father, stalwart Henga and his Sake bowmen, Philos and his pretty wife and blue-eyed baby, crippled Paulos, the fiendish Shamans and the murderous brown Sakae are real living people, I cannot pretend to say, any more than I can tell whether pine-fringed Aornos, the snow-peaks of Saghar Mor, or the gloomy Shaman citadel, with its red-hot trapdoor, exist outside Lake’s brain. All I can say is that he has never told me anything but the truth all the years I have known him. Payindah I remember well, while Wrexham I met several times in 1917, and both are very accurately described.

If the story is true, then I cannot say how the letters and the manuscript reached us, save that, from the vernacular inscriptions on the original wrapping which Ethel Wheeler sent me, it has clearly been passed from hand to hand by Indian merchants on the Chinese trade route. Perhaps Lake and his friends found the missing camels, and built up a sufficient store of water at stages across the desert to enable one or two determined men to make a flying journey out and back to hand over their letters to some Indian trader. But he has given no details as to how he proposed to get their letters home.

[xi]If Lake’s record is genuine, then I envy him intensely, and hope that it will be many, many years before any explorer, even of the type of genial Sir Aurel Stein, penetrates to Sakaeland, for it and its people seem to me far too pleasing for one to wish them spoilt by the contact of twentieth-century civilization.

[xi]

If, on the other hand, it is merely an invention of Lake’s to while away monotonous evenings during his explorations in unknown Central Asia, where he certainly is, then I hope that his readers will find it as interesting and realistic as I and others here have done.

“Ganpat”

Ganpat

Staff College Quetta, Baluchistan 1st January, 1923

Staff College Quetta, Baluchistan

Quetta, Baluchistan

1st January, 1923

[xii]

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