For many Westerners Tibet is wrapped in an atmosphere of mystery. The "Land of
Snows" is for them the country of the unknown, the fantastic and the impossible. What
superhuman powers have not been ascribed to the various kinds of lames, magicians,
sorcerers, necromancers and practitioners of the occult who inhabit those high tablelands,
and whom both nature and their own deliberate purpose have so splendidly isolated from
the rest of the world? And how readily are the strangest legends about them accepted as
indisputable truths! In that country plants, animals and human beings seem to divert to
their own purposes the best established laws of physics chemistry, physiology and even
plain common sense.