THE 17,000,000 square miles of Asia are divided into five unequal parts.

First of all, and nearest to the Arctic, lies the great plain which I have already mentioned when I spoke of Russia. Next come the central highlands.Then the high plateaus of the south-west.Next the peninsulas of the south;and finally the peninsulas of the east.As I have already described the great Arctic plain, I can continue at once with the second part of the program.

The central Asiatic highlands begin rather mildly with a series of low mountain chains which form more or less parallel lines running invariably from east to west or from south-east to northwest, but never from north to south. In many places, however, the crust of the earth has been badly broken and twisted and folded and tortured by great volcanic upheavals.Thus we get the irregular contours of the Yablonoi Mountains east of Lake Baikal, the Khangai and Altai Mountains west of Baikal, and the Tien-shan Mountains just east of the Balkash Lake.To the west of these mountains are the plains.To the east lies the high plateau of Mongolia where the Gobi desert is situated, the home of the ancestors of Genghis Khan.

West of the Gobi desert lies the slightly lower plateau of east Turkestan. It is the valley of the Pamir River, which aimlessly loses itself in the nearby lake of Lob-nor, famous through the discoveries of the Swedish travller, Sven Hedin.On the map the Pamir looks like a small desert brook.Yet it is one and a half times as long as the Rhine.For remember, Asia is the country of the gigantic proportions.

Just north of Turkestan there is a gap between the Altai and Tien-shan Mountains. It is the land mentioned on our atlases as Jungaria, and it leads up to the Khirgiz steppes.It consists of an enormous valley which was the gateway through which all the desert tribes, the Huns, the Tartars and the Turks, started upon their marauding expeditions against Europe.

South of the Tarim basin, due south-west to be more accurate, the landscape becomes exceedingly complicated. The Tarim basin is cut off from the valley of the Oxus or the Amu-Darya(which loses itself in the Aral Sea)by a high plateau, the Plateau of Pamir, also called the Roof of the World.The Pamir Mountains, already known to the Greeks, were on the direct route from Asia Minor and Mesopotamia to China.They were a good deal of a barrier but could be crossed by a number of mountain passes.These passes average between 15,000 and 16,000 feet in height.Remember that Mount Ranier is only a little over 14,000 feet high, Mont Blanc a little over 15,000 feet.Then you get some idea of a mountainous territory where the passes lie at a higher altitude than the highest mountain tops of America and Europe, where the mountains themselves therefore dwarf anything we ourselves have to offer in the shape of crinkled globe-crust.

But the Pamir plateau is merely a beginning. It is a sort of terminal from which the big mountain-ranges radiate in all directions.There is the Tien-shan range, which I have already mentioned, running northward.There is the Kuen-lun range, which cuts Tibet off from the Tarim basin.There is the Karakoram, which is short but very, very steep;and finally we have the Himalaya range, which in the south cuts Tibet off from India and which breaks all records for“highest above sea-level”,with altitudes of more than 29,000 feet or over five and one half miles, reached by both Everest and Kanchanjanga.

As for the plateau of Tibet, with an average height of 15,000 feet, it is indeed the most elevated country in the whole world. The Bolivian plateau in South America is between 11,000 and 13,000 feet high but it is practically uninhabited, whereas Tibet, which covers an area equal to two-fifths of that of Russia, has a population of almost two million people.

This shows to what extremes of air-pressure the human body can accustom itself. Those Americans who have crossed the Rio Grande know the discomforts they experience when they are allowed to spend a few days in the delightful Mexican capital which is only 7400 feet high.They are warned beforehand not to hustle as they do at home, and to take it easy until their heart ceases to pump like a sledgehammer whenever they walk half a block.The Tibetans not only walk a hundred blocks in a day but they carry everything the country needs on their backs across mountain passes which are quite frequently too steep for mules and horses but which are the only connection they have with the outside world.

Although Tibet is about sixty miles further south than the semi-tropical island of Sicily, the snow remains on the ground for at least six months of every year and the thermometer not infrequently goes down to-30°. Nevertheless, this high plateau with its terrible wind storms, raging across the bleak salt-bogs of the south, its dust and snow and general discomforts of living, has become the home of an exceedingly curious religious experiment.

During the seventh century, Tibet was merely a principality like so many other Asiatic states, ruled over by a king who lived in Lhasa, the City of God. One of these kings was converted to Buddhism by his Chinese wife.Since that day, Buddhism has flourished in Tibet as nowhere else in Asia.Lhasa is to the Buddhists what Rome is to the Catholics, or Mecca to the Mohammedans-the holy of holies.

But Tibet has been a bulwark of Buddhism which has been of great help in preserving that religion against the attacks of the Mohammedans from the west and the pagan creeds of southern India. Its uninterrupted success may in part have been the result of a very extraordinary arrangement which that church provides for an almost automatic continuation of the institution of the Buddhistic papacy.

The Buddhists have always believed in the reincarnation of the soul. It follows that the soul of Gotama himself must continue somewhere on this earth.All that was necessary was to find him and make him head of all the faithful.Now it is well to remember that Christianity which is so much younger than Buddhism, has a great many idea and institutions in common with its old neighbor and rival.Pious Buddhists were in the habit of eschewing the Devil and the flesh long before John the Baptist retired into the wilderness.Their monks practiced celibacy, poverty and chastity ages before Saint Simeon climbed to the top of his pillar in the valley of the Nile.They also exercised high political functions.During the reign of Kublai Khan, the grandson of Genghis Khan and an ardent convert to Buddhism, the abbots of an important Tibetan monastery were recognized as the political rulers of all Tibet.In return for this favor, the new Dalai Lama, in his quality of spiritual over-lord of the whole Buddhist world, officially crowned the Tartar Khan Emperor of Mongolia, just as Pope Leo　Ⅲhad crowned Charlemagne.In order to keep the dignity of Lama(or superior spiritual ruler)in the same family, the first Lamas broke the rules of celibacy and remained married until they had begotten a son to succeed them.But during the fourteenth century a great reformer arose among the Tibetan monks, a sort of Martin Luther of Buddhism.When he died, the old monastic orders had been reestablished in all their former rigor and their head, the Dalai Lama,“the Lama as big as the ocean”,was once more recognized as their spiritual shepherd by one-quarter of all the people on earth.He was to be assisted in his task by the Pantshen Lama or Glorious Teacher, who was to be a sort of vice-pope.The method of succession, which was then introduced, has never been changed.

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.

As for the mountain-ranges which protect Tibet against the neighbors 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 prints that they are better known and to a larger number of people than the mountains of Vermont. For our time, which loves records, has cast an envious aye upon the last remaining mountain top of any importance that remains unscaled.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.It has defied all attempts of man to reach the summit.The last of the great Everest expeditions in 1924 got to within a few hundred yards of the top.Two men volunteered to make the final climb.Armed with oxygen apparatus, they bade farewell to the rest of the party.They were last observed when they were within 600 feet of the final pinnacle.After that, they were never seen again.Mount Everest remains unconquered.

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 along the sea-shore.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 more 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.

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 sunshine and rain to destroy them and reduce them to flat country, but the forces of Nature, hostile to rock formations, are busily engaged.Already the Himalayas are cut into irregular pieces 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 labor of disintegration along at a merry clip.

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.Some of these, like Nepal, the home of the famous Gurkhas, who have retained a certain degree of independence, are four times as large as the republic of Switzerland and have almost 6,000,000 inhabitants.Others, like Kashmir(where our grandmothers got their shawls and where the English recruit their famous Sikh regiments),which is now part of the British domains, have an area of some 85,000 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 the way the Rhine runs down from the Alps, or the Missouri runs down from the Rockies.Instead they take their rise behind the main chain of the Himalayas.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 for a fact, 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 is death.