you been born an Aurignacian before us lies a Chang-pa camp. hunter a small matter of 20,000 years ago,-you might have cursed him nearer home. Witness his oft-repeated portrait found of late by M. Casteret chiselled on the walls of the Cavern of Montespan. But enough of the kyang. A longer look, and, far out on the plain, four tiny white specks float into the glass's field. The specks move; they are goa -Tibetan gazelle. We have located our game for the morrow. The rest of that march across the plain is a nightmare. The storm is waxing, and the vicious sleet-squalls follow one another in ever more rapid succession, till we are almost too frozen to heed the world around us: the gaggle of bar-headed geese that, wary as ever, rise well out of range; or these low class friends from India, the ruddy sheldrakes, who, waddling on the frozen salt-flats, mournfully do croak in very keeping with their mournful setting; or the "blue" mountain hares as they pop up on their hams for a hurried look at us before they lope off up the mountain-side. But, by slow degrees, an isolated rock of fantastic shape looms ever nearer. Now we can distinguish the lop-sided cell clinging to the topmost pinnacle, wherein Stylites lives a life of prayer-a red-robed Stylites, with a roving eye and a band of female ministrants. And at long last we reach the brink of a shallow depression below the rock, and there Nomad Chang-pas these, on their way to summer grazinggrounds. Summer-save the mark! By their black tents, hung with yaks' tails, we pitch our camp. Our fuel is yaks' dung, with scanty roots dug laboriously from the earth for kindling. How poor and smoky is the resultant fire our cook's red eyes and loud laments do testify. Our water is melted snow. But, once camp is pitched, soon all is well. One is warm and fed and tired; and, with a night's rest ahead, what does man want more? Next morning we scale the base of the rock to spy out the land before setting out. And we can count some forty gazelle scattered about on the plain. The larger lots, of ten or a dozen, are probably females; so look out for the lots of two or three. Thereafter, having taken our bearings, we set to work. In I have vivid recollections of a day spent on such a plaina twelve-hours' day. We found three bucks at once. They remained in sight throughout the day. At dark we were back again close to our startingpoint-beat to the world. the interval we had tried to lessen the interval between us by every expedient known to man. Times without number had we wormed our way through gravel and sand as though the curse of the Serpent was upon us, had staged elaborate drives, or, abandoning artifice, had strolled openly across the plain, hoping to be mistaken for the guileless Chang-pa. All equally useless. That night a vision of white scuts, bobbing, bobbing, bobbing before me across an unending plain, haunted my dreams. The next day and the next I adopted different tactics: I lay down at extreme range and fired. The mark was a beast about twice the size of a hare-a beast whose greyish-white colouring blended exactly with his background, and who was never still. The wind blew and the sand drove. The results on these days were no better. On the fourth day the luck changed. That day we topped a low ridge, to find a party of bucks in the middle of a minor plain beyond. Behind us lay the major plain, and in the ridge were two depressions leading thereto. Plainly, if the bucks were disturbed, they would try to break back through one or other of these dips to regain the major plain. We made our plans accordingly, and all went well. Soon I saw them heading for the left-hand dip, and I got there just in time. The result: two good heads and victory complete-a hardearned victory. Subsequently I have met many more gazelle -some, confiding creatures asking to be shot; but I here give first impressions. Tibetan antelope country differs only in degree from the country wherein we have been hunting the gazelle. The " floor is perhaps two thou sand feet higher; for now we are up on the Chang-Tangthe great uninhabited Tibetan plateau where you may go for weeks on end without meeting man. Gently sloping valleys, wide and shallow, shut in by parallel lines of rounded shale-bluffs; a grey drab landscape, lifeless and undistinguished; and the wind, above all, the wholly indescribable wind-such is the antelope country. With the Everest Expedition fresh in all memories, the heights that the antelope hunter works at make poor reading; at most one reaches something above nineteen thousand feet. But, believe me, if you have known that wind and liked it—well, then, you can e'en afford to smile should Fate in the hereafter consign you to the lower and frigid hell. Yet there is a fascination about the country -a very strange fascination; of the sort, I think, that Kipling had in mind when he talked of something "lost behind the ranges." Ahead, the map— detailed and accurate as know it-ceases, to be replaced by wavy lines that mark the route-reports of hunter and explorer. And man is not. The lonely peoples of this lonely land are the antelope and the wild yak and the grey Tibetan wolf. We have reached the world's end. we And pantholops himself-the Tibetan antelope is an entertaining beast. His appearance is odd. His nose has a swollen inflated appearance, due, they say, to the special apparatus horns. Thus, at rest, he is which he carries to assist his often hard to find. Again, he breathing at great altitudes; is much troubled by bot-flies while his horns, long, slender, in summer. And when a botand slightly curved, are set fly approaches the herd, the forward at an unusual angle. individuals thereof scatter and Indeed, thanks to these peculi- run like mad, to reunite an arities, it is possible to imagine hour or so later in some totally that pantholops-seen in profile different place. This, when -has a faintly unicornish look, on which account some hold that we have in him that one horned Indian beast' which bulks so large in the writings of Ktesias and brother classics of zoological mindin other words, the unicorn of antiquity. Therein, however, I cannot agree. As we all know, the unicorn-naturally a most ferocious beast-has one fatal weakness: his heart melts at the sight of a virgin. Discretion, then, is cast to the wind. He must lay his head upon her lap to gaze up into her eyes. The sort of chance, in fact, for which the pothunter waits a lifetime. And, though not plentiful in Western Tibet, virgins doubtless do exist. Yet who ever met the antelope hunter who has used this method with success? Nobody. you are reaching the climax of a lengthy stalk, is apt to be annoying. Contrariwise, where there is one antelope there are like to be many. Nor is he particularly wary. Wolves and wild dogs he knows and fears. But of man his experience is limited to the occasional nomad, with his gaspipe effective up to fifty yards, and, in parts, the even more occasional sportsman. So much so that I have stalked and shot an antelope out of a herd whereof the other members, heedless of the shot, remained lying peacefully round their dead companion till they smelt the taint of blood. We have not yet completed the programme outlined on the opening page. We have still to hunt the goat-antelopesthe serow and the takin-and also the little four-horned antelope in the grassy glades of the forests of the plains. But we have been overlong with their predecessors, so of the three we must be content with the serow. Indeed, as to the takin In sober reality three factors tend to make antelope hunting difficult. For the first of these the antelope himself is not responsible; it is, once more, the absolute openness of the terrain. For the rest, the of gnu-like horns-I have antelope has two tiresome habits. He has a trick of scraping out a circular trough in the sand for shelter, wherein he lies invisible but for his nothing to tell. For he is a most recondite beast, and the sportsmen who have shot him could probably be numbered on the fingers of one hand. In the nearer Himalaya-a less splendid-super-pheasants country of stupendous valleys narrow and deep, of pine forest and rhododendron thickets, of precipices and snow-the serow makes his home. You happen on him only by chance. He never quite leaves cover, and has no fixed feeding-places. And when at last you meet, there is a snort, and your serow has silently vanished both,-and the pine-marten and the gooral and the musk-deer and the black Himalayan bear. All the time you know that the serow is there somewhere in the forest around you. The day will come when, yourself unseen, you see him in the flesh before you. Take a good. look at him-you may never have another chance. Large away: a solitary Boojum-like and donkey-like, with short person. But while you are a-hunting of your Snark, you will happen on much else that is worth the seeing; maybe the scarce and wary tragopan, splendid in his crimson and grey, surely the moonal only curved horns, big ears, black face and bristling main, rough reddish coat and splay hoofs, he is surprisingly like the devil. I think you will agree that you have made an entertaining friend. THE FOREIGN OFFICE SERVICES. BY A. C. WRATISLAW, C.B., C.M.G., C.B.E. II. THE CONSULAR SERVICE. To find the earliest record of a Consul in history we have to go back as far as the Peloponnesian War, when Alcibiades, having quarrelled with his own people, the Athenians, and taken refuge with the Spartans, is represented by Thucydides as claiming consideration from his hosts on the ground that he and his father before him had acted as Consul (πpóğevos 1) for Sparta at Athens, and had succoured natives of that country. The office seems to have to have been common amongst the States of ancient Greece, but to have fallen into disuse with the spread of Roman domination, when, the whole civilised world being under one Government, there was no call for a functionary whose duty it was to look after foreigners. The Consul does not reappear until the Middle Ages, when the Venetians, the great traders of the period, began to appoint commercial agents in foreign countries to watch over their trade and protect their traders, and other nations soon followed their example. England, isolated and commercially insignificant, lagged behind in the race for trade, and it was not until 1485 that Richard III. (who, when not indulging his hobby of exterminating nephews in the Tower, showed himself to be an enlightened and progressive ruler) appointed Lorenzo Strozzi, a merchant of Florence, to be the Consul of the English merchants at Pisa and in the adjacent countries. To this appointment His Majesty was moved "by observing from the practice of other nations the advantage of having a magistrate for settling disputes amongst them." The King delegated to Strozzi the power of determining all disputes between English subjects in those parts, and doing all things appertaining to the office of a Consul. Towards the end of Elizabeth's reign a Charter was granted to a Company, entitled "the Governor and Company of Merchants of England trading into the Levant Seas," giving it the monopoly of trade in the dominions of the Grand Signor and the Eastern Mediterranean, which Charter was confirmed by James I. and confirmed and extended by 1 The word "pótevos is still that employed by the modern Greeks to represent "Consul" in its present-day signification. |