M. Notovitch in his Vie inconnue cle Jesus-Christ was

pure fiction, I thought it fair to give him the benefit of a doubt, and to suggest that he might possibly have been hoaxed by Buddhist priests from whom he professed to have gathered his information about Issa, i. e. Jesus. (Isa is the name for Jesus used by Mohammedans.) Such things have happened before. Inquisitive travellers have been supplied with the exact information which they wanted by Mahatmas and other religious authorities, whether in Tibet or India, or even among Zulus and Red Indians. It seemed a long cry to Leh in Ladakh, and in throwing out in an English review this hint that M. Notovitch might have been hoaxed, I did not think that the Buddhist priests in the monastery of Himis, in Little Tibet, might be offended by my remarks. After having read, however, the foregoing article by Mr. Douglas, I feel bound most humbly to apologize to the excellent Lamas of that monastery for having thought them capable of such frivolity. After the com- plete refutation, or, I should rather say, annihilation,
1 Nineteenth Century, August, 1896.
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of M. Notovitch by Mr. Douglas, there does not seem to be any further necessity — nay, any excuse for trying to spare the feelings of that venturesome Russian traveller. He was not hoaxed, but he tried to hoax us. Mr. Douglas has sent me the original papers, containing the depositions of the Chief Priest of the monastery of Himis and of his interpreter, and I gladly testify that they entirely agree with the extracts given in the article, and are signed and sealed by the Chief Lama and by Mr. Joldan, formerly Postmaster of Ladakh, who acted as interpreter be- tween the priests and Mr. Douglas. The papers are dated Himis Monastery, Little Tibet, June 3, 1&95- I ought perhaps to add that I cannot claim any particular merit in having proved the Vie incownue de Jesus-Christ— that is, the Life of Christ taken from MSS. in the monasteries of Tibet — to be a mere fiction. I doubt whether any Sanskrit or Pali scholar, in fact any serious student of Buddhism, was taken in by M. Notovitch. One might as well look for the waters of Jordan in the Brahmaputra as for a Life of Christ in Tibet.
SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE By Mr. J. A. Douglas.
Five and a half years have elapsed since the fore- croing paper was written in the little wood-panelled guest-chamber of Himis Monastery in Western Tibet. The monastery and adjacent settlement are built on the western side of a rocky pass which climbs
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upwards to the eternal snows. The pass above the Buddhist settlement is the haunt of numerous ibexi which are tamer than the rest of their kind ; and higher up I saw a snow leopard, a rare animal even in this trans-Himalayan region. At the foot of the Himis valley flow the head -waters of the mighty Indus, which, after a roundabout route by way of the Chitral border, sweeps through the plains of the Punjab and the hot, low-lying country of Sind into the Indian Ocean. Remarkable and weird as are the surroundings of this great centre of Lamaism, or Western Buddhism, the interior of the Himis Monastery is still more fascinating on account of its dissimilarity to anything that the European who has not previously visited a Buddhist country has ever seen before. The few days that I spent at, and in the neighbourhood of Himis, were among the most interesting of my life hitherto, and even now it sometimes seems like a visit to another planet — as a journey to Mars, for instance, in response to an invitation forwarded by Dr. Nikola Tesla’s wireless mega-telephone. The marvels of the Buddhist temple, its strange points of resemblance to a Roman Catholic cathedral of Southern Europe, the wonderful pictures and carvings, and the grotesque images occupied my attention very fully. There was one terribly graphic picture of the horrible tortures of the damned, which impressed itself upon my mind on account of the fiendish ingenuity of the conceptions. The huge yellow, savage dogs, chained up near the temple, were in keeping with their surroundings, though I succeeded, after repeated appeals to the appetite of one of these Tibetan hounds, in making friends
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with him to the extent of allowing himself to be stroked. Even then there was something uncanny about it, for this animal did not express his fellow feeling by wagging his tail, as any ordinary canine would have done, but purred like a cat, or rather like a dozen cats in chorus.
In fact, there were so many interesting things to occupy my attention that I deferred the duty of chronicling the results of my investigations to the last evening of my stay.
Much rubbish has been written by travellers regarding the exclusiveness and hostility of Buddhist Lamas. I saw none of it ; on the contrary, I was received everywhere with quiet, gentle courtesy. It was understood that I had come on a somewhat important mission to the Chief Lama, which might have accounted for mere toleration; but I found more than that, and from several Lamas met with real friendliness. This has always been my experience with the peoples .of Western and Central Asia, that if an Englishman treats them with unsuspicious and frank geniality, they are very ready to reciprocate the feeling, and some are indeed flattered by the exhibition of friendship on the part of a European. Perhaps I have been exceptionally lucky. All the same, I believe that a great deal of the trouble that arises between Europeans and Orientals in unbeaten tracks is due to a want of consideration, of common courtesy, on the part of the former.
There was one young Lama, who seemed to be a kind of secretary to the Chief Lama, who was especially helpful and hospitable. He knew a little Hindustani, and by that means we could hold some
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kind of conversation without the aid of an interpreter, and he seemed to be better educated from our stand- point than the older monks. In examining the library of the monastery, with its MSS. on wooden rollers and between wooden boards, the intelligence of this young Tibetan was very helpful to me, and with the assistance of my interpreter the task of inspection was rendered easy.
Early in the evening before my departure my secretary-friend brought into my little chamber a tankard of ’tchang, or Tibetan beer, a present from the Chief Lama, which was not altogether unwelcome after some weeks of enforced total abstinence. ’Tchang; has a slightly acid flavour, but is not at all un- palatable, and it is not too much to presume that this beer is free from arsenical impurities. My visitor departed after a brief conversation ; and I sat down at my camp-table to write an account of my investi- gations. It was in the small hours of the morning that I finished my labours, and after a few hours’ sleep I dispatched my article to the editor of the Nineteenth Century, and the signed depositions of the Lama and of my interpreter, with an explanatory letter, to my revered friend, Professor Max Muller at Oxford. These were given to a moon-faced Tibetan dak-runner to hand to the postal officials at Leh, and I must confess to grave feelings of anxiety lest they should fail to reach their destination.
It can hardly be wondered at that I was anxious to send news to England of the results of my investi- gations at the earliest possible date, especially as the proof of the forgery was complete ; but when further inquiries in Western Tibet produced other striking
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instances of M. Notovitch’s marvellous inventive powers, I was inclined to regret that I had not delayed dispatching these packets to Europe.
The good mission-people of Kashmiri and Ladakh, who first attempted to expose M. Notovitch, did that Russian adventurer good service by denying that he had ever visited Leh or Himis at all. There is no doubt whatever that M. Notovitch spent one night at Himis, and that ten days later (or within a fortnight after he had broken his leg, according to his own account) he walked into the mission dispensary at Leh, and asked to see Dr. Karl Marks, whom he informed that he was suffering from toothache. Dr. Marks made an entry of the date of the visit in his diary. The Tibetan who engaged some carriers for