SECRET CITIES

Dominion, Volume 14, Issue 73, 20 December 1920, Page 8

SECRET CITIES

The veil of mysPery which has for o.fiiituries hung over the secret city of Shcshuan, north of Fez, in Morocco, is on the point of being rent. Spanish troops may to-day enter this Inst stronghold of Moorish Mohoinmcdanism, writes T. 0. Bridges in the London' ' Daily Mail." Secret cities are becoming so scarce Shut very soon they will exist only in the pages of boys' stories, yet within the memory of many still alive there were half a doyen places which fully deserved the nanie^ Mecca, for instance, was still El Harara, the inviolable, and the Western world rang with wonder when Burton succeeded in first penetrating its mysteries. Timbuctoo, the triangular city of the Southern Sahara, was long but quite wrongly mipposcd to be the capital of a great negro empire, and wonderful but erroneous stories were rclai'ed of its vast population and immense wealth. To-day it is almost as well known as Accra or Zanzibar, Peking itself, though it had a population of over a million, was little known until invaded by the French and English Allied forces in 1860, while the secret city, tjie Yuen Ming Yuen, was absolutely terra incognito. This great area, covering 60,000 acres, which had been preserved inviolate for conhmes. was then sacked and burned. '.Hie booty taken was estimated to be worth .£1,500,000, while .£2,000,000 worth was destroyed. Lhassa, though visited by M. Hue in IB4G. remained a secreti city until a much later dato. It was not 7. Younglnisband's pnnitivo expedition marched' thero during the present century that its privacy was finally destroyed. To-day there is perhaps only .one city on t'ho earth's surface which still remains to bo described, oven from that the veil of mystery will probably be raised shortly. This is the Golden City of South America. which Elizabethan adventures sought in vain under various names. It lies among tlio mountains of Matro Grosso, illiat westernmost and leastknown provinco of Brazil, and is protected by natural barriers very difficult to overooino. , , , It was an English P.A. v>flicer lent by the British Government to Bolivia to <iOiimit her frontiers who first_ found proofs of the existonce of tins city, and it is tho samo officer who, under th? auspices of the Brazilian Government, is now leading an expedition to locate it exactly.