-and Rowland had taken me into his charming house and treated me like a brother. Bottled beer and gram-fed mutton in Ladakh-the memory of them lingers still! We had not met since, but it did not take us long to find out that we were both bound for home next day, and to arrange to dine together.

At dinner our knowledge of each other's recent doings was quickly brought up to date.

"After that summer you were up shooting in Ladakh," Rowland began, "I stayed on in Leh till the spring of '14. It was a good job and suited me. My summers in Leh were lonely of course, except when fellows like you came up and stopped with me, for the only other white folk were were the Moravian missionaries. But after all, the shooting was well worth it, for it is not every one who has his way paid by Government to shoot an Ovis ammon. Then, of course, in winter I went down to Kashmir and lived like a Christian amongst my fellow-men, with some of the finest duck-shooting in the world at my doorno, I've no complaints against Leh.

"But early in '14 they transferred me to the Gulf, and then the war came. At first, of course, I applied repeatedly to be allowed to rejoin my old battalion, but I was, it appeared, indispensable, and as

matter of fact the Hun 'agents provocateurs' did keep us quite busy. After a bit I was transferred to Teheran and thence to the South-Eastern

Caspian. There I have been sitting in splendid isolation for the last two years at the court of a Kurdish potentate called the Khan of Bujnurd. He's nominally under the Shah, but as a matter of fact he doesn't give two hoots for any one; so I felt a little lonely sometimes, especially when he commenced to discuss with me in a perfectly academie spirit the probable outcome of his cutting off my head. However, he decided against it in the end-I really never quite knew why.

"In normal times it would not have been too bad at Bujnurd, for there is some good fishing near-by-a fish very like the mahseer. Then, too, there are quite a few tigers in the heavy forest by the Caspiansort of Terai country it is. No, not the long-haired tiger-the ordinary one. But as things were, I had to keep a very close eye on my Khan, to try to head off Pan-Turanian emissaries from Baku and Bolsheviks from Turkestan, so I was too busy for anything of that sort. Yes, I have just come down from there-a longish trek it is, too."

"Talking about those Moravians at Leb," I said, "I wonder what happened to them in the war? Of course they were Huns to a man, so I suppose they were interned, but I must say I think they might have been made exceptions. Mind you, I hold no particular brief for their missionising, for as a matter of fact they probably did not make a convert from one year's

home, he let his place to a rich American and wandered about the world to to indulge his archæological bent. But in his subaltern days he had been up in Kashmir on leave, and had got so bitten with that country that in after years he was never long away from the Himalaya. He would spend years on end pottering about amongst the Buddhist inscriptions and remains of Western Tibet and Kashmir-a humble follower in the footsteps of Aurel Stein. I met him several times on his wanderings and liked him immensely, for he always struck me as a large, sane, self-reliant individual, differing from the ordinary run one meets, in that, though he had a very healthy liking for the flesh-pots, still he could deny himself for years together in pursuit of his hobbies. He was a very keen sportsman too; but in this the naturalist always came first, and I remember he was one of those most interested in the proposed mammal-survey of the Himalaya that the Duke of B― had in view at one time. With all this, he was one of the best-read men I have ever met, full of all sorts of abstruse knowledge, especially of Asiatic history-which, of course, was a necessary concomitant of his archæology. In fact, he was at once a man of the world, a savant, and a sportsman-and a most charming companion at all times.

"It was the winter before you were last up in Leh, wasn't it, that Weismann brought in Kenway over the Karzong La?

VOL CCVII.—NO. MCCLV.

He had a very bad go of enterio, but the Moravians pulled him through, and by the time I reached Leh that spring he was already convalescent. He had originally intended crossing the Karakorum that summer to have a look at the ruins round Khotan, but after his illness he did not feel fit enough to go so far afield. He had found a kindred spirit in Weismann, who was himself, of course, a recognised authority on all sorts of Tibetan lore,-I remember he had been busy for years on a monumental work which he meant to call a 'Corpus Insoriptionum Tibeticarum,' or some such name, if it had ever been finished. Weismann had told Kenway a lot about the remains of an ancient monastery at Spadum in Zanskar, only a few marches from Leh across the Indus, so finally Kenway decided to put off Khotan till later and to spend the summer investigating Spadum.

"I saw nothing of Kenway all summer; but Weismann went over to spend some weeks with him, and on his return came to tell me about the doings at Spadum. It happened to be a busy day, so I'm afraid I did not give the old boy the attention he deserved. However, I gathered that Kenway had roped in a perfect army of the local Zanskaris, and between them they had unearthed buried ruins of very considerable extent and-according to Weismann-of tremendous interest. Kenway was still out in Zanskar when I went back

2 T

to Kashmir that autumn, and I understood that he intended wintering in Leh to arrange all the material he had colleoted at Spadum.

"Sure enough, next spring I found him still in Leh, busy with the arrangements for his deferred trip to Khotan; and, somewhat to my surprise, I heard that Weismann was to go with him. I helped them both a good deal with their preparations, and remember being struck with the extent of the 'bandobast' they were making. The Karakorum road to Turkestan is a big enough undertaking certainly, but Kenway was buying horses and mules wholesale and paying fancy prices for the best. Old Mohan Lal, the merchant in the Leh bazaar, was acting as his agent in this. You remember the good old boy, of course? He drank himself to death in the winter of '13, I'm sorry to say, and how they manage now in Leh without him I can't think. Well, in the end they got together as well-found a caravan as ever left Leh. Chiefly Zanskari ponies they had bought they're much the best; and Kenway had got hold of old Mahommed Mish as caravanbashi. He couldn't have done better than that, for the old man went with Malcolmson through Tibet in '96, and knew Central Asia like the palm of his hand.

"One evening, just before they were due to start, Kenway came over to dinner with me and brought Weismann with him, and after dinner

we settled down by the fire in my study. It was the last time I ever saw them together, and the scene comes back to me very clearly: the dark room, with its flickering firelight dimly revealing Kenway-solid and well-groomed even in his old shooting - suit -lying back reposefully in his arm-chair, in marked contrast to Weismann, lean and cadaverous, with straggling brown beard, who was crouching forward to the blaze and playing nervously with those blue glare - glasses that he never went without.

"I remember telling them then that I expected a leng account of their doings when they got back.”

666 'As 8 matter of fact,' Kenway replied, 'that is just what I want to talk to you about. Of course Central Asian exploration is always a bit of a risk; but there are some peculiar features about this trip of ours, so, though it may seem rather nonsense to you, we both feel we are in for a pretty big undertaking accompanied by more than the usual danger. For that reason we want somebody to know where we have gone in case we don't turn up again; but if you were to hear our plans now, in your official position you might feel obliged to put a spoke in our wheel. So here is a letter that I want to give you, but I'm going to ask you not to read it till we have been gone 8 month. Do you agree?'

"All right,' I said; 'you

oan give me the letter, and I promise not to read it for a month, perhaps not then, for as long as you don't ask me to connive with you in infringing the orders of Government you can go anywhere you please as far as I'm concerned -to Timbuctu and back if you want to. But mind you take care of yourselves all the same; we don't want any regrettable incidents or complications.'

"So Kenway gave me this letter, and shortly after he and Weismann started on their travels. Some time during the summer I I opened the letter: here it is, and this is what I read :

'DEAR ROWLAND,-W. and I have gone, not to Khotan, but into Tibet-as you probably suspected. But what will surprise you is the reason for our going: we have gone for gold. Now, do not be in a hurry to put us down as mere fatuous treasure-hunters, but first let me explain to yon the grounds on which we are basing our search.

'Now, has it ever struck you, I wonder, what a prominent place in history the gold of this part of the world has always held? Perhaps you have never thought about it; anyway the subject has always had a faseination for me, and for years I have been tabulating in my mind odd scraps of evidence bearing upon it.

'To begin very far backthe Greek and Roman writers teem with references to the subject. One of the earliest allusions is to be found in

Herodotus, as you may remember; and as his account has a very important afterbearing on my story, I shall quote him more or less in full. This is what he says:

"Another kind of Indians live in the land of Paktyika, away towards the North from the rest of the Indians; their manner of living is much the same as that of the Bactrians. These are the most warlike of all the Indians, and it is they who are sent for the gold. For in this country there is a sandy desert, and in this sand there are ants which are smaller than dogs but larger than foxes. . .. These ants make for themselves burrows below ground, and in doing so throw up the earth as ants do with us, and in the same manner; they also look exactly like ours. This thrown-up sand contains the gold, and for the sake of this sand the Indians are sent into the desert. . . . When the Indians arrive at the place with their leather bags, they fill these with sand and ride away as quickly as possible, for the ants who have found out what has happened through their sense of smell are at once after them, and they are exceedingly swift. Thus, if the Indians do not gain a good start before the ants have gathered, none of them would escape (Herodotus, lib. iii. 98-106).

...

'Of course it is very generally agreed that the "Indians "