§ 1. My friends, the author and the publisher of this work, have called on me to write a preface to it. I confess to a strong interest in the book, which I have seen through the press from first to last, during Captain Gill's absence on duty in the Levant. That is, indeed, an office which nature does not easily permit to be done by deputy; and I am told that I have left some of his flowers only planted, when they ought to have flaunted, and his banners to flatter when they ought to flutter, whilst I have made his bells to twinkle when they only tinkled.

But my interest in the journey which the book relates began long before the book was even an embryo, and with the first hour of my acquaintance with its author. Three years and a half ago, he was indeed well known to me by name as a brother officer who had been an enterprising traveller on the Turkoman frontier of Persia, and a still more enterprising candidate for a metropolitan borough. But we had never met when, in the end of May 1876, Captain Gill visited me at the India Office, and announced that he was meditating an expedition, by way of Western China, into either Eastern Turkestan or Tibet.