Travel and Adventure in Tibet (Including the Diary of Annie R. Taylor)

Excerpt:

Starting from the north of China, near the Great Wall, Miss Taylor entered Tibet, penetrated almost to Lhasa, and returned by another route. She was seven months and ten days in the forbidden land. Her only arms were a pistol, and her only instruments a telescope and a watch. The pistol had been packed in the baggage and never saw the light. The telescope was stolen, and it does not appear that she ever had occasion to use it. It was probably intended as a spy-glass for robbers; but those gentry swarmed about her so close and so often that looking for them at long range would have been a mere ridiculous superfluity. The watch she tried unceasingly to barter for something more useful, such as a tent or a tat. Without aneroid, thermometer, or theodolite, she toiled over unmapped mountains and jogged through unvisited valleys, provokingly oblivious of the claims of science, and constrained only when something went wrong with the cooking to notice the boiling-point.

The absence of scientific research does not, however, detract from the human interest of Miss Taylor's story. She kept a diary for the whole period of her adventurous journey, from the day when, at dawn, she stole out of Tau-Chau and across the border, to that other day when she emerged at Tachien-lu, having cast her line in a long loop over the rugged interior. This diary is now published for the first time, eight years after the event.

The original lies on my desk. It is a small black notebook, stained and smudged, but closely pencilled on every page. Night after night, at the end of each comfortless march, and as well as numbed fingers would let her, she jotted down the main features of the day. Only those who have faced the cold and fatigue of such travel, without intending to write a book or record the results of scientific observation, can really appreciate the significance of this persistence.

Not till the diary had been written would the tired traveller burrow into her sleeping-bag under tent or cave. When, at last, the tent had been taken, and no cave could be found, she settled herself to sleep on the snow. What a comical little bundle it must have been for the merry stars to wink at!