Till the summer of 1904 if one had been asked what was the most mysterious spot on the earth's surface the reply would have been Lhasa. It was a place on which no Englishman had cast an eye for a hundred years and no white man for more than half a century. In our prosaic modern world there remained one city among the clouds about which no tale was too strange for belief. The greatest of mountain barriers shut it off from the south, and on the north it was guarded by leagues of waterless desert. Explorer after explorer had set out on the quest, but all had stopped short before the golden roofs of the sacred city could be seen from any hill-top. Even in early days the place had never been explored, for the visitors had been jealously watched and hurried quickly away. In the Potala might be treasures of a culture long hidden to the world, lost treatises of Aristotle, unknown Greek poems, relics, perhaps, of the mystic kingdom of Kubla Khan, riches of gold and jewels drawn from the four corners of Asia..... And then suddenly in 1904 we went there, not as apologetic travellers taken by side paths, but as an armed force marching along the highway to the very heart of the mystery, and letting loose at once upon the world a flood of accurate knowledge. For a moment we were carried centuries away from high politics and every modern invention, and were back in the great ages of discovery: with the Portuguese in their quest for Ophir or Prester John, or with Raleigh looking for Manoa the Golden. It was impossible for the least sentimental to avoid a certain regret for the drawing back of that curtain which had meant so much to the imagination of mankind. The shrinkage of the world goes on so fast, our horizon grows so painfully clear, that the old untiring wonder which cast its glamour over the ways of our predecessors is vanishing from the lives of their descendants. With the unveiling of Lhasa fell the last stronghold of the older romance.
