to horizon there was never a flush of blue. It was all
common, and yet the hour teemed with a fierce interest
of a kind that no man will perhaps ever feel again.
I took off my smoked glass spectacles to see the clearer,
and it was bright indeed.
Then, as we rode on, it came. In the far, far distance,
across and beyond those flat fields of barley,
marked here and there by the darker line of low-wooded
plantations, a grey pyramid painfully disengaged itself
from behind the outer point of the grey concealing spur
fff§Lhasa.
There at last it was, the never-reached goal of so
many wearyj* wanderers, the home of all the occult
mysticism that still remains on earth. The light waves
of mirage dissolving impalpably just shook the far
outlines of the golden roofs and dimly seen white
terraces. I do not think anyone of us said much. Life
seemed very fu ll: but the fact of achievement seemed
remote and impossible. Still, there it was. There was
Lhasa.
We had outridden the main column by some distance,
and we stood a moment on the road just where
a sudden flight of dragon-flies pierced the air with lines
of quick blue ; then we rode on.
There at last it was, and for the next half mile
O’Connor and I allowed our beasts to find their own
way over the pebble-strewn road while little by little
we devoured with our eyes the outlines of the twin hills
which stand as sentinels to hide from the traveller the
sight of the Cathedral which lies low on the plain to the
east. For the city of Lhasa is not visible until you shall
have climbed up the neck of land which almost joins
Chagpo-ri to Potala. But there the great palace of the