Excerpt from Selections From the Travels and Journals Preserved in the Bombay Secretariat, 1916 The documents in this volume were brought together by me when I was Director of Records, Bombay Government. They have been buried in the archives of that Government or in old journals not easily accessible. To bring them to light and to preserve them "from the greedy and devouring jaws of oblivion" is the object of this work. They have been printed, letter for letter, exactly as they are in the original papers. Many words occur which are not easily accounted for, many names are spelt contrary to orthodox rules, many sentences war against the laws of grammar. It has been suggested that the text should be edited and the geographical information brought down to the present time. To alter the text would, however, destroy the old flavour of these travels and their main charm. It was proposed to give a list of errata, but after much labour it was abandoned as an impossible task. No two experts agreed as to what the list should contain. Under these circumstances, being but an amateur student of Central Asian geography, I sought the advice of Sir Thomas Holdich, one of the greatest living authorities on the subject, and he most kindly read the volume for me and came to the decision that it should be published exactly as it has been printed. He writes: "I am glad to find that so useful a series is now put together under one cover. They are all of them most valuable, although there is hardly any part of the regions dealt with that has not been recently either explored thoroughly or actually surveyed." If the lands which these adventurous pioneers first opened have now become familiar fields of enterprise, the freshness of the tales of their exploits still remains, for they are as simple, strong and masculine as the great men who wrote them. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.