"But they made me out a sinister (though clumsy) agent of Imperialist intrigue, a kind of shady Lawrence; and I could not help feeling pleased that anyone should take me so seriously."
"Are you so easily turned from your design? Did you not call this a glorious expedition? And wherefore was it glorious? Not because the way was smooth and placid as a southern sea, but because, at every new incident, your fortitude was to be called forth, and your courage exhibited; because danger and death surrounded it, and these you were to brave and overcome . . . Oh! Be men, or be more than men . . . This ice is not made of such stuff as your hearts may be; it is mutable, and cannot withstand you, if you say that it shall not."
"We were never short of food; but, with the exception of perhaps an hour after the evening meal, there was no single moment in the day when we would not have eaten, and eaten with the greatest relish, anything that appeared remotely edible. Dog biscuits would have been welcome. A plate of cold tapioca pudding would have vanished in a flash. Your dust-bins, had we come across them, would not have been inviolate."
"The [unidentified feral donkeys] are known to Tibet and Ladakh as 'kyang', to the Turkis of Sinkiang as 'kulan,' to China (always charmingly vague about natural history) as 'wild horses.'"
"The Tartar men have hats different from other peoples' whose form we cannot clearly describe."
Ex Libris Kirkland (formerly known as "I Just Read . . .") is where I quote, at length, something I found interesting in my reading. The selected passages might be funny, or sad, or true, or false, or irritating, but they all bear thinking about - or at least writing down.
