“It’s the last geographical secret left unriddled,” he said, and now he spoke seriously. “Well, perhaps not quite the last. I’m told there’s still something to be done with the southern tributaries of the sss. Mornington, you know, believes there’s a chance of finding some of the Inca people still dwelling in the unexplored upper glens. But all the rest have gone. Since the beginning of the century we’ve made a clean sweep of the jolly old mysteries that made the world worth living in. We have been to both the Poles, and to Lhasa, and to the Mountains of the Moon. We haven’t got to the top of Everest yet, but we know what it is like. Mecca and Medina are as stale as Bournemouth. We know that there’s nothing very stupendous in the Brahmaputra gorges. There’s little left for a man’s imaginat
