Twenty years have passed since Ugyen Gyatso, one
of the best of our native explorers, corrected, inadequately
enough, but to the best of his ability, the
traditional delusion as to the shape of the Sacred Lake
of Tibet. Travelling in disguise and almost by
stealth, his opportunities were limited, but his map of
the Yam-dok tso was the first improvement upon
D ’Anville’s 1735 design, and it is probable that to this
day the common conception of this strange sheet of
water is that originated by the Jesuit-taught Lamas of
1717, and repeated without any great variation by every
atlas down to 1884. But the Yam-dok tso is by no means
a symmetrical ring of water surrounding a similar ring
of land. Lieutenant-Colonel Waddell uses the happy
expression “ scorpionoid ” to describe its real shape.
It is not, perhaps, surprising that our ignorance of
what is undoubtedly the most interesting inland sea
of Asia should have been so profound. Its claim to
sacred isolation has been respected far more than that
of Lhasa itself. For every one who has ever set eyes on
the Yam-dok tso, four or five foreigners have seen Lhasa.
Indeed, we do not certainly know that before this ex-
pedition any Europeans except Manning and della
Penna s company had ever passed along the margin
of the long, narrow waters which mean so much to the
superstitious Tibetan peasant, and from Manning, the
incurious, we learn little indeed, except that the water
is bad— a wholly misleading statement, for though the
taste is somewhat alkaline, neither salt nor entirely
fresh, it is wholesome and clean.*
The Tibetans themselves, besides the name Yam-
* Lakes with no outlet inevitably become salt in the lapse of centuries. The Yam-
dok tso must have had some point of escape— probably the Rongchu-at a comparatively
recent period.
dok tso, or “ high grazing lake,” use another, “ Yu-tso,”
or the “ Turquoise Lake,” and it is impossible to
describe more exactly the exquisite shade of blue-green
which colours the waters under even the most
brilliant azure skies. Near inshore the innumerable
ripples are, indeed, blown in over the white-sanded
Nagartse jong.
floor as colourlessly as wavelets on a South Pacific
strand of white coral, but twenty yards out the bottom
drops suddenly, and the lake glows deeply with the
colour from which it takes its name.
On shore, dotted severally over the wide, clean shelf
of sand and grit and pebble, a white drift into which
one sinks to the ankles, great nettles grow rudely, only
yielding place to the waving hoof-track— there are no