When either the Dalai Lama or the Pantshen Lama dies, the survivor sends for a list of all the male children born in Tibet immediately after the demise of his colleague, for the spirit of the dead man must now live in one of those babies. After prolonged prayers, three names are chosen, and these names are written on slips of paper. These are then thrown in a golden casket provided several centuries ago for the occasion by one of the Chinese emperors. Then the abbots of all the great monasteries of Tibet gather together in the immense palace of the Dalai Lama. There are 3000 such monasteries in the country, but only a few are big enough to send delegates to this Buddhistic college of cardinals. After a week of fasting and praying, they draw one name out of the golden casket. The child who bears that name is held to be the reincarnation of the Buddha and is surrendered to the monks to be prepared for his task.
His fate is not a very happy one. It is to the advantage of the powerful abbots to keep him in the background and to make him a weakling, so that he may do their bidding and let them live comfortably at the expense of the other two-thirds of the populace, who are not monks but who are engaged in some productive labour and must therefore support their spiritual mentors. Should the poor youngster prove ‘difficult,’ then there are several subtle ways and means to allow him to ‘return to Paradise.’ Does he come up to the expectations of his tutors, then he leads a terribly dull and monotonous existence until lack of exercise and boredom bring it to an end.
Nevertheless and notwithstanding, the system continues. Systems of that sort always do, whether 12,000 feet up in the air or at sea-level. As for the mountain-ranges which protect Tibet against its neighbours from the south, and which protect it so well that until only a few years ago no foreigner had set foot upon this holy land of the living Buddha for more than seven hundred years, these mountain-ranges are so much in the public eye that they are better known and to a larger number of people than most of the mountains nearer home. For our time, which loves records, has cast an envious eye upon the last remaining mountain top of any importance that remains unsealed. Mount Everest was called after the colonel of engineers who brought this part of the Himalayas into maps for the English geodetic survey, some time during the middle of the last century. It is 29,000 feet high, which makes it nearly twice as high as Mont Blanc. It has so far defied all attempts of man to reach the summit. The great Everest expedition in 1924 got to within a thousand feet of the top. Two men then volunteered to make the final climb. Armed with oxygen apparatus, they bade farewell to their companions and they were last observed when they were within 600 feet of the final pinnacle. After that, silence!
THE MOUNTAIN GAP
But for ambitious mountaineers this is an ideal region. Being situated in the heart of Asia, the country of the Gigantic Dimensions, the mountains must of course assume proportions compared to which the Swiss Alps become little sand piles made by boys and girls playing on the beach. In the first place, these mountains of eternal snow, as the Hindus call them, are almost twice as wide as the Alps and cover thirteen times as much territory. Some of their glaciers are four times as long as the most important glacier of Switzerland. There are forty individual mountain tops of more than 22,000 feet height, and several of the mountain passes are more than twice as high as those of the Alps.
SOUTH AMERICA
THE PANAMA CANAL
Like all other parts of the Great Fold which runs all the way from Spain to New Zealand, the Himalayas are of comparatively recent date (even younger than the Alps), and count their age in millions of years and not in hundreds of millions. It will take a great deal of frost and wind and rain to destroy them and reduce them to flat country, but the forces of Nature, hostile to rock formations, are bushy engaged. Already the Himalayas are cut into irregular chunks by the deep ravines of half a hundred brooks and rivers. The Indus, the Ganges, and the Brahmaputra, the three most important rivers of India, help this labour of disintegration along at a merry pace.
Politically speaking, too, the Himalayas, with their tremendous length of 1500 miles, offer a more diversified spectacle than any other mountain-range. For they are not merely the natural frontier between two adjoining countries, as are the Alps and the Pyrenees. They happen to be so wide that quite a number of independent States are tucked away in them. For instance, Nepal, the home of the famous Gurkhas, who have retained a certain degree of independence, is almost four times as large as the republic of Switzerland and has almost 6,000,000 inhabitants. Kashmir, where our grandmothers got their shawls, which is now part of the British domains, has an area of some 84,000 square miles with a population of over 3,000,000.
Finally, if you will look once more at the map you will see a curious thing in regard to two of the big rivers, the Indus and the Brahmaputra. They do not run down from the Himalayas as, for instance, the Missouri runs down from the Rockies. Instead they rise behind the main chain of the Himalayas and flow parallel to the mountain chain for a long way before cutting a course across it, much in the same way as do the Rhine and the Rhone in the Alps. The Indus originates between the Himalayas and the Karakoram ridge. The Brahmaputra flows first from west to east through the plateau of Tibet. Then it makes a sharp turn and starts upon that short voyage from east to west to join the Ganges which runs through the heart of the broad valley between the Himalayas and the plateau of Deccan, in the central part of the Indian peninsula.
Running water, of course, has a terrific erosive power, but it does not seem likely that these two rivers could have dug their way through the Himalayas if they had begun to flow after the mountains had been made. And we are therefore obliged to draw the conclusion that these rivers must be older than the mountains. The Indus and the Brahmaputra were there before the crust of the earth began to heave and groan and very slowly produced those gigantic folds which were to become the highest mountain-ranges of the modern world. But their growth was so slow (time is after all only an invention of man, eternity is timeless) that the rivers, by dint of their erosive energies, managed to remain on the ground floor, so to speak.
There are geologists who claim that even now the Himalayas are still gaining. Since the thin concrete shell on which we live contracts and expands like the skin of our body, these geologists may be right. The Swiss Alps, as we know, are travelling slowly from east to west. The Himalayas, like the Andes of South America, may be moving upward. There is only one law in the laboratory of Nature which holds good for all creation—there must be constant change, and the punishment for those who fail to obey it is death.
Chapter XXXIII
* * *
THE GREAT WESTERN PLATEAU OF ASIA
From Pamir in the centre, a wide mountain-range—which is really nothing but a series of high plateaux—runs due west until at last it is stopped by the waters of the Black Sea and the Aegean.
These plateaux have familiar names, for they have played a most important part in the history of human progress. I might go a little further and say the most important rôle. For unless all our present ethnological speculations are wrong, these highlands and valleys between the Indus river and the shores of the eastern Mediterranean were not only the nursery which hatched that branch of the human race to which we ourselves happen to belong, but they also acted as a sort of grammar school in which we learned the rudiments of those sciences and the first principles of those moral tenets which eventually were to set Man apart from the rest of the animal world.
In order of their succession, the first of these highlands is the plateau of Iran. It is a vast salty desert about 3000 feet high entirely surrounded by high mountain-ranges. Even in the north, where it borders upon the Caspian Sea and the Turanian desert, and in the south, where it borders upon the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea, there is not a sufficient amount of rainfall to give this region a single river worth the name. Baluchistan, separated from India proper by the high Kirthar range, and since 1887 part of the British domains, has a few indifferent streams which lose themselves into the Indus river, but
its deserts have been feared ever since a greater part of Alexander’s armies perished there from thirst on the way back from India.
Afghanistan, which was so much in the limelight a few years ago when it fell into the hands of a ruler who tried to advertise himself and his country by a very spectacular trip through Europe, has a river, the Helmund. This begins in the Hindu Kush, one of the high mountain-ranges that radiate southward from Pamir and which loses itself in the salty Lake of Seistan on the border between Persia and Afghanistan. Afghanistan, however, enjoys a much better climate than Baluchistan, and in many other ways this country is of much greater importance. The original trade-route between India and northern Asia and Europe ran through the heart of this country. It went from Peshawar, the capital of the north-west frontier province, to Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, by way of the famous Khyber Pass, and then crossed the high Afghan plateau until it reached Herat in the west.
Over fifty years ago Russia and England began their fight for the ultimate control of this buffer State. As the Afghans happened to be excellent fighting men, those peaceful penetrations from south and north had to be accomplished with more than the usual care and circumspection. The disaster of the first Afghan war of 1838–1842, when a mere handful of English returned to tell how all the others had been massacred during the attempt to force an unpopular ruler upon the unwilling Afghan people, was never quite forgotten; and thereafter England proceeded across the Khyber Pass with careful tread. But when the Russians in 1873 occupied Khiva and were known to be heading for Tashkend and Samarkand, the English from their side were forced to make some move lest they should wake up one morning to hear the armies of the Tsar doing a little practice shooting on the other side of the Sulaiman Mountains. And so, while his Imperial Majesty’s representatives in London and her Britannic Majesty’s representatives in St Petersburg were assuring the respective imperial and royal Governments that their intentions towards Afghanistan were wholly unselfish and of a most respectable and laudatory nature, the engineers of both Governments were working on elaborate plans to bless poor Afghanistan, “cut off by cruel Nature from direct access to the sea,” with a railway system that should henceforth allow the benighted Afghans to partake at first hand of the blessings of Western civilization.
The World War unfortunately interfered with these projects. The Russians got as for as Kushk (near Herat), from where to-day you may travel by rail via Merv in the Turkoman Socialist Soviet Republic to the harbour of Krasnovodsk on the Caspian Sea and thence by boat to Baku and western Europe, Another line runs from Merv by way of Bokhara to Kokand in the Uzbeg Republic and is to continue from there to Balkh. Balkh is at present a third-rate village, situated among the vast ruins of that ancient Bactria which 3000 years ago was as important as Paris is to-day. It was the original centre of that highly ethical religious movement started by Zoroaster (or Zarathustra) which not only conquered Persia and penetrated as far as the Mediterranean, but which in a modified form was so popular among the Romans that for a long time it was one of the most serious rivals of Christianity.
England meanwhile has been pushing her railway from Hyderabad to Quetta in Baluchistan, and from there towards Kandahar, where in 1880 the British avenged themselves for their defeat of the first Afghan war.
But there is still another part of the Iranian plateau which deserves some attention. To-day it is merely the shadow of its former greatness, but it must have been an extraordinarily interesting land when the name of Persia stood for all that was most excellent in painting and literature, and above all things in the difficult art of living. The first period of glory came six centuries before Christ, when Persia was the centre of an empire which reached all the way from Macedonia to India. This was destroyed by Alexander, but five hundred years later, under the dynasty of the Sassanids, the Persians restored the ancient realm of Xerxes and Cambyses. They restored the Zoroastrian faith in all its former purity, collected the sacred writings into one volume, the famous Zend-Avesta, and made the desert flower with the roses of Ispahan.
Early during the seventh century the Arabs conquered Persia and Mohammed defeated Zoroaster. But if it is true that one shall know a country by its literature, then the works of Omar, the tent-maker’s son from Nishapur, bear witness to the exquisite taste that flourished once upon a time in these desert lands between Kurdistan and Khorasan. A professor of mathematics, dividing his time between algebra and quatrains upon the delights of love and the beauties of old red wine, is a phenomenon of such rare occurrence that only a civilization both wise and mellow would have tolerated his presence in the hallowed halls of pedagogy.
To-day’s interest, however, in Persia is of a more prosaic nature. The country has oil, and that is about the worst thing that could possibly happen to a nation too weak to defend its own interests. Theoretically speaking, the natives of any given place are supposed to be the chief beneficiaries of the treasures that lie hidden beneath their ancestral graveyards. In practice it works out differently. A few of the Shah’s intimate friends in far-away Teheran grow rich from granting concessions, and several thousand men and women living near the wells may find occasional employment at pretty meagre wages. But the rest goes to the foreign investor who thinks Persia is the name of a rug or a cat.
Unfortunately, Persia seems to be one of those countries which will always be poor and badly administered. Its geographical situation is very little of a blessing and very much of a curse. It is a desert, but when a desert is situated on the main road, which in turn is part of a land bridge connecting two of the most important parts of the world, then that desert will for ever be a battlefield and a bone of contention between opposing interests. And what I have just said of Persia holds true of this entire western part of Asia.
THE LAND BRIDGE FROM ASIA TO EUROPE
The final highlands in the chain of plateaus that run all the way from Pamir to the Mediterranean are Armenia and Asia Minor. Armenia, the westward continuation of the great platform of Iran, is a very old land, old in the formation of its volcanic soil and old in the suffering of its people. It is another bridge country. Whosoever wanted to wander from Europe to India had to pass through the valleys of the high Kurdistan mountains, and among those travellers have been some of the most notorious cut-throats of all time. Its history goes back to the days of the Deluge. It was on the top of Mount Ararat, the highest mountain of this entire region, which rises nearly 17,000 feet above sea-level and almost 10,000 feet above the plain of Erivan, that Noah’s ark landed when the waters of the earth had begun to recede. This we know for certain because when Sir John de Mandeville visited these regions in the beginning of the fourteenth century he still found parts of the old craft lying near the top. But when the Armenians themselves, who belong to the racial group of the Mediterranean and who therefore are our very near cousins, moved into these hills is still quite uncertain. At the recent rate of extinction, however, there soon won’t be any of them left.
It is the proud boast of the Armenians that their King, Tiridates the Great, was the first of all the kings of the earth to be converted to Christianity. Ever since that time the Armenian Christians have been carrying on a desperate struggle for existence, sometimes with their neighbours, such as the Persians and the Arabs, sometimes with their conquerors, such as the Mongols and the Turks. They enjoyed a brief flowering season of prosperity in the ninth and tenth centuries, when they built at Ani, on the bank of the river Arpa, a capital city whose ruins are still one of the marvels of Asia Minor—a land unusually rich in ruins. During the nineteenth century the ancient homelands of the race were rather unequally divided between Russia and Turkey. The Turks did their best—and a very good best it was—to wipe out their Armenian subjects by means of periodic, large-scale massacres; but at the same time Turkey did not disdain to make use of the commercial gifts of these people, who in many ways resemble the Jews, and are disliked for much the same reasons.
During the Great War the Armenians lent their aid—for
what it was worth—to the Allies, confident that an Allied victory would mean their liberation from the Turkish yoke for ever. They hoped, though with how much reason only international diplomacy knew, that America might accept a mandate for their country under the League of Nations. The Russian revolution and the refusal of the United States to enter the League brought these hopes to naught.
The Home of Mankind Page 25