FORGOTTEN ASIA.

Taranaki Daily News, 8 November 1919, Page 12

FORGOTTEN ASIA.

THE LAW OF THE STRONG. (London Times). There is a vast area of the world of which it might be said with truth that the surface of the moon itself is better known, and, after the fashion of great things neglected, it may one day very terribly revenge itself. For with every day in the modern world it becomes more and more apparent that one of man's greatest crimes is ignorance, remediable ignorance—that is, the kind of ignorance that hides its head in the sand and insists on blundering on its way in the face of all warnings of probabilities and history. This area is greater than a continent, for it is in itself the better half of two continents. The forces of Nature have hedged it about with inaccessibilities, and, lest these should be insufficient, knowing man's insatiable greed and curiosity have suffered it to lie under an imputation of uselessness and want of interest more effectual as a barrier than rivers or mountain peaks. Darkest Africa has ceased to be quite dark, but over Central Eurasia there hangs a curse, a Lethean veil like the dust clouds over an earthquake-buried city. It is little more than the Old World's graveyard, just a place of skulls and dry bones. Yet, did it never strike one that Nature rm„y just have laid it by? She has not forgotten it. She is a crafty dame, working with a line disregard of man, and while he cajoles himself that he is defeating her here, she is quietly proceeding to his undoing there. And she can wait. If empires have lain under the sand a hundred centuries, it no difference. Where they have been they can be Something of these ideas stirred in me when I found myself a traveller on the confines of these regions, and when I heard from men who had come from the midst of them, as men might come out of a dream and meet one on the roadway, the unbelievable tales of peoples remote and unknown.

From where .1 .pitched my small tent at night and lay with my camelmen around me jabbering by their thorn fire to the verce of the Arctic itself was one great desert whereon men were moving like cloud shadows across the sea, moved, but had no homes. They were descendants of men who had 'carved out Empires, nevertheless Were they only biding their time? For Central Asia has ever been the world's reservoir of conquerors. Men, hawl-bitten and hardliving, Ishmaels their lives itnrough, superstitious, indeed, but not vjith the soft idolatry of the plains peopVs: ignorant, perhaps, but not with the selfsufficient ignorance of civilised men who cannot conceive of any reasonable'' state of existence other thin their own. The history of India has been the history of the descents of these wild men. Again and lagain their hordes have poured through the passes of the Himalaya! and the Hindu Koosh to swpop into nihility the soft-living, self-satisfied people oi the hot plains, to found kingdoms and empires, onlv to grow enervated land luxurious in their turn and in their Lrn to be destroyed by fresh swarms! of mountain and desert-nurtured men. And as their lives have been through Irhn ages, so they are now. While I w)ilc and while you read somewhere in lib at remote immensity tribe is fighting yjlth tribe, brigands are looting, men am wiurdcring, wrfmen are shrieking, lost Wn are perishing, weird rites are .performing, caravans are marching, bazaars are buzzing, and merchants are trafficking, all as they did in the dars of the Croat Mogul, as in the days of Alexander and of Darius, and of Nebuchadnezzar. The only modern invention that has come their way is gunpowder.

TALES OF WILD JUSTICE. I had a fierce, Maek-ringlettcd little fellow, a man of about 45, to teach me one of the tongues of this region. His instruction followed no known methods of pedagogy, but, what was more interesting, consisted of a running storv of bis own life. He had had a brother wh» under forms of law jockeyed him out of a small inheritance. So one night he mounted his wife and babv on their only camel, having loaded the beast with dates and-a waterskin, and hid them in a nuilah not far from their camp. Then he crept to his brother's tent, and having found him asleep, with a small axe and his short sword cut off his head. He described to me minutely the, whole process, how he knelt and groped j n the dark, how still the camp was, and how the blood poured over his- hands. The deed done he ran nnd caught the camel, and flying day and night never drew rein until he had crossed the Suleiman Mountains and come safely into Rind. He told me of an incident which befel after a wedding. Two brothers had been suitors for the hand of the bride, and the unsuccessful one, full of jealousy, murdered his rival in the night. Thereupon he was brought before a council of the elders and the chief. The latter, who seems to have been a bit of a jurist in his way. stated that no public harm bad been done, hot that the oiilv sufferer was the widow, and she might take whatever course she likfrd. The girl immediately went to the prisoner and, bidding him kneel with his face to Mecca, drew out a knife nnd, in front of the assemblage, cut his throat.

Again, it happened that a young man married a girl whom lie loved very dearly, but being poor, left her in charge nl j an aunt, and went off to Seisfan to try to make some money as a laborer. As booh as he was gone the old woman turned traitor and introduced into her hut a would-be paramour of (he nride After this degradation the girl sought out her old grandfather, and bade him out off her head after the enstom of the tribe, for she had betrayed her husband's honor. The old man was blind, hut the girl herself directed his hand with the knife, and in few minutes she lay headless in his tent. Then the old man. blazing with senile rape, but cunning as a jackal through it all. crept from" his tent and felt, his way to the tent of the aunt. Creeping up to her in the dark, which was no dark to him. he hacked off her head before she could make a sound, and then found his wnv to the tent of the paramour and did the same by him. These tales and many like tlu-ni ibis half-wild man told me with the childlike ii'noeenee of a hoy relating the plunder of an orchard, his fierce little eyes blazing the while, but as to any consciousness of horror, entirely unashamed. And these were tales of everyday life, life in the wastelands of Asia. There they are 'onlv common-place. All about me I used to come across the evidences of a dead civilisation—remains of huts and villages and long, dry watercourses. The camel-men averred they were haunted, and would not go near them. But I used to think of them and of the buried cities found by Aurcl Stein and. of the' homeless millions of Tartars of the deserts and steppes that spread away to tlie north of me as far as the Polar ice, and wonder if they would ever come

j again to be, as they had been, a factor (in the life of the world. For life is to the strong, the virile, the men who look it in the face, and not to the sophists and idealists with their ill-digested theories and verbal entanglements, which, after nil, are only the concealment of their disinclination to face disagreeable facts.