careful to avoid. All countries are his washpot. All mankind is his friend.

Perhaps the most striking testimony that I could offer to the change that has passed over the scenes of my earlier journeys-and incidentally also to the chronically unstable equilibrium of the East -would be a reference to the dramatic fate that has befallen so many of the rulers and statesmen with whom I was brought in contact, and some of whom appear in these pages, in the days to which I refer. Shah Nasr-ed-Din of Persia, my audience with whom at Teheran in 1889 is mentioned later on, perished in 1896 by the weapon of an assassin. The ruler of Chitral with whom I stayed in 1894 was shot and killed by the half-brother who had sat at table with him and me only two months before. The Emperor of Annam, who presented me with a golden decoration at Hué in 1892, was deposed in 1907 and subsequently banished. The poor little King of Korea, who conversed with me in low whispers at Seoul in 1892, first saw his Queen murdered in the Palace and was afterwards himself forced to abdicate. His son, who struck me as the stupidest young man I ever met, shared the same fate. Deposition was the fate of the trembling figure of Norodom, the King of Cambodia, whom I visited at Pnompenh. The Amir of Bokhara, whom I saw in his capital in 1888, was afterwards expelled from his country and throne. Abbas Hilmi, whom Lord Cromer took me to visit at Cairo, soon after he had

ascended the Khedivial throne, is also a fugitive and an exile. The life of that eminent Japanese statesman, the Marquis Ito, who was so friendly to me when I was in Japan, was cut short by the knife of an assassin. Almost alone among the Eastern potentates whose guest I was, the Amir Abdur Rahman Khan, who told me that he lived in daily fear of his life, but that his people had not the courage to kill him, died in his bed. But of his two sons with whom I used to dine at Kabul, the elder, Habibulla, was murdered in his tent, and the younger, Nasrulla, languishes in prison. His Commander-in-Chief, known as the Sipah Salar, a gigantic figure, 6 feet 3 inches in height, and of corresponding bulk, who rode at my side from Dacca to Jellalabad on my way to Kabul in 1904, died suddenly a few years later in circumstances which left little doubt that his end was not natural.

Even in Europe my diaries refer to more than one similar tragedy. As far back as 1880 I recall a visit to the picturesque castle of Herrenhausen in Bavaria, where, in a room adorned exclusively with furniture and decorations in the shape of swans, I heard the steady tramp overhead, as he passed to and fro, of the mad King of Bavaria, who ended by drowning himself in a lake. I recall very clearly, and others have related, the incidents of a dinner with King George of Greece, who came to his death at the hand of an assassin in the streets of Salonika.

These incidents illustrate no more uncommon

phenomenon than that the lives of monarchs and statesmen are subject to exceptional and fatal risks, particularly in the East. But as I recall the features and tones of those ill-fated victims, so famous or so prominent in their day, a chasm appears to open between me and the time when I saw them in the plenitude of their strength and power-and I seem to be almost living in a world of different circumstances and different men.

I have said that this volume, which, if it be found acceptable, will be followed by a successor, is intended to be descriptive rather than didactic in object, and that I hope not so much to instruct as to entertain. But a few of my subjects may be thought to make a more sober claim, or to demand a more definite apology. The portrait of the Afghan Amir, with whom I was the only Englishman to stay at Kabul in a private and unofficial capacity, is the likeness of one of the most remarkable men of his time-a man who, had he lived in an earlier age and not been crushed, as he told me, like an earthenware pot between the rival forces of England and Russia, might have founded an Empire, and swept in a tornado of blood over Asia and even beyond it. The paper entitled "The Voice of Memnon," in the investigations with regard to which I was assisted by my old Oxford tutor, J. L. Strachan Davidson, afterwards Master of Balliol, may, I hope, be regarded as a positive contribution to historical and archaeological research. The "Singing Sands" is an essay on a subject which has always

greatly interested me-namely, the mysterious moaning and muttering of the sands in desert places, as a rule far removed from ordinary kenand which has never before been treated with the fulness which it deserves. When I began this essay I intended it merely to be a synopsis of the cases of musical or sounding sands of which I had previously heard descriptions or attempted the investigation. But, as I proceeded, the subject expanded, until I found myself producing a treatise which may possibly fill a modest place in the scientific literature of travel, while the story may still appeal to the dilettante reader by reason of its mystery and romance.

There are many other aspects of travel, apart from its incidents or experiences, which I should like to examine, but which must be deferred to a later volume. Among these is a study of the Philosophy of Travel-its character, history, purpose, methods, justification, and results; and a chapter or more on the Literature of Travel-a subject that, to the best of my knowledge, has never received attention save perhaps in the casual pages of a magazine.

Here, however, I conclude with a reflection that will certainly not offend by its seriousness. The joy of travel, while it is being pursued, lies in a good many things: in the observation of new peoples and scenes, in the making of discoveries, in the zest of sport or adventure, in the pleasures of companionship or the excitement of new acquaintance, even in the collection of often valueless ob