Among the Coreans the tiger is much admired and much feared. They believe that bad men and evil spirits can turn themselves into tigers, and they have many strange stories of these tiger-men magicians. Thus they say that once a man was travelling through a lonely and desolate region. Toward evening he was surprised to come upon a fine house. Entering and asking shelter he found an old man living alone there. He felt sure things were wrong and that the old man was a tiger-magician. He was right; it was the king of all the tiger-magicians. If he had shown his fear he would have been torn to pieces, but he pretended to be brave. When the old man asked him who he was and where he was going, he boldly declared he was hunting for tiger-magicians, of whom he meant to kill two hundred, that he might carry their skins to the king. When the old man—who you remember was king of the tiger-magicians—heard this bold talk he was terribly scared. Secretly he called his subjects together and told them of their danger. They advised him to kill two hundred tiger-magicians who were in jail and give their skins to the hunter, begging him to spare the rest. The traveller gladly accepted, and taking the skins sold them for much money. This man had a cowardly neighbor who heard the story and determined to try the same trick. When he reached the tiger-king’s palace, however, he got scared, the tigers knew his fraud, and falling upon him they killed him.
Few countries are naturally so difficult of access as Tibet. It is a lofty plateau. To reach it from any side frightful mountains must be passed. Not only is the country itself difficult to reach, but the Tibetans do not like strangers. They do everything in their power to keep white men out of the country. Few travellers of our race have ever been to the heart of Tibet. Recently the American traveller, W. W. Rockhill, has visited that country and written interestingly of it, and later Walter Savage Landor claims to have had exciting adventures there. But the journey that is best known and has been most talked of was made more than fifty years ago by two French missionaries named Huc and Gabet.
Starting from China these gentlemen traversed Mongolia and Tatary and penetrated to the sacred Tibetan city of Lhassa. They returned to China over a different route. It was a fearful journey. The road led along the side of vast cliffs, over raging torrents where the bridges were composed of chains hung from bank to bank with boards laid crosswise of them, through snowdrifts, and over sheets of glacier ice.