Pilgrim of the Himalayas

People, at the present day, are warmly interested in all that is to be learned concerning Tibet. She remains as of old a standing mystery. If you go to India, the adjoining country, you seem as far away as ever from reaching or understanding her. And yet, Calcutta itself is distant not two hundred miles from the Tibetan border. You may ascend, moreover, to Darjeeling, the hill-station nearest to the frontier; but the forbidden land shows there only as a chimerical region impenetrably locked away from exploration by gigantic chevaux de frise of mountain peaks, placidly combing the horizon. Now, there at Darjeeling, burial place of my ancestor, Alexander Csoma de Koros, the Szekely discoverer of Tibetan Buddhism, an awesome sentinel, a five-headed giant, is the first thing to attract the attention. It may not be generally known, that in 1838 there were deposited by Alexander Csoma de Koros at the Royal Asiatic Society no fewer than 339 native-printed Tibetan volumes. The strange phases of Buddhism, both philosophical and popular, have developed in those mystic and unknown fastnesses beyond the Himalayas.