LAST SECRET CITY.
The veil o£ mystery which has for centuries hung over the secret city of Shefchuan, north of Fex, in Morroco, is on the point of being rent. Spanish troops may to-day enter this last stronghold of Moorish Mohammedanism (writes T. C. Bridges in the London Daily Mail). Secret cities are becoming so scarce that very soon they will exist only in the pages of boy’s stories, yet within the memory of many still alive .there were half a dozen places which fully deserved the name. Mecca, for instance, was still El Haram, 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 supposed to bfi the capital of great negro empire, and wonderful but enormous stories were related of its vast population and immense wealth. Today 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, the Yuen Ming Yuen, was absolutely terrar incognita. This great area, covering 60,000 acres, which had been preserved inviolate for centuries, was then sacked and burned. The booty taken was estimate! to be worth £],500,000, while £2.000,000 worth was destroyed. Lhassa, though violated by Mr. Hue in 1846, remained a secret city until a much later date. It was not until Younghusband’s punitive expedition marched there during the present century that its privacy was finally destroyed. To-day there is perhaps only one city on the earth’s surface which still remains to be described, and even from that the veil of mystery will probably be raised shortly. This is the Golden City of South America, which Elizabethan adventurers sought in vain under various names. It lies among the mountains of Matto Grosso, that westermost and least-known province of Brazil, and is protected by natural barriers very difficult to overcome. It was an English B.A. officer lent by the British Government to Bolivia to delimit her frontiers who first found proofs of the existence of this city, and it is the same officer who, under the auspices of the Brazilian Government, is now leading an expedition to locate it exactly.
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Taranaki Daily News, 8 January 1921, Page 10
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386LAST SECRET CITY. Taranaki Daily News, 8 January 1921, Page 10
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