has no parallel in the world. Nowhere, neither in Egypt, nor in South Africa, nor even in places of such local reputation as Sydney or Calcutta or Athens, is there such a constancy of beauty, night and morning alike ...

Indeed, he drew attention to one phenomenon peculiar to Tibet, a five-fingered aurora of rosy light that arches at sunset over the sky from east to west. 'This', he wrote, 'is no ordinary light.' He concluded:

These sunsets are as unlike the cinnamon, amber, and dun of South Africa as the crimson, gold-flecked curtains of Egypt, or the long contrasting belts of the western sky in mid-ocean. So peculiar are they to this country that they have as much right to rank as one of its characteristic features as Lamaic superstition ... [179]

By the end of the century travelers were already expecting to see, encounter and appreciate these colors. As Chandler stood atop the Jeylap-la Pass and looked into Tibet, he reflected: 'Here then, was Tibet, the forbidden, the mysterious. In the distance all the land was that yellow and brick dust color I had often seen in pictures and thought exaggerated and unreal.' [180]

Travelers to these regions now no longer referred to early Romantic landscape painters, but to Turner and the Impressionists. After yet another lengthy description of a sunset, equal in quality to the famous word-paintings of Ruskin, Landon wrote: 'J.W.M. Turner, probably as a result of his travels, was the first painter to recognize this atmospheric truth.' [181] On the same expedition, Millington enthused: 'a short sojourn in Tibet, a country freed from the obscurities of a thick atmosphere, and full of great dense mountains and lakes, and of startling crude contrasts of bright colors, quite revolutionizes ... one's ideas of landscape art.' For him, the quiet tones of Impressionism could not do justice to the bold blocks of color in Tibet: these, he asserted, needed a cruder, more childlike and naive rendition. [182] But Impressionism did capture the momentary nature of landscape and light, and it was this dynamic and transient quality that so impressed fin-de-siecle travelers in the Himalayas and Tibet. [183]

This sudden celebration of Tibetan light and color was both the culmination of a century of travel in the wilderness regions of the planet and, as we have seen, the outcome of a long revolution in landscape aesthetics. The Himalayas and Tibet were crucial to this late flowering of landscape Romanticism. Suddenly the preparatory work of Ruskin and Turner found fertile ground in the imagination of these Central Asian travelers. In addition, the era was ripe for such a revolution. The celebration of uncanny luminosity and unearthly colors reinforced Tibetan Otherness, its place above the demands and stresses of the modern world, outside space and time.

But some travelers were reticent. Waddell, for example, while extolling the 'swift kaleidoscopic play of colors', also felt disturbed. As these bright lights faded, there arose 'a cold steely grey that seemed to carry them far away, spectral-like into another world'. [184] Always threatening the brightness of Tibetan light, its blue skies and bold colors, was Tibetan gloom. Landon moaned: 'Everything under foot or in the distance was grey and colorless.' [185] Whilst contemplating a particularly beautiful scene, Grenard mused about the 'harmony of delicate splendor which defies description and which was rendered yet more perfect by the supreme calm that reigned overall, for the least movement, would have appeared like a discord in this picture'. [186] It was as if the luminous beauty of Tibet was so dreamlike that travelers were afraid a sudden movement, or slight noise, would shatter the illusion. At the turn of the century, the harmonious and appealing otherworldliness of Tibet was still elusive, fragile and delicate. The longings were tentative and mostly subliminal.

10. The Eternal Sanctuary

Chandler described Tibet as one of 'the most secret places of the earth'. Landon wrote of its 'mystic and fascinating seclusion', and the 'sacrosanct character of the country'. [187] Lhasa, of course, was the 'Eternal Sanctuary', the 'Sacred City'. [188] But there were other secret places in Tibet. The fertile land along the Tsangpo river came as a surprise to Chandler: 'We looked down on the great river that has been guarded from European eyes for nearly a century. In the heart of Tibet we had found Arcadia ...'. [189] Elsewhere, Landon came upon 'an enchanted valley with a lake, the Yam-dok-tso', whose 'claim to sacred isolation has been respected far more than that of Lhasa itself'. He reflected:

Nowhere in Tibet has our incursion meant less to the people than here, up at the Yam-dok-tso, and one feels that in years to come the passing and repassing beside the holy waters of the unending line of our quick-stepping, even-loaded mules and tramping, dust-laden men with light-catching rifle barrels will only take its proper place among the myriad other and equally mysterious legends that wrap with sanctity the water of this loveliest of all lakes. [190]

The image of Tibet as an eternal sanctuary outside -- or even indifferent to -- space and time coincided with Western fascination about the Buddhist Nirvana. [191] Grenard, for example, whilst contemplating 'Samtan Gamcha' Mountain in northern Tibet, was moved to observe:

This mountain, which, secluded in the mist of this almost dead region, seemed not to deign to see this low world from the height of its cold and impassive serenity and to be trying with its sharp top, to penetrate and to absorb itself in the heavenly void, was indeed the visible emblem of the Buddhist soul, which strives to isolate itself and to collect itself in the contemplation of eternal things ..., which aims ... at becoming one, in the infinity of silence and of space, with Nirvana, the only absolute and perfect life, which does not feel, nor suffer, nor change, nor end. [192]

Louis experienced similar reveries whilst resting on a pass leading into Tibet. He wrote of 'the solemnity of the absolute stillness around!  ... a sublime nothingness of sound, an all-absorbing silence which seems to transport one into regions of peace unknown, not of this world ...'.  At that moment, Louis exclaimed, 'I could realize, if not explain, what had given rise in the mind of the contemplative Buddhist, to the idea of the Nirvana, as happy state of absorbing and exclusive contemplation and meditation.' [193]

While the fantasy of Tibet as a place of mystic, Nirvana-like seclusion and otherness beckoned seductively, many travelers struggled against its allure. Even Younghusband, who was so sympathetic to mystical experience and religion, was critical. He felt that the Tibetans had mistaken the real Buddhist ideal by 'withdrawing from the world into the desert and into the mountain to secure present peace for the individual instead of ... manfully taking their part in the work of the world, aiming at the eventual unison of the whole'. [194] Others argued that the Tibetan Buddhist image of endless reincarnation was itself a source of oppression -- devaluing, as it did, the present, holding it ransom to eternity. [195] The vastness of the Buddhist eternity, like the new sense of time in Western cosmology, seemed to annihilate the meaning of history.

One hundred and twenty-eight years before the expedition to Lhasa, Bogle had begun the modern British involvement with Tibet. At one point on his journey he had paused to reflect on the hermitages perched high on the mountainsides. He looked on the contemplative life with some favor. In 1904 Millington was of the opposite opinion. For him the tiny monasteries standing on hilltops were generally 'stagnant', the monks 'sordid', 'their minds vacant and what remains of their religion stale or even polluted'. He argued that in the larger monasteries, the 'religion is clear and more vital and life less stagnant'. [196] The Victorian travelers definitely preferred social action and involvement to solitary contemplation.

At the turn of the century many Western travelers indeed found healing and wisdom in Tibet. However, these came from the solitude and silence experienced whilst traversing its boundless, luminous spaces far from the confusions and turmoil of modern life. Victorian travelers, no matter how sympathetic to Buddhism they may have been (and many were), found the Tibetan way of gaining wisdom, in the world-denying immobility of a cramped, dark and airless cell, repugnant. For the majority of them the theory and practice of Tibetan Buddhism held little attraction.

The Underworld of Tibetan Travel

As we have seen, Tibet offered complexity and paradox, as well as coherence and fascination. Moments of absolute wretchedness seemed to compete with moments of sublime beauty. Travelers felt compelled to invent paradoxical phrases: 'majestic gloom', 'barren but fascinating', 'desolate but grand', 'sublime monotony'. [197] If the land was full of extremes, then so was the culture. Westerners just could not seem to decide how to evaluate Tibetans, whether they were peasants, nomads, aristocrats or lamas. Even the Dalai lama was frustratingly paradoxical. After one attack by the Tibetans against the British camps at Kangma, Chandler commented:

We have learnt that the Tibetan has courage, but in other respects he is still an unknown quantity. In motive and action he is as mysterious and unaccountable as his paradoxical associations would lead us to imagine. In dealing with the Tibetans one must expect the unexpected. They will try to achieve the impossible, and shut their eyes to the obvious. They have a genius for doing the wrong thing at the wrong time. [198]

Tibetans were described as cowards but also as courageous, as gentle and peaceful yet violent and aggressive, as humorous and gay but also sullen. Bower, for example, was of the opinion that

the inhabitants laugh a great deal ... A noisier, cheerier lot I have never seen, and one is always inclined to be prepossessed in favor of a light-hearted people. But in the case of the Tibetans a very little knowledge serves to dispel all prepossessions -- lying, avaricious and cowardly; kindness or civility is thrown away on them, and nothing but bullying, or a pretence of bullying, answers. [199]

Many travelers would have agreed with this estimation. Henry Savage Landor was disgusted at the Tibetan men's cowardice. They were, he wrote, 'a miserable lot, though powerfully built, and with plenty of bounce about them'. [200] The answer for Landor, when dealing with any trouble, 'was a good pounding with the butt of my Mannlicher [rifle]'. [201] Yet even Landor acknowledged that 'we had great fun with them, for the Tibetans are full of humor, and have many comical ways'. [202] Contempt and affection for the Tibetans seemed to coexist. Bower and Landor were, of course, the most aggressive of travelers, but even the more sensitive ones reached similar conclusions. [203] Rockhill reported that many groups living around the border feared aggression by Tibetans. He was especially sympathetic towards the Mongolians, who, he wrote, 'are bullied by their Tibetan neighbors'. On the other hand, he praised the 'extraordinary kindness' he received from ordinary Tibetans. [204]

The more astute travelers tried to resolve these paradoxes in the Tibetan character by blaming social circumstances. This was a feature of the late nineteenth century, with its upsurge in sociological and anthropological understanding. Earlier travelers would simply have explained them in terms of climatic or geographical theories, if not racial and biological ones. This new social understanding turned its critical attention towards the power and hegemony of the lamas. But instead of providing a simple explanation or an easy resolution of the paradoxes, this shift in focus merely uncovered a different order of contradictions:

In general, it may be said that the Tibetan possesses gentleness not devoid of hypocrisy; he is weak, timid, obsequious and distrustful, like all weak people. This is a consequence of the clerical government that is laid upon him, a tyrannical, sectarian, suspicious government, trembling lest it should see its authority escape it, mindful to keep everyone in a state of servile dependence and making a system of mutual spying and informing the basis of the social edifice. Fear hovers over the whole of Tibet. [205]

Such a negative evaluation of the lama's power was consistent among travelers at this time, no matter what their nationality. Even the respected Japanese Buddhist monk Kawaguchi was of a similar opinion after three years in Tibet. [206] While individual lamas evoked a mixed response -- ranging from lazy, indolent, ignorant, immoral and parasitic to self-reliant, sagacious and dedicated -- the system was, almost without exception, viewed negatively. [207]  Lamas, in their role as ecclesiastic or political administrators, were disliked. Their position seemed dictatorial, almost totalitarian, in its fusion of blatant power with absolute ideological and spiritual control. The situation was described as 'despotic', as 'spiritual terrorism' and 'unlimited tyranny'. [208] Landon was severe in his criticism.

no priestly caste in the history of religion has ever fostered and preyed upon the terror and ignorance of its flock with the systematic brigandage of the lamas. It may be that, hidden away in some quiet lamasary ... Kim's lama may still be found. Once or twice in the quiet unworldly abbots ... one saw an attractive and almost impressive type of man; but the heads of the hierarchy are very different men, and by them the  country is ruled with a rod of iron. [209]

Tibet seemed a country of slavery, severe punishments, torture, political assassinations, mutual distrust. Grenard reported: 'The lower orders, in general, display towards the magistrates and the agents of authority a crawling servility which I have never seen equaled in either Turkestan or China.' [210] Lamaism was believed to be both the agent for this terror and its cause. That scrupulous ethnographer Rockhill, for example, vividly described the action of some police-monks at a market gathering:

Suddenly the crowds scattered to the right and left, the lamas running for places of hiding, with cries of Gekor lama, Gekor lama! and we saw striding towards us six or eight lamas with a black stripe painted across their foreheads and another around their right arms -- black lamas ... the people call them -- armed with heavy whips with which they belaboured anyone who came within reach. Behind them walked a stately lama in robes of finest cloth, with head clean-shaved.

He had come to enforce ecclesiastical law by knocking down a Punch and Judy show and other prohibited amusements, the owners of which were whipped. [211]

With some understatement, Grenard mused: 'the Lhasa government is not a tender one'. [212] Indeed, the focal point of this totalitarianism seemed to be Lhasa, and even the Potala itself. Whilst on the one hand Lhasa was the sacred city, the Rome of Asia, it was also seen as the dictatorial centre of a police state. William Carey, as usual, painted a vivid picture: 'The holy city is more than the home of metaphysical mysteries and the mummery of idol-worship; it is a secret chamber of crime; its rocks and its roads, its silken flags and its scented altars, are all stained with blood.' [213]

But Tibet, and especially Lhasa, was so important to the Western spiritual imagination that some explanation, some understanding, had to be reached. How could filth and tyranny coexist with beauty and compassion: how could deep mystic insight have arisen from such savagery? Some travelers blamed the paradoxical influence of the land. William Carey wrote: 'chief of all is the weird majesty of the land ... In any other environment the lama would be merely a dirty and revolting pretender.' [214]

Others were more sophisticated in their understanding of social control. First, it was clear that the two great industries of Tibet -- weaving and religious arts -- were monopolized by the two great official powers, the government and the monasteries. Also, the system of land ownership made most Tibetans, who were neither nomad nor brigands, into serfs. [215] But in addition to this crushing economic control, the system exerted political and ideological power. 'The clergy of Tibet', wrote Grenard, 'owes its social and political mastery to several causes and, first of all, to its powerfully organized hierarchy and to the inflexible discipline to which all its members are subjected.' [216] Despite having no standing army and a weak police force, this hierarchy, continued Grenard, 'is able to make its orders obeyed even in the most remote districts. This is due to the terror inspired by the severity with which it punishes the least offences against its authority.' Indeed, any crime against the church or against an individual lama was especially severely punished: theft committed on a lama entails a ten times greater penalty than one committed on a layman; to murder a layman is three or four times as cheap as to murder a monk.' [217] But even more than judicial punishments, respect for lamaism was instilled into the Tibetan by

a state of mind in which are mingled the fear of blows, superstitious terrors and the sense of his own wretchedness and of his weakness in the face of the evils that beset him. The king and his agents ... are considered to partake of the divine nature; consequently, the people have the same opinion of them as of the gods ... [218]

Landon was even more thorough in his analysis and criticized what he called 'a cynical misuse of the theory of reincarnation, the employment of it as a political lever'. [219] Kawaguchi agreed:

Whatever may have been the practical effect of incarnation in former times, it is, as matters stand at present, an incarnation of all vices and corruptions, instead of the souls of departed Lamas ... the present mode of incarnation was a glaring humbug, and ... was nothing less than an embodiment of bribery ... At best it is a fraud committed by oracle-priests at the instance of aristocrats who are very often their patrons and protectors. [220]

Neither Landon nor Kawaguchi was attacking the spiritual idea of reincarnation, only its political misuse in Tibet. For Landon, its was 'a blind horror of the consequences of ... reincarnation upon which the whole fabric of Lamaism is built'. [221]

The impact of the shadow side of Tibetan religious and cultural life was lessened by some travelers, who reasoned that its excesses and paradoxes were no worse that those of Western feudalism. Grenard thought that most lamas were like good country priests, with all their attributes and failings; [222] Rockhill compared the warrior quality of some Tibetan monks with the Knights Templars of medieval Europe. [223] It was argued that blind obedience and cruelty were an inevitable part of feudalism. Grenard thought that the attitude of laypeople towards the monks resembled that of Italian peasants in the Middle Ages -- sneering and complaining behind their backs, subservient to their faces. Landon felt that the Lhasa government was probably no worse than the court of Louis XIV of France. [224] Of course, there were still a few travelers who adopted an extreme position. For some, no good whatsoever could be said about Tibet or the Tibetan religious system. Prejevalsky, for example, considered lamaism to be 'the curse of Tibet'. [225] At the other extreme were those for whom Tibet was an exemplary society -- Hensoldt considered it cultured, peaceful, honest and well governed. Even that tough, seasoned traveler Sven Hedin wrote of  'Tibet; the country whence the light of holiness streams forth upon the world of lamaism, just as its waters, in the form of mighty rivers, stream forth to give life and nourishment to the countries which surround it'. [226]

The Dalai lama, surprisingly, escaped the kind of censure one would have expected to be directed at the absolute ruler of this system. The judgments against him were mild. He was occasionally called an autocrat, or headstrong, but was more usually excused as being naive or misled. [227] For example, on one occasion a music-box of Grenard's ended up as a present for the Dalai lama. 'It was', he noted, 'a pleasure to us to think that this infidelity might for a moment distract the boredom of this young god exiled upon the earth.' Grenard imagined the Dalai Lama as imprisoned both within the Potala and within the role as a god-king, as being deprived of the joys of childhood and adolescence. William Carey described him as being but 'a toy'. [228]

These seemingly unresolvable paradoxes sometimes forced Western travelers to deepen their reflections upon their own society, [229] but this was rare, and most would have agreed with Bonvalot when he exclaimed that there was 'no reading the hearts of these orientals'. [230] The West had, of course, invented 'these orientals', along with 'the orient', so the inscrutable paradoxes were composed largely of their own projections. [231] They tell us more about the Western unconscious than about the oriental heart. One can clearly hear, for instance the mixture of fear and fascination projected on to the Tibetan lama, the magician-priest, by William Carey:

Standing in that wild theatre, with his trumpet of human thigh-bone at his lips, and a skull in his hands, he is the very embodiment of the spirit that haunts the mountains, and broods over the wide, inhospitable deserts, and makes sport of man. It is the spirit of awe and mystery that smites the heart with panic and congeals the blood.

'And this', he concluded, is the enchantment with which the land is enchanted.' [232] Carey was not alone in his use of the theatre metaphor when writing about Tibet. Indeed, Tibet was a theatre: the landscape and the people were the backdrop, but the script was written by Westerners as they enacted their own hopes and fears. For example, the British encountered in Tibet an almost Kafkaesque parody of their own formidable imperial bureaucracy. The Tibetan government, with all its negative characteristics, seemed indescribably slow to operate, with an unwillingness to make big decisions at regional level and an obscurity so profound that ignorance and timidity seemed the essential qualifications for office. It incorporated an underworld of vicious punishments for those who disobeyed rigid orders or inadvertently showed individual initiative. Corruption seemed rampant, and there was total ignorance of international diplomacy. Younghusband could not decide if the bureaucrats were evil or just stupid. In the British imagination, the Indian administration was one of the wonders of the world. [233] It had its faults, but by comparison with the sinister machinations of Tibet it was exemplary. Yet it was as if the British were faced with the shadow of their own bureaucratic imagination, a chilling presentiment of the totalitarian states so characteristic of the dawning twentieth century.

In addition to the zebrules and the flesh-eating horses, two other images from the period seem to encapsulate the paradox of Tibet: the imposing Potala, with golden roofs at its summit, the dirty and uninteresting city of Lhasa at its feet, the dungeons below its foundations and in between a labyrinth of dark passageways, countless rooms full of intrigue, of monks like ants swarming from their nests; [234] or else the scene at Phari the first town the British 1904 expedition encountered in 'mysterious' Tibet. 'Everything in the place is coated and grimed with filth', wrote a sickened Landon. 'In the middle of the street, between the two banks of filth and offal, runs a stinking channel ... In it horns and bones and skulls of every beast eaten or not eaten by the Tibetans ... The stench is fearful.' He described 'half-decayed corpses of dogs', 'sore-eyed and mouth-ulcerated children', rubbish rising 'to the first-floor windows and a hole in the mess has to be kept open for access to the door'.  Landon admitted that Phari was probably the highest as well as the filthiest town of any size on the planet, but he concluded his observations with a marvelous image:

The disgust of all this is heightened by an ever-present contrast for, at the end of every street, hanging in mid-air above this nest of mephitic filth, the cold and almost saint-like purity of the everlasting snows of Chumolhari -- a huge wedge of argent a mile high ... [235]

Loss and Nostalgia

Travelers and explorers at the turn of the century were poignantly aware that the globe was shrinking, that a closure of the earth's previously imagined boundless space was imminent. As Hedin put it, the blank spaces were disappearing. [236] 'The exploration of entirely uncharted territory ... came to an end', writes Kern. [237] Lhasa, along with the North and South Poles, was one of the last remaining geographical unknowns. After them there were only the highest mountain summits, the ocean depths, and outer space. Landon's salute to Younghusband for his leadership of the 1904 expedition to Lhasa was almost a funeral oration for exploration. [238] He called the expedition 'this rear-guard of exploration'. For many it was the end and the culmination of a long tradition.

Tibetan travel at this time was always accompanied by a lamentation, by a sense of loss and often by a feeling of nostalgia. Explorers were caught in a double bind, for they themselves were in the vanguard of eliminating the last blank spaces on the maps of the globe. Grenard lamented that 'Tibet ... is on the verge of losing a notable part of its originality.' [239] For many of those who finally reached Lhasa in 1904, the triumph was tinged with regret. 'Filth and familiarity very soon destroyed the romance of Lhasa', wrote Chandler. Earlier, as he stood on the threshold of the city, Chandler had sensed misgivings: 'Tomorrow when we enter Lhasa, we will have unveiled the last mystery of the East. There are no more forbidden cities which men have not mapped and photographed.' [240]

Travel accounts invariably situated Tibet globally: the last place on earth, the highest country in the world, and so on. Globalism and internationalism were in their heyday as the century drew to its close, bringing hopes of human unity but also fears of cultural homogenization, loss of uniqueness, and the end to geographical mystery. Global communications threatened the anonymity of the individual, his or her solitude and freedom. In the wake of globalism came a feeling of disenchantment with the world. Globalism and imperialism not only annexed its present landscapes, they also mapped out the future. [241]

The regret for a lost era was prevalent. For Chandler, the final closure of geographical mystery meant the end of fairy stories: 'For now that there are no real mysteries, no unknown land of dreams, where there may still be genii and mahatmas and bottle-imps, that kind of literature will be tolerated no longer ...'. [242] To enter Lhasa with a map and a camera, bringing the clear light of reason, seemed to sever the last links with childhood, both culturally and individually: it was the inevitable victory of modernism. Freshfield felt similarly whilst in the Himalayas, gazing towards the distant mountains of Tibet. 'Some of them', he mused, 'perhaps were within the horizon of Lhasa itself: the imagination leapt, using them as stepping-stones, to the golden terraces of Potala, the palace of the Dalai Lama.' [243] Clearly, for him, Tibet was still remote, its romance untainted, but he was not free from ennui. Soon after his Tibetan reverie he came upon a 'fantastic' place, 'an enchanted grotto', a 'fairy dell'. 'Once again', he exclaimed, 'I was carried back to the pantomimes of my childhood.' But then he stopped, sorrowfully, in the midst of this enthusiasm: 'There are no such pantomimes now!' [244] No wonder the age produced such writers as Freud and Proust, both of whom tried to rescue childhood from the disenchantment of modernism and rationality. Both men stressed that some connection with the timeless enchantment of childhood, albeit only in memory, was revitalizing, healing, essential. [245]

Again we can turn to Chandler contemplating the Forbidden City: 'If one approached within a league of Lhasa, saw the glittering domes of the Potala, and turned back without entering the precincts, one might still imagine it an enchanted city, shining with turquoise and gold. But having entered the illusion is lost.' [246] The members of the expedition became blase about the city. As Major Ottley wrote, 'life at Lhasa ... became dull.' [247] Even Younghusband, so full of enthusiasm and so open to mystic reverie, was touched by moments of sadness. Where, he asked, was the 'inner power for which Tibetan Buddhism was famous, especially here, in Lhasa, its holiest places?' [248]

For some, the disenchantment with Tibet had begun even before reaching Lhasa. Chandler wrote that amidst the filth of Phari, he 'forgot the mystery of Tibet'. [249] Again, after the massacre of Tibetan soldiers at Guru, he had a similar feeling: 'For the moment I was tired of Tibet'. [250] Even the longed-for journey across the Tibetan wilderness was tainted by the necessity of traveling with an army. It was not how it should have been, how it was expected to be: 'Often in India I had dreamed of the great inland waters of Tibet ... and here at last I was camping by the Yamdok Tso itself -- with an army.' [251] The intensity of loss matched that of the expectations.

The 1904 expedition seemed to threaten the innocence of Tibet in so many small ways -- not wilfully but almost inevitably. Chandler, for example, recounted how Tibetans had traditionally smoked a mixture of dried wild rhubarb leaves and tobacco. 'Now hundreds of thousands of cheap American cigarettes are being introduced and a lucrative tobacco-trade has sprung up.' Everyone smoked them, from 'Sahibs' to 'coolies'. Even 'Tibetan children of three appreciate them hugely, and the road from Phari to Rungpo is literally strewn with the empty boxes.' Later he reported the first wheeled transport into Tibet. [252] One can feel the lost innocence in these accounts -- not only for the Tibetans, but for the Westerners too. When the Tibetans magic charms, prayers and spells did not stop the British bullets, one can almost sense Chandler's disappointment. After the battle at Guru, the Tibetan soldiers just walked slowly away; they did not run, even though they were still being shot at. Chandler wrote:

the most extraordinary procession I have ever seen. My friends have tried to explain the phenomenon as due to obstinacy or ignorance, or Spartan contempt for life. But I think I have the solution. They were bewildered ... Prayers and charms and mantras, and the holiest of their holy men had failed them ... They walked with bowed heads, as if they had been disillusioned with their gods. [253]

Perhaps something very special in Chandler's imagination had also been disillusioned.

Chandler, like many Westerners at the time, hovered between two worlds. 'There will always be people', he wrote, 'who will hanker after the medieval and romantic, who will say, " ...why could we not have been content that there was one mystery not unveiled, one country of an ancient arrested civilization ..."'. But he failed to convince himself and quickly cried out, 'why could we not have left at least one city out of bounds?' [254]

The increasing sense of global unity was accompanied by a realization of global fragility, destruction, loss. Species were dying out, cultures vanishing, environments becoming polluted. The deforestation of the Himalayas was already causing concern and sadness even at this early date. [255] The loss of the Himalayan forests was associated with the demise of their inhabitants, particularly the Lepchas, who were constantly described as the 'Lotus-eaters', the original inhabitants of 'Arcadia', of 'enchanted woods'. [256] They were the spirits of these forests. Waddell wrote: 'the language of the real aborigines, the Lepchas, is fast becoming extinct'.

Freshfield told of the probable end of the Lepchas, 'superseded by the more sturdy Tibetan and the more energetic Nepalese'. [257] Elsewhere in these vast mountain regions, Younghusband wrote of the Baltis: 'a patient, docile, good-natured race, whom one hardly respects, but whom one cannot help liking in a compassionate, pitying way. The poor Balti belongs to one of those races which has gone under in the struggle of nations'. [258] The quiet threat of extinction hanging over these retiring mountain peoples symbolized the passing of another way of life, a kind of childhood's end.

But perhaps the deepest sense of loss, as well as source of irritation, was caused by mass tourism and its effects on the wild places of the world. Tibetan travelers and explorers were obviously aristocratic in their beliefs, and desperately wanted to preserve some part of the globe for their own kind. Bonvalot could not resist making snide remarks from time to time: 'I spend a few moments in admiring the scene, and am straightaway lost in ecstasy before a scene which Messrs. Cook can promise to their clients when, in years to come, they have organized trips to Tibet. [259] Time was felt to be running out for 'Mysterious Tibet'. Waddell, too, made negative asides about the tourists in Darjeeling, especially the new breed of 'globe-trotters'. [260] Grenard amusingly drew attention to 'a very inconvenient dwelling' but one particularly well situated and arranged to attract the attention of future Baedekers'. [261] For the previous generation of mid-century travelers, Tibet had been a secure and permanent -- if somewhat elusive -- place, but by the end of the century it was touched by impermanence. Although still a self-contained, mysterious 'Lost World', Tibet was also the representative of a whole world that was about to be lost. As Western imperialism remorselessly built Tibet into its geographical frontier, it was also irrevocably being built into another kind of frontier: between what was imagined to have been and what was imagined to lie ahead; between the world of fantasy and romance and that of science and so-called reality. [262] The rhythms of mystic ritual were being replaced by those of industrial routine. As yet this sense of poignant nostalgia was only a dark blush on the contours of Tibet, but already the West was laying the ground for a new Tibet, one that would remain pure and untainted by its sudden, rude emergence into the cold light of the twentieth century.

So powerful was the need for a sacred place among many Westerners that even the squalor, cruelty, superstition and everydayness of Lhasa could not totally destroy the romance of Tibet. Something in the Western psyche desperately wanted to believe in Tibet. Fortunately, two essential characters on the Tibetan stage escaped both the shadow that was being cast over the Tibetan landscape and also the direct scrutiny of the rational Western mind that spelt death to any lingering Romanticism. Firstly the Potala was excused its association with Lhasa. Chandler put it quite simply: 'The Potala is superbly detached'.  He insisted that 'romance still clings to the Potala. It is still remote'. [263] Although Younghusband had his way and the treaty with Tibet was signed in the Potala's throne room, this was but a hurried, temporary intrusion which only served to increase its fascination. Even more important, however, than the aloofness of the Potala was the absence of the Dalai Lama. In the last chapter we saw how all the paradox and fascination of Tibet became condensed into his young form. By vanishing just before the arrival of the British Army he took with him the still-virgin soul of Tibet. His sanctity was still intact, both for believers and for Westerners: 'The man continues a bogie, a riddle, undivinable, impersonal, remote.' But Chandler was relieved:

imagine him dragged into durbar as a signatory, gazed at by profane eyes, the subject of a few days' gossip and comment, then sunk into commonplace, stripped of his mystery like the city of Lhasa ... To escape this ordeal he has fled, and to us, at least, his flight has deepened the mystery that envelops him, and added to his dignity and remoteness; to thousands of mystical dreamers it has preserved the effulgence of his godhead unsoiled by contact with the profane world. [264]

The Potala and the Dalai Lama were therefore free to join the new Tibet of the twentieth century, untainted by the fin-de-siecle malaise.

In addition to the Dalai Lama and the Potala, two other characters were waiting in the wings. One had been around for a long time but still inspired the fascination of Westerners, whilst at the same time eluding their grasp. This was, of course, the summit of Everest, the highest mountain on the globe. The other was a more recent figure, scarcely formed but full of promise and vitality: the yeti. As we shall see, these two would become central as the twentieth-century Tibet took shape.

There were also two events -- one local, the other far away from the Himalayas -- that would protect Tibet from further profanation -- indeed, almost erase the memory of 1904 and simultaneously heighten the need for a sacred land. After their anguished success in reaching Lhasa, the British promptly withdrew and Tibet became even more firmly closed than before. Western travelers were denied permission by the British to enter Tibet, and it disappeared once again under increased Chinese control. Ironically, even when the Dalai Lama fled to India in 1910 and appealed to the British for assistance against the Chinese, who were repressing the Tibetan independence movement, and begged for an agent to be installed at Lhasa, he was turned down. The irony was not lost on Younghusband. 'Was there ever a more tragic reversal of an old position?' he asked with disgust. 'When the Tibetans did not want us we fought our way to Lhasa to insist upon them having us; when they did want us, and had come all the way from Lhasa to get us, we turned them the most frigid of shoulders. [265]

The other event that protected Tibet from prying Western eyes was the outbreak of the First World War, barely ten years after Younghusband's column had entered Lhasa. The Europe and America at the end of this war, in 1918, were very different from those at the turn of the century. A new Tibet was needed, no longer at the centre of global rivalry yet still central to a deep longing among many in the West.

The Eternal Feminine

Soon after Younghusband and the Anglo-Indian troops had entered Lhasa, Lord Curzon wrote apologetically to the explorer Sven Hedin: 'I am almost ashamed of having destroyed the virginity of the bride to whom you aspired, viz. Lhasa.' For Hedin it was sufficient reason to make him lose 'the longing that had possessed [him] to penetrate the Holy City ...'. [266] Millington described going to Lhasa as, 'assisting in drawing aside a purdah'. [267] Elsewhere it was said that the 'veil of Lhasa' had been 'torn down.' Chandler similarly referred to 'The Unveiling of Lhasa'. [268] Indeed, time and again, Tibet and Lhasa were described as being hidden behind a veil. [269] Waddell, in his classic 1895 study of Tibetan Buddhism, claimed responsibility for lifting higher than before the veil which still hides its mysteries from European eyes ...'. [270]

In the late nineteenth century, the Orient was popularly imagined as feminine. An article on 'The Capture of Lhasa' in The Spectator, reminded its readers that Asia was "'the women's apartment" of the world ...'. [271] For many travelers, as we have seen, Lhasa was the 'most secret place'. For much of this era of Tibetan exploration, Western culture was highly patriarchal. Travel and exploration, despite the significant exploits of a number of women, was a man's world; it emphasized all the characteristics considered desirable in a man. Some, like Prejevalsky, were actively misogynist. He refused to take any man on his expeditions who had either been married, or was even merely involved with a woman. [272] The Royal Geographical Society was one of the last of the great Victorian institutions to grant equal status to women. [273]

However, even these Victorian women travelers partook of similar patriarchal attitudes. Whilst not denying their achievements -- traveling as loners and challenging many assumptions about the role of women, about women's clothing, self-assurance and mobility -- these women rarely challenged imperialist attitudes, or the cultural superiority of 'manliness'. Jane Duncan, for example, was quick to defend the ability of women as hunters, to insist that they were the equal of men. [274] The accounts by women travelers in this period were statements asserting their right and their ability to participate in a man's world.

Said has suggested a 'narrow correspondence between suppressed Victorian sexuality at home, its fantasies abroad and the tightening hold on the nineteenth century male imagination of imperialist ideology'. [275] But to treat the feminization of the Orient simply as a compensating projection of repressed Victorian sexuality is far too static: it loses the imaginative quality of both sexuality and the feminine. As Foucault has argued, the myth of repressed Victorian sexuality has long obscured the workings of power and knowledge. [276] No less than the 'Orient' was the category of 'sexuality' created and produced, particularly in the late Victorian era.

Both the 'Orient' and 'sexuality' were signifiers of deep imaginative processes, of a concern for meaning. In both cases, Western attention was drawn to these unconscious processes by the desire for 'the feminine'. This desire cannot just be reduced to the 'male imagination', nor to 'repressed sexuality'. The image of the eternal feminine has long been at the forefront of fantasies about the unknown and the fascinating. [277] Such an image was, for example, vital for both Freud's and Jung's so-called discovery of the unconscious at the turn of the century. [278] It was no less significant in the 'discovery' of the geographical unconscious. But of course, in both cases -- the psychoanalytical and the geopsychological -- the images of the unconscious were couched in the prevailing patriarchal rhetoric. Nevertheless, to remain at this somewhat static level of criticism blocks our understanding of the subtle shifts that were occurring at that time in the Western imagination. We need to return to the images, and stick closely to them.

The attitude of these travelers was almost voyeuristic; veils, purdahs, and so on. The most commonly expressed aim, for example, was just to get a 'peep' at Tibet, or at Lhasa. So, on a hunting trip near the border, Stone confided: 'I determined to ... have a peep at least into Tibet.' Colonel Tanner of the Indian Staff Corps similarly described a safe point in the mountains where 'the traveler will be rewarded by a peep at Tibet'. Grenard, like many other Tibetan explorers at the time, was frustrated by being denied access to Lhasa. But 'our annoyances would be quite wiped out', he mused, 'by our satisfaction in having opened ... a peep-hole of which our successors would make a window'. [279] Travelers strained with longing to catch a glimpse of Tibet on the distant horizon: they were thrilled merely to touch Tibetan soil, or even just to see a Tibetan. [280]

Hensoldt wrote of 'the secrets of a region which has so long provoked and tormented Western curiosity'. [281] This curiosity was primarily visual -- a fascination with appearances, with the display of the landscape, of the art, the architecture, the costumes, the colours and the light. [282] This is a crucial point, for Eros has many forms. In Tibet, colonization, conquest, domination, taming, destruction, rape, violation and arrogant civilizing were virtually absent and only hovered around the edges of Western fantasies. While words of bravado could occasionally be heard -- such as Prejevalsky's famous boast: 'It needs only twenty or thirty sharpshooters and I'll guarantee I'll get to Lhasa' -- the mystery of Lhasa was always respected. [283] Even the so-called 'rape' of Lhasa occurred only after years of frustrated wooing and in the face of perceived regional threats from the Russian Empire. It was deeply regretted by most of the British expeditions leaders and caused outrage around the world -- not merely for political reasons.

Such respect was not only the result of imperial caution about global strategies and alliances, of upsetting the so-called balance of power; it was also due to the imaginative potency of Lhasa itself and the very special place it occupied in Western fantasies. Landon, for example, described the tense anticipation as members of the expedition strained to catch the first glimpse of Lhasa and the Potala. 'Here there was to be seen a gleam of gold in the far distance, and we thought that Lhasa was at last in sight.' But the glimmer was from a building two miles outside the 'Forbidden City'. Officers vied with each other to be the first to see this fabled place. As the expedition entered the plains on which Lhasa is built, the city was still hidden: ' ... even from that point of view not a stone nor a pinnacle of Lhasa is to be seen. We had to possess our souls in patience still.' These were not thugs bearing down upon a defenceless princess, but pilgrims demanding their right to pay homage. Lhasa and the Potala were not sacred only to the Tibetans and Mongolians, they were now global shrines.

At last Landon saw the Potala. This was not a tourist event but one that possessed all the numinosity and awe of the first moon landing. He was gazing at last on the face of the goddess. It was a moment to be savored, and Landon's beautiful prose pays it due homage:

It was about half-past one in the afternoon and a light blue haze was settling down in between the ravines of the far-distant mountains that to the east ringed in the plain, and nearer to hand on either side threw their spurs forward like giant buttresses from north to south. There was a smell of fresh spring earth and the little rustle of a faint wind in the heads of barley; the sun was merciless in a whitened sky wherein from horizon to horizon there was never a flush of blue ... The hour teemed with a fierce interest of a kind no man will perhaps ever feel again ...

Then as we rode on, it came. In the far, far distance, across and beyond those flat fields of barley, marked here and there by the darker line of low-wooded plantations, a grey pyramid painfully disengaged itself from behind the outer point of the grey concealing spur -- Lhasa. There at last, it was, the never-reached goal of so many weary wanderers, the home of all the occult mysticism that still remains on the earth. The light waves of mirage dissolving impalpably just shook the far outlines of the golden roofs ... I do not think anyone of us said much. Life seemed very full.

... We stood a moment on the road just where a sudden flight of dragon-flies pierced the air with lines of quick blue; then we rode. [284]

Even after his mixed experiences whilst living at Lhasa, Landon's respect and fascination remained undiminished. As he rode from the city, he constantly turned to gain his final view: 'When it came to the point, it was no easy thing to see the last of Lhasa ... I had been watching, with concentration and almost sadness, the slowly dwindling palace of the forbidden town. I would have given a good deal then to go back ...'. [285] He crossed over a culvert at which point 'the last vestige of the Potala is hidden from your view forever. The road goes on, but for many miles the warmth had gone out of the sun, the light was missing from the distant slopes ... I went on, something depressed at heart.'

The very vulnerability of Lhasa and Tibet added to their femininity for these Western travelers. When a country had no army to speak of and fought with antique weapons, what glory lay in aggression towards it? Its illogical, unworldly topsy-turviness fitted prevailing fantasies about the feminine, but the feminine was also a source of mystery and, although materially vulnerable, was psychologically and spiritually powerful. William Carey wrote of 'the spell' ''cast' by Lhasa over millions. [286] For Hensoldt it was a place that had 'provoked and tormented Western curiosity'. Aspects of the Dalai Lama encapsulated such fantasies. He was, wrote Hensoldt, who claimed to have reached Lhasa some time in the 1890s and to have spoken with the Dalai Lama, 'no ordinary mortal'. His face was 'of great symmetry and beauty'. Later, Hensoldt recounted how the Dalai Lama's 'beautiful features seemed as if transfigured with a celestial radiance'. [287] This beguiling, irresistibly attractive power is typical of what Jung called the 'anima'.

The anima is not simply the opposite of animus, the psychological compensation for a man's repressed femininity. As Hillman insists, the anima is an archetypal aspect of the psyche. She is a bridge between the world and the unconscious, the mediatrix of the unknown -- indeed, of the unknowable. Hillman equates definitions of the anima with the

phenomenology of 'unknownness' ... -- anima as innocent, empty, vague ...; the smoke, mist, and opacity; her elusive, engimatic, obscurantist behaviour; her dubious, shady origins or her associations with remote history or alien culture; the images of her turning her back, or veiled, or hidden, or incarcerated in the darkness of primal matter. [288]

We can easily see how Western experiences of Tibet at the turn of the century, even their horror at the monks incarcerated within their rock-hewn caves, echoed such a phenomenology. The experience of anima is also subject to 'sudden unwilled moods and attractions ...'. Certainly these experiences are not always nice, or predictable. They are characterized by contrary emotions: fear and awe, fascination and danger.

It should not surprise us that such a close correspondence exists between Jung's formulation of the anima and the imaginative phenomenology of Tibet at this time: both sprang from the same source. Both Jung's psychological fantasies and, as we have seen, Tibetan travel fantasies, were late developments of European Romanticism, part of its tradition. [289] Both arose from a cultural situation of disenchantment and depersonalization, from an age which felt on the verge of losing its soul. [290] Jung's movement towards an introverted psychology based upon a close psychological reading of philosophical and religious texts and of a close attention to the individual, subjective world of dreams, visions and psychopathology was only one possible solution. Another moved in a more extroverted direction towards travel landscapes, nature, wilderness and ecology, producing a kind of geo-, or eco-, mysticism.

It is significant, for example, that Jung drew extensively upon Goethe's philosophical and fictional works, but ignored his travel diaries and his scientific studies of nature. Even Jung, however could not fail to arrive at the importance of the anima mundi, the soul in the world. [291] The anima mundi, writes Hillman, is

that seminal image, which offers itself through each thing in its visible form ... its sensuous presentation as a face bespeaking its interior image ... The world comes with shapes, colors, atmospheres, textures -- a display of self-presenting forms. All things show faces ... [292]

Tibet offered the West such faces, and in them Westerners searched for ways to regain their soul. The humorous reference in 1894 to Tibet as 'the modern Brunnhilde asleep on her mountain top', and the viceroy of India as 'Siegfried', whose task was to 'awaken her from the slumber of ages', was therefore more astute than was perhaps realized. [293]

A Treasure House of Wisdom

But the longings evoked by Tibet were complex. As we saw in the previous chapter, gold was the original symbol for the imaginative wealth to be found there. The close of the nineteenth century saw no respite in the fascination with Tibetan gold. Right into the twentieth century it was still thought to be plentiful, and Russian interest in Tibet was, in part, attributed to this precious mineral. The Russo-Chinese Bank was exploiting Mongolian gold at that time. So, as Lamb points out, it was quite logical to assume their interest in Tibetan gold. There were also rumors in London that Rothschild was curious about gold in Tibet and had commissioned a secret surveying expedition, which as it turned out never materialized. The 1904 expedition was instructed to keep a lookout for any signs of gold mining. [294] In 1891 the ethnologist-explorer Dr. Leitner reported that the Himalayan glaciers cover layers of gold ... [and] there are immense treasures there ...'. [295] William Carey wrote of Tibet's 'inexhaustible wealth of gold ...'. Much of this wealth was thought to be stored up in Lhasa, in the monasteries and in the Potala. [296]

As the previous chapter showed, Tibetan gold had been formed into a highly compact symbol by the condensation of diverse streams of fantasy into a single image, but by the end of the nineteenth century this image was relieved of its complex imaginative load. Lhasa, the Potala and the Dalai Lama were by then quite clearly evocative images in their own right and did not need their symbolic qualities to be displaced on to gold. Nevertheless Tibetan gold continued to represent the unknown fascination and desired wealth of Tibet until more appropriate symbols appeared. But as more and more Westerners crossed over the border and became directly familiar with Tibet, a broader variety of imagery was made available for the imagination. This symbolic enrichment and differentiation facilitated the subtle imaginative transformations that were occurring at that time.

As we have seen, the anima-quality of gold -- its seductive, dangerous richness, its promise of power, its astonishing color -- were transferred and released on to the Tibetan landscape, the Potala palace and the Dalai Lama. But in addition, the senex-qualities of gold symbolism, its mixture of wealth, control, order, as well as wisdom and endurance, were beginning to separate out and take shape around Tibetan religiosity. As Jung points out, 'With further differentiations the figure of the (wise) old man becomes detached from the anima and appears as an archetype of the "spirit". [297] Although this aspect would not become fully mobilized until much later, in the twentieth century, as part of a new Tibet, it was already making its appearance. Blavatsky's all-wise, eternal mahatmas were an obvious manifestation of this archetypal quality, but the fantasies of theosophy reached a far wider audience than its followers. Time and again travelers looked for the mahatmas, or commented upon their absence. Blavatsky's fantasies struck a chord in the Western psyche that continues to echo to this day.

Rockhill, for example, raised the issue with some Tibetan lamas: 'When told of our esoteric Buddhists, the Mahatmas, and of the wonderful doctrines they claimed to have obtained from Tibet, they were immensely amused.' [298] Landon, too, took Blavatsky's claims fairly seriously and investigated at some length the numerous types of Tibetan magicians and occult practitioners, but he concluded: 'The word Mahatma is not known in Tibet, and ... I do not think, on the whole, that any particular occult knowledge will come to us from Tibet.' Even so, the atmosphere of the Potala, in its oasis 'among ... the highest mountain ranges of the world', almost convinced him. [299] Others, too, took issue with Blavatsky's claims but for different reasons. Hensoldt, for example, while disputing that 'occult science' originated in Tibet, agreed that it reached its culmination there. It was, he wrote, 'the very fountain head of esoteric lore'. Like Blavatsky, Hensoldt argued that Buddhism, especially its Tibetan version, was rational and scientific; that it was totally compatible with Darwin's ideas on evolution. [300] It must surely have been no coincidence that both he and Blavatsky also used the metaphor of a veil, but for them it was the Tibetans, especially the Dalai Lama, who had lifted it. They were of course referring to that other veil, the mystical veil of Isis. [301]

This archetypal quality was also echoed in the many references to Lhasa as the 'Mecca' or 'Rome' of Central Asia, or in Landon's reference to the great fourteenth-century reformer Tsong-kapa as the 'Luther of Central Asia'. [302] It is also significant that at this very moment, a document telling of Jesus's wanderings in the Himalayas and Tibet should suddenly be found in western Tibet, at Hemis monastery in Ladakh. [303] Many Westerners at the end of the century would have sympathized with Hensoldt's claim that Tibet was a storehouse of ancient wisdom: even Landon wrote that it was the last home of occult mysticism. [304] This image was to be carried on and developed by yet another of those intrepid women explorers in Tibet who combined adventure, scholarship and mysticism. In 1912, whilst in India, Alexandra David-Neel became the first Western woman to be granted a private audience with the Dalai Lama. She combined a theosophical background with intensive studies in Orientalism and eventually became an ardent practising Buddhist. In 1914 she entered Tibet to study their esoteric religion and in 1916 set out for Lhasa, But her story, while rounding off one era, really belongs to the next, to post-war Tibet. [305] The anima-fascination with Tibet would then still continue unabated, but the demand for an exemplary image of wisdom, guidance and order would have become desperate after the shock and conflagration of World War I.

Stepping Stones to the Potala

A third imaginative quality of gold was also separating from the compact density of the original, undifferentiated image and beginning its own autonomous development. Gold has evoked distant longings, and has also provided the finance to satisfy them. The youthful puer gazes out over far, unknown horizons, anxious to begin the wandering search of always-elusive goals and aspiring to new frontiers. [306] Kipling's famous protagonist Kim prefigured this quality in its late-Victorian guise. Torn between duty and the excitement of the 'Great Game', Kim was always earnest, always an enthusiastic companion to the spiritual quest, but never allowed himself to be burdened by its heavy dogmas. [307] Like Blavatsky's mahatmas, both Kim and his delightful companion, the old Tibetan lama -- earthy but spiritual: wise, but not in the ways of the world; kindly but firm -- found a home in the British imagination. It was often with a profound sadness that travelers reported the absence of such qualities among the Tibetan monks they encountered. Landon, for example, thought that 'Kim's lama may exist ... But ... these men are rare ...'. Chandler was of a similar opinion. [308]

Younghusband, born among the Himalayas -- always popular, always sensitive to the demands of both imperial duty and mysticism, at ease with British aristocracy, with the ordinary soldier and with the tribespeople of the hills; always restless, always longing -- possessed many of Kim's qualities. [309] It was therefore singularly appropriate that he should lead the expedition to Lhasa, and understandable that he should keep one eye open for any signs of 'Kim's lama.' Never one to be discouraged, Younghusband was finally rewarded. The 'Ti Rimpoche', nominally in charge during the Dalai Lama's absence, visited him on the eve of his departure from Lhasa and gave him a small statue of the Buddha. 'He was full of kindness.' wrote Younghusband, 'and at that moment more nearly approached Kipling's lama in "Kim" than any other Tibetan I met.' [310] The whole experience in Tibet was a profound one for Younghusband, and when he died in 1942, an old man, he had a relief of Lhasa carved on his tombstone, beneath which were the words: 'Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God'. Younghusband treasured the Buddha statue above all other things, and his daughter placed it upon the lid of his coffin. [311]

This puer quality had, of course, been manifest in Himalayan travel long before the end of the nineteenth century -- one need only remember Bogle's youthful idealistic earnestness. But Tibet was still somewhat vague in the early years of the century, and gold had helped to give direction, coherence and intensity to those otherwise hazy yearnings. Such a displacement and condensation was, however, no longer required once other, more appropriate images became available. Indeed, once the goal of Lhasa had been reached, the puer imagination focused itself on to the Himalayan mountains. Younghusband, for example, left the army soon after the 1904 expedition and turned his attention to religion, to the stars and to the mountains. [312] As we shall see, he was to become the inspiration behind the British Everest expeditions of the post-war years. But even as the century drew to its close, the Himalayan summits were attracting many a longing gaze. Mountaineering was on the threshold of a new 'golden age', as the giants of the Himalayas and Karakorams began to be challenged by Western climbers. As the earth's empty spaces vanished, it was to these virgin summits that the puer imagination turned. The purity and danger of the everlasting snows superseded the need for gold.

W. W. Graham's controversial claim to have climbed to the 24,076-foot-high summit of Kabru in 1883 was, if true, a new altitude record. It was followed in 1892 by Martin Conway's expedition, which included Charles Bruce and the Swiss guide Matthias Zurbriggen. They climbed to a height of 22,600 feet. In 1895 Mummery, Collie and Hastings attempted Nanga Parbat (26,660 feet) but had to turn back without reaching the summit. Meanwhile the American feminist Fannie Bullock-Workman and her husband were also regularly climbing summits above 20,000 feet in the Karakorams. Disputes, claims and counter-claims were rife. Longstaff, Bruce and Mumm climbed to the summit of Trisul (23,360 feet) in 1907, thereby establishing a new altitude record. The years just before the outbreak of World War I saw a rush of expeditions to these mountains, including the famous one led by the Duke of Abruzzi in 1909 which explored the approaches to K-2. [313]

Douglas Freshfield's expedition of 1899 to circumnavigate Kanchen-junga was one of the most famous of these pioneering attempts. He was already fifty-four years old and one of the most respected figures in climbing. His expedition was almost a pilgrimage:

There is a ... motive, which is driving not a few of the surviving pioneers of the Alps to extend their wanderings. We long to compare the familiar snows we have known and loved so well with those of still mightier ranges. We, connoisseurs in mountain scenery, as we think of ourselves ... desire, before either our limbs or our eyes fail us, to make acquaintance with the greater ranges of the globe ... [314]

Indeed, the art of Alpine comparisons, already much in evidence in the preceding decades, reached its fullest development in Freshfield's text. His prose, an exquisite tribute to the mountains he loved, was matched in its time only by the photographs of Vittorio Sella who, after Freshfield's expedition, later accompanied the Duke of the Abruzzi's expedition. In his book Freshfield delicately sips each view, sliding the palate of his gaze over every nuance, comparing buttress, neve and slope with those sampled before, in the Alps. His admiration for the peaks overflowed: 'almost incredibly perfect grace of form'; 'the most superb triumph of mountain architecture'; 'possibly the most beautiful snow mountain in the world'. [315] As he gazed in wonder at Siniolchum (22,570 feet) he admitted that it was inaccessible to climbers of his generation, 'but others will come, and, standing on our shoulders will boast, as men did in Homer's day, that they are much better than their fathers'. His vision then turned towards the horizon: 'Far away to the east behind the crags that separate Lachen and Lachung, the eyes are caught by the distant cliff of Chumalhari rising beyond the Tibetan frontier.' [316]

But Tibet hovered over even these mighty summits. For Freshfield, these mountains were 'stepping-stones to the golden terraces of Potala the palace of the Dalai Lama'. [317] At the beginning of this study we saw that initially, when the first flush of mountain enthusiasm gripped the British imagination, Tibet was associated with the Himalayas. It partook of the fresh glory of the mountain summits, and thereby had its own mystery enhanced. Over a hundred years later, Tibet was a place of aspiration, fascination and mystery in its own right -- the Himalayas marked only one of its frontiers. Now the situation was reversed: the sanctity and fascination of Tibet -- and in particular of Lhasa -- enhanced the numinosity of the Himalayan summits. The Himalayas were now associated with Tibet. Speculation that summits higher than Everest existed there -- indeed, had even been seen in the distance -- were an unconscious way of symbolizing Tibet's supreme  imaginative power. [318]

Freshfield's book was dedicated to Joseph Hooker, just as Hooker's own famous Himalayan Journals had earlier been dedicated to Charles Darwin. Time and again Freshfield referred to Hooker's formative journey, as a young man of thirty-two in the eastern Himalayas. Freshfield visited the same splendid views, experienced similar emotions. When Hooker, by now an old man of eighty-six, received Freshfield's book, he wrote that it was 'with pleasure that I cannot express in words ... You have brought to me visions of my happiest early days that I never hoped to see ...' [319] An era was coming full circle, closing and passing on.

Only Connect! Communication with the Axis Mundi

Chandler perceptively observed that he was 'part of more than a material invasion. [320] Westerners were seeking a way not just into the geographical Tibet, but into the fantasy it represented. The paradox they faced was how to establish communication with this unique space-time zone, without simultaneously being the agent of its irrevocable demise or even destruction. By the end of the century Tibet had become a fully formed sacred space for the West, with the axis mundi firmly established at the Potala in Lhasa and embodied in the person of the Dalai Lama. The frontiers of this temenos were well established and highly charged with symbolic significance. It was a true complexio oppositorum, embracing the widest possible range of contradictions; hence it was an invaluable vessel for Western projections at a time of acute social fragmentation. The era was as complex as its fantasies about Tibet.

The range of traveling styles was no less extreme. Some -- like Hedin, who prepared by plunging naked into snowdrifts -- were desperate in their determination to reach Lhasa. Others, such as Colman Macaulay, were content to travel around the perimeter of Tibet. The contrast was extreme. As explorers struggled grimly across Tibetan wastes, Macaulay was complaining: 'Nothing in luncheon basket but some tinned oatcakes, a pate de foie, a couple of glasses of whisky and a bottle of green chartreuse'. [321]

Whether being put out by only having green chartreuse to drink or stoically enduring barley-meal day after day, all the travelers had their own, very specific reason for trying to connect with Tibet. For some free access to the country was a God-given right:

The Pass open and free to all,
By God's own will
For ALL the world
Unto ALL men in heritage

wrote Louis in his poem 'A Legend of the Jeylap-La'. [322] For others, such as Chandler and Landon, eventual Western access to Tibet and Lhasa was inevitable, not because of God's will but due to the unstoppable law of progress. The humorous signpost erected by the British soldiers atop Jeylap-la with one arm pointing 'To Lhasa' and the other back 'To London', was probably the most apt monument to this sense of the inevitable. [323]

Many British travelers at the end of the century felt that it was their duty to reach Lhasa and free the ordinary Tibetans from the oppression of the lamas. Bower, for example, disgusted at the wealth and power of the monks as compared with the poverty and servility of the peasants, decided that 'the only chance of redemption for Tibet lies in foreign intercourse'. [324] Grenard, Macaulay, Louis, Younghusband and Landon, among others, all insisted that the ordinary Tibetan would welcome the British and other Westerners. [325] It was as if the British were creating, in their imagination, an unlikely allegiance with ordinary Tibetans. This allegiance gave British and other Western travelers, frustrated by the lack of communication with the Tibetan government and aristocracy, a sense of a possible connection. The old relationship with the 'Tashi Lama' (Panchen Lama), which dated back to Bogle's time, was also frequently proposed as a possible alternative to the impossible one with the Dalai Lama. [326]

For some travelers the establishment of communication with Tibet was a spiritual necessity and obligation. It was almost inevitable that spiritual guidance should be imagined to come from Tibet. The spiritually inclined Blavatsky, Hensoldt and David-Neel seemed to articulate the voice from the axis mundi, the voice from outside conditioned time and space. The form of communication varied from direct oral religious instruction inside Tibetan monasteries to more long-range psychic transmission, telepathy or astral communiques.

More conventional means of communication had also been attempted, particularly using letters. In 1889 the Archbishop of Canterbury sent a letter to the Dalai Lama, but Dr. Lansdell, his emissary, was prevented from crossing the border on orders from the Anglo-Indian government, which was sensitive to Chinese territorial concerns. [327] Lord Curzon also tried to send letters to the Dalai Lama by means of a rather doubtful character named Ugyen Kazi. As Lamb ironically points out, 'Curzons survey of the Indian Empire disclosed but three persons who could conceivably be used as intermediaries with the Dalai Lama; a minor Bhutanese official, a fat Chinese and a bibulous Ladaki.' [328] The choice fell upon the first, who was eventually suspected of lying about handing over the letter to the Dalai Lama and even of being a Tibetan spy. The Russians seemed to have more luck, and gifts were exchanged between the czar and the Dalai Lama. [329] This success was understandably a sore point with the British, who probably exaggerated its importance and repeatability, fantasizing a regular correspondence between St. Petersburg and Lhasa.

Others preferred more tangible styles of communication -- railways, roads and telegraph lines. While an allegiance with the peasants, or a solitary dash on horseback, or an armed expedition with or without the permission of God, or gifts and letters -- even monastic instruction, occult transmission or psychic conversations -- were all well and good, they were judged to be less reliable than the new communications technology. Telegraph wires, not telepathy, were wanted. By 1870, international telegraph lines had brought the East nearer both to the European governments and to their general population. Explanations and rationalizations for overseas actions were increasingly being demanded by a public kept well informed by the new mass-circulation newspapers.

In 1879 Kabul was connected to India by telegraph. [330] British overseas representatives no longer had the flexibility of decision-making that had been allowed by the several months it took a letter to make the round trip to and from London. By the time Waddell journeyed through the Himalayas in 1898, the telegraph line from India extended to Gantok, the capital of Sikkim, only a few miles from the Tibetan border. [331] In 1904 Younghusband soon discovered the pains of being a field agent within easy reach of London. Orders and counter-orders flowed readily from London to the Gantok telegraph stations and then over the Tibetan border, as the thin wires followed closely behind the slowly advancing British troops. [332] News reached the expedition barely three hours after it had been published in London. Waddell dreamt of a railway line extending over the border and into the Chumbi valley; Louis was of a similar mind, and proposed a railway tunnel under the Jeylap-la. [333] When the British left Lhasa, they left behind, despite Tibetan protests, a telegraph terminal at Gyantse, the second city of Tibet. [334] It seemed as if a permanent, reliable and modern line of communication had finally been established.

Relph, in his study Place and Placelessness, makes a distinction between being an insider and an outsider: 'From the outside you look upon a place as a traveler might look upon a town from a distance; from the inside you experience a place, are surrounded by it and part of it.' [335] He further sub-divides these categories of experience:

Existential Outsideness, in which there is an 'awareness of meaning withheld and of the inability to participate in those meanings'.

Objective Outsideness, 'A dispassionate attitude towards places ...'.

Incidental Outsideness 'describes a largely unselfconscious attitude in which places are experienced as little more than a background or setting for activities ...'.

Vicarious Insideness, a second-hand but 'deeply felt involvement'.

Behavioural Insideness 'involves deliberately attending to the appearance of that place'.

Empathetic Insideness implies 'a willingness to be open to significances of a place, to feel it, to know and respect its symbols'.

Existential Insideness is a complete belonging, the 'complete identity with a place that is the very foundation of the place concept'.

In the case of Tibet and Western travelers at the turn of the century, there were few, if any, incidental outsiders: Tibet was rarely a mere background place for travelers in the region. Nor were there many purely objective outsiders. Most certainly there was a mix between a behavioral insideness (deliberately attending to the appearance of Tibet) and an empathetic insideness (a willingness to be open to the significance of Tibet). However both existential attitudes were paramount.

While the experience of existential insideness may have occasionally been sustained by travelers such as Blavatsky, David-Neel or Hensoldt, usually it came as a brief moment of attunement. Landon, for example, when surrounded by Lhasa and the Potala, almost became convinced of the veracity of Tibetan religion. Younghusband too, as we have seen, had several profoundly intimate experiences in Tibet. Even Henry Savage Landor, the most aggressively ethnocentric and bullish of Victorian travelers, had flashes of existential rapport with the place.

On the other hand, the experience of existential outsideness was almost universal among Western travelers at that time. The belief that Tibet contained meanings, and the urgent desire to participate in these meanings, was a constant background. Every travel account described an attempt to articulate these meanings, to locate them, to journey towards them and embrace them. Every journey into Tibet, or around its perimeter, contained a kind of nekyia, a descent into the Underworld, into a landscape of symbols and hidden meanings -- a descent into the unconscious not only of the individual but of the era itself. Grenard's wonderful text presents this descent in its most exemplary form:

I have now to describe the journey which we performed across a region which man had never penetrated ... The things which we saw in the course of this long march were things great and magnificent, no doubt, but always the same ... barren and dreary things. [336]

As Tibet became an intimate part of the Western psyche, the separation from it was felt as an exile. The journey to Lhasa was experienced on a depth level less as a going than as a returning.

To a reading public in Europe and North America thirsty for global images, these accounts offered a vicarious insideness. With the invention of photographic dry-plates in the 1880s, numerous photographic illustrations joined the written text. [337] The formation of the photographic record societies in Britain, Europe and America after 1890 testified to the archival fantasy that surrounded photography. [338] Photographs helped to fix Tibet, to capture it, to establish a kind of one-way communication. [339]

Photographs were also being used extensively for mountaineering reconnaissance. Freshfield in particular constantly discussed this. [340] In 1886 photography was placed on the Royal Geographical Society's curriculum for prospective explorers. However, in addition to this practical use of photographs, they also enhanced a sense of vicarious participation. Already a tradition of sensitive mountain photography had been established. It was significant that out of six Europeans in Freshfield's party that left Marseilles in 1899, three were connected with photography -- Signor Vittorio Sella, 'one of the first of mountain photographers'; his brother, 'to keep him company'; and a photographic assistant. [341] Freshfield's expectations had previously been stimulated by photographs: 'The picture, so long dreamt of, so often studied in black and white, is at last before ... [my] eyes in all its glory of color and aerial perspective.' [342]

But photographs also gave Westerners a vicarious sense of power over Tibet. Even if they could not go to the country at will, nor occupy it, nor control it, at least they had possession of its image. This was less the rape of the anima than her photo-exposure. In a kind of primitive sense, to own the image was to gain power over the subject, or at least to possess something of its soul. For example, in Kipling's famous tale, Kim takes the old Tibetan lama to the Lahore museum. The curator, a 'white-bearded Englishman', speaks to the trembling Tibetan: 'Welcome then, O lama from Tibet. Here be the images, and I am here ... to gather knowledge.' The lama then tells of his monastery, where he was the abbot. In reply, the 'curator brought out a huge book of photos and showed him that very place, perched on its crag, overlooking the gigantic valley of many-hued strata'. The lama is suitably impressed, even awed -- 'And thou -- the English know of these things?' -- but he is not totally convinced. He says that there are still things that Western scholars do not know, nor even look for: things to do with spiritual wisdom. [343] The attitude of curator and lama expresses so well the tension and polarity within Western travelers and their attitude towards Tibet: science, technology and power versus spiritual wisdom and mystery.

When Landon returned from Lhasa on horseback he proudly announced that the Forbidden City was only eleven days and three hours from British territory: Ghoom Station, just outside Darjeeling. The elusive had been made tangible: a connection seemed finally to be established. Even the solitary thread of the telegraph wire looping its precarious way over the windswept Jeylap-la Pass and into Tibet seemed evidence, albeit fragile, of communication with this place outside space and time -- a permanent Ariadne's thread.

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