I reached Gyantse on July 12. The advance to Lhasa began on the 14th. As might be expected from the tone of the delegates, peace negociations fell through. The Lhasa Government seemed to be chaotic and conveniently inaccessible. The Dalai Lama remained a great impersonality, and the four ShapÉs or Councillors disclaimed all responsibility. The Tsong-du, or National Assembly, who virtually governed the country, had sent us no communication. The delegates' attitude of non possumus was not assumed. Though these men were the highest officials in Tibet, they could not guarantee that any settlement they might make with us would be faithfully observed. There seemed no hope of a solution to the deadlock except by absolute militarism. If the Tibetans had fought so stubbornly at Gyantse, what fanaticism might we not expect at Lhasa! Most of us thought that we could only reach the capital through the most awful carnage. We pictured the 40,000 monks of Lhasa hurling themselves defiantly on our camp. We saw them mown down by Maxims, lanes of dead. A hopeless struggle, and an ugly page in military history. Still, we must go on; there was no help for it. The blood of these people was on their own heads.

We left Gyantse on the 14th, and plunged into the unknown towards Lhasa, which we had reason to believe lay in some hidden valley 150 miles to the north, beyond the unexplored basin of the Tsangpo. Every position on the road was held. The Karo la had been enormously strengthened, and was occupied by 2,000 men. The enemy's cavalry, which we had never seen, were at Nagartse Jong. Gubshi, a dilapidated fort, only nineteen miles on the road, was held by several hundred. The Tibetans intended to dispute the passage of the Brahmaputra, and there were other strong positions where the path skirted the Kyi-chu for miles beneath overhanging rocks, which were carefully prepared for booby-traps. We had to launch ourselves into this intensely hostile region and compel some people—we did not know whom—to attach their signatures and seals to a certain parchment which was to bind them to good behaviour in the future, and a recognition of obligations they had hitherto disavowed.

Our force consisted of eight companies of the 8th Gurkhas, five companies of the 32nd Pioneers, four companies of the 40th Pathans, four companies of the Royal Fusiliers, two companies of Mounted Infantry, No. 30 British Mountain Battery, a section of No. 7 Native Mountain Battery, 1st Madras Sappers and Miners, machine-gun section of the Norfolks, and details.[14] The 23rd Pioneers, to their disgust, were left to garrison Gyantse. The transport included mule, yak, donkey, and coolie corps.

The first three marches to Ralung were a repetition of the country between Kalatso and Gyantse—in the valley a strip of irrigated land, green and gold, with alternate barley and mustard fields between hillsides bare and verdureless save for tufts of larkspur, astragalus, and scattered yellow poppies. To Gyantse one descends 2,000 feet from a country entirely barren of trees to a valley of occasional willow and poplar groves; while from Gyantse, as one ascends, the clusters of trees become fewer, until one reaches the treeless zone again at Ralung (15,000 feet). The last grove is at Gubchi.

I quote some notes of the march from my diary:

'July 14.—The villages by the roadside are deserted save for old women and barking dogs. The Tibetans came down from the Karo la and impressed the villagers. Many have fled into the hills, and are hiding among the rocks and caves. Our pickets fired on some to-night. Seeing their heads bobbing up and down among the rocks, they thought they were surrounded. Many of the fugitives were women. Luckily, none were hit. They were brought into camp whimpering and salaaming, and became embarrassingly grateful when it was made clear to them that they were not to be tortured or killed, but set free. They were called back, however, to give information about grain, and thought their last hour had come.'

'July 16.—All the houses between Gubchi and Ralung are decorated with diagonal blue, red, and white stripes, characteristic of the Ning-ma sect of Buddhists. They remind me of the walls of Damascus after the visit of the German Emperor. Heavy rain falls every day. Last night we camped in a wet mustard-field. It is impossible to keep our bedding dry.'

From Ralung the valley widens out, and the country becomes more bleak. We enter a plateau frequented by gazelle. Cultivation ceases. The ascent to the Karo Pass is very gradual. The path takes a sudden turn to the east through a narrow gorge.

On the 17th we camped under the Karo la in the snow range of Noijin Kang Sang, at an elevation of 1,000 feet above Mont Blanc. The pass was free of snow, but a magnificent glacier descended within 500 feet of the camp. We lay within four miles of the enemy's position. Most of us expected heavy fighting the next morning, as we knew the Tibetans had been strengthening their defences at the Karo la for some days. Volleys were fired on our scouts on the 16th and 17th. The old wall had been extended east and west until it ended in vertical cliffs just beneath the snow-line. A second barrier had been built further on, and sangars constructed on every prominent point to meet flank attacks. The wall itself was massively strong, and it was approached by a steep cliff, up which it was impossible to make a sustained charge, as the rarefied air at this elevation (16,600 feet) leaves one breathless after the slightest exertion. The Karo la was the strongest position on the road to Lhasa. If the Tibetans intended to make another stand, here was their chance.

In the messes there was much discussion as to the seriousness of the opposition we were likely to meet with. The flanking parties had a long and difficult climb before them that would take them some hours, and the general feeling was that we should be lucky if we got the transport through by noon. But when one of us suggested that the Tibetans might fail to come up to the scratch, and abandon the position without firing a shot, we laughed at him; but his conjecture was very near the mark.

At 7 a.m. the troops forming the line of advance moved into position. The disposition of the enemy's sangars made a turning movement extremely difficult, but a frontal attack on the wall, if stubbornly resisted, could not be carried without severe loss. General Macdonald sent flanking parties of the 8th Gurkhas on both sides of the valley to scale the heights and turn the Tibetan position, and despatched the Royal Fusiliers along the centre of the valley to attack the wall when the opposition had been weakened.

Stretched on a grassy knoll on the left, enjoying the sunshine and the smell of the warm turf, we civilians watched the whole affair with our glasses. It might have been a picnic on the Surrey downs if it were not for the tap-tap of the Maxim, like a distant woodpecker, in the valley, and the occasional report of the 10-pounders by our side, which made the valleys and cliffs reverberate like thunder.

The Tibetans' ruse was to open fire from the wall directly our troops came into view, and then evacuate the position. They thus delayed the pursuit while we were waiting for the scaling-party to ascend the heights.

At nine o'clock the Gurkhas on the left signalled that no enemy were to be seen. At the same time Colonel Cooper, of the Royal Fusiliers, heliographed that the wall was unoccupied and the Tibetans in full retreat. The mounted infantry were at once called up for the pursuit. Meanwhile one or two jingals and some Tibetan marksmen kept up an intermittent fire on the right flanking party from clefts in the overhanging cliffs. A battery replied with shrapnel, [Pg 213/214]
covering our advance. These pickets on the left stayed behind and engaged our right flanking party until eleven o'clock. To turn the position the Gurkhas climbed a parallel ridge, and were for a long time under fire of their jingals. The last part of the ascent was along the edge of a glacier, and then on to the shoulder of the ridge by steps which the Gurkhas cut in the ice with their kukris, helping one another up with the butts of their rifles. They carried rope scaling-ladders, but these were for the descent. At 11.30 Major Murray and his two companies of Gurkhas appeared on the heights, and possession was taken of the pass. The ridge that the Tibetans had held was apparently deserted, but every now and then a man was seen crouching in a cave or behind a rock, and was shot down. One Kham man shot a Gurkha who was looking into the cave where he was hiding. He then ran out and held up his thumbs, expecting quarter. He was rightly cut down with kukris. The dying Gurkha's comrades rushed the cave, and drove six more over the precipice without using steel or powder. They fell sheer 300 feet. Another Gurkha cut off a Tibetan's head with his own sword. On several occasions they hesitated to soil their kukris when they could despatch their victims in any other way.

On a further ridge, a heart-breaking ascent of shale and boulders, we saw two or three hundred Tibetans ascending into the clouds. We had marked them at the beginning of the action, before we knew that the wall was unoccupied. Even then it was clear that the men were fugitives, and had no thought of holding the place. We could see them hours afterwards, with our glasses, crouching under the cliffs. We turned shrapnel and Maxims on them; the hillsides began to move. Then a company of Pathans was sent up, and despatched over forty. It was at this point I saw an act of heroism which quite changed my estimate of these men. A group of four were running up a cliff, under fire from the Pathans at a distance of about 500 yards. One was hit, and his comrade stayed behind to carry him. The two unimpeded Tibetans made their escape, but the rescuer could only shamble along with difficulty. He and his wounded comrade were both shot down.

The 18th was a disappointing day to our soldiers. But the action was of great interest, owing to the altitude in which our flanking parties had to operate. There is a saying on the Indian frontier: 'There is a hill; send up a Gurkha.' These sturdy little men are splendid mountaineers, and will climb up the face of a rock while the enemy are rolling down stones on them as coolly as they will rush a wall under heavy fire on the flat. Their arduous climb took three and a half hours, and was a real mountaineering feat. The cave fighting, in which they had three casualties, took place at 19,000 feet, and this is probably the highest elevation at which an action has been fought in history.

A few of the Tibetans fled by the highroad, along which the mounted infantry pursued, killing twenty and taking ten prisoners. I asked a native officer how he decided whom to spare or kill, and he said he killed the men who ran, and spared those who came towards him. The destiny that preserved the lives of our ten Kham prisoners when nearly the whole of the levy perished reminded me in its capriciousness of Caliban's whim in Setebos:

These Kham men were in our mounted infantry camp until the release of the prisoners in Lhasa, and made themselves useful in many ways—loading mules, carrying us over streams, fetching wood and water, and fodder for our horses. They were fed and cared for, and probably never fared better in their lives. When they had nothing to do, they would sit down in a circle and discuss things resignedly—the English, no doubt, and their ways, and their own distant country. Sometimes they would ask to go home; their mothers and wives did not know if they were alive or dead. But we had no guarantee that they would not fight us again. Now they knew the disparity of their arms they might shrink from further resistance, yet there was every chance that the Lamas would compel them to fight. They became quite popular in the camp, these wild, long-haired men, they were so good-humoured, gentle in manner, and ready to help.

I was sorry for these Tibetans. Their struggle was so hopeless. They were brave and simple, and none of us bore the slightest vindictiveness against them. Here was all the brutality of war, and none of the glory and incentive. These men were of the same race as the people I had been living amongst at Darjeeling—cheerful, jolly fellows—and I had seen their crops ruined, their houses burnt and shelled, the dead lying about the thresholds of what were their homes, and all for no fault of their own—only because their leaders were politically impossible, which, of course, the poor fellows did not know, and there was no one to tell them. They thought our advance an act of unprovoked aggression, and they were fighting for their homes.

Fortunately, however, this slaughter was beginning to put the fear of God into them. We never saw a Tibetan within five miles who did not carry a huge white flag. The second action at the Karo la was the end of the Tibetan resistance. The fall of Gyantse Jong, which they thought unassailable, seems to have broken their spirit altogether. At the Karo la they had evidently no serious intention of holding the position, but fought like men driven to the front against their will, with no confidence or heart in the business at all. The friendly Bhutanese told us that the Tibetans would not stand where they had once been defeated, and that levies who had once faced us were not easily brought into the field again. These were casual generalizations, no doubt, but they contained a great deal of truth. The Kham men who opposed us at the first Karo la action, the Shigatze men who attacked the mission in May, and the force from Lhasa who hurled themselves on Kangma, were all new levies. Many of our prisoners protested very strongly against being released, fearing to be exposed again to our bullets and their own Lamas.

On the 18th we reached Nagartse Jong, and found the ShapÉs awaiting us. They met us in the same impracticable spirit. We were not to occupy the jong, and they were not empowered to treat with us unless we returned to Gyantse. It was a repetition of Khamba Jong and Tuna. In the afternoon a durbar was held in Colonel Younghusband's tent, when the Tibetans showed themselves appallingly futile and childish. They did not seem to realize that we were in a position to dictate terms, and Colonel Younghusband had to repeat that it was now too late for any compromise, and the settlement must be completed at Lhasa.

From Nagartse we held interviews with these tedious delegates at almost every camp. They exhausted everyone's patience except the Commissioner's. For days they did not yield a point, and refused even to discuss terms unless we returned to Gyantse. But their protests became more urgent as we went on, their tone less minatory. It was not until we were within fifty miles of Lhasa that the Tibetan Government deigned to enter into communication with the mission. At Tamalung Colonel Younghusband received the first communication from the National Assembly; at Chaksam arrived the first missive the British Government had ever received from the Dalai Lama. During the delay at the ferry the councillors practically threw themselves on Colonel Younghusband's mercy. They said that their lives would be forfeited if we proceeded, and dwelt on the severe punishment they might incur if they failed to conclude negociations satisfactorily. But Colonel Younghusband was equal to every emergency. It would be impossible to find another man in the British Empire with a personality so calculated to impress the Tibetans. He sat through every durbar a monument of patience and inflexibility, impassive as one of their own Buddhas. Priests and councillors found that appeals to his mercy were hopeless. He, too, had orders from his King to go to Lhasa; if he faltered, his life also was at stake; decapitation would await him on his return. That was the impression he purposely gave them. It curtailed palaver. How in the name of all their Buddhas were they to stop such a man?

The whole progress of negociations put me in mind of the coercion of very naughty children. The Lamas tried every guile to reduce his demands. They would be cajoling him now if he had not given them an ultimatum, and if they had not learnt by six weeks' contact and intercourse with the man that shuffling was hopeless, that he never made a promise that was not fulfilled, or a threat that was not executed. The Tibetan treaty was the victory of a personality, the triumph of an impression on the least impressionable people in the world. But I anticipate.

While the ShapÉs were holding Colonel Younghusband in conference at Nagartse, their cavalry were escorting a large convoy on the road to Lhasa. Our mounted infantry came upon them six miles beyond Nagartse, and as they were rounding them up the Tibetans foolishly fired on them. We captured eighty riding and baggage ponies and mules and fourteen prisoners, and killed several. They made no stand, though they were well armed with a medley of modern rifles and well mounted. This was actually the last shot fired on our side. The delegates had been full of assurances that the country was clear of the enemy, hoping that the convoy would get well away while they delayed us with fruitless protests and reiterated demands to go back. While they were palavering in the tent, they looked out and saw the Pathans go past with their rich yellow silks and personal baggage looted in the brush with the cavalry. Their consternation was amusing, and the situation had its element of humour. A servant rushed to the door of the tent and delivered the whole tale of woe. A mounted infantry officer arrived and explained that our scouts had been fired on. After this, of course, there was no talk of anything except the restitution of the loot. The ShapÉs deserved to lose their kit. I do not remember what was arranged, but if any readers of this record see a gorgeous yellow cloak of silk and brocade at a fancy-dress ball in London, I advise them to ask its history.

This last encounter with the Tibetans is especially interesting, as they were the best-armed body of men we had met. The weapons we captured included a Winchester rifle, several Lhasa-made Martinis, a bolt rifle of an old Austrian pattern, an English-made muzzle-loading rifle, a 12-bore breech-loading shot-gun, some Eley's ammunition, and an English gun-case. The reports of Russian arms found in Tibet have been very much exaggerated. During the whole campaign we did not come across more than thirty Russian Government rifles, and these were weapons that must have drifted into Tibet from Mongolia, just as rifles of British pattern found their way over the Indian frontier into Lhasa. Also it must be remembered that the weapons locally made in Lhasa were of British pattern, and manufactured by experts decoyed from a British factory. Had these men been Russian subjects, we should have regarded their presence in Lhasa as an unquestionable proof of Muscovite assistance. Jealousy and suspicion make nations wilfully blind. Russia fully believes that we are giving underhand assistance to the Japanese, and many Englishmen, who are unbiassed in other questions, are ready to believe, without the slightest proof, that Russia has been supplying Tibet with arms and generals. We had been informed that large quantities of Russian rifles had been introduced into the country, and it was rumoured that the Tibetans were reserving these for the defence of Lhasa itself. But it is hardly credible that they should have sent levies against us armed with their obsolete matchlocks when they were well supplied with weapons of a modern pattern. Russian intrigue was active in Lhasa, but it had not gone so far as open armament.

The wild mountain scenery of the Yamdok Tso, the most romantic in Tibet, has naturally inspired many legends. When Samding was threatened by the Dzungarian invaders early in the eighteenth century, Dorje Phagmo miraculously converted herself and all her attendant monks and nuns into pigs. Serung Dandub, the Dzungarian chief, finding the monastery deserted, said that he would not loot a place guarded only by swine, whereupon Dorje Phagmo again metamorphosed herself and her satellites. The terrified invaders prostrated themselves in awe before the goddess, and presented the monastery with the most priceless gifts. Similarly, the Abbot of Pehte saved the fortress and town from another band of invaders by giving the lake the appearance of green pasturelands, into which the Dzungarians galloped and were engulfed. I quote these tales, which have been mentioned in nearly every book on Tibet, as typical of the country. Doubtless similar legends will be current in a few years about the British to account for the sparing of Samding, Nagartse, and Pehte Jong.

Special courtesy was shown the monks and nuns of Samding, in recognition of the hospitality afforded Sarat Chandra Dass by the last incarnation of Dorje Phagmo, who entertained the Bengali traveller, and saw that he was attended to and cared for through a serious illness. A letter was sent Dorje Phagmo, asking if she would receive three British officers, including the antiquary of the expedition. But the present incarnation, a girl of six or seven years, was invisible, and the convent was reported to be bare of ornament and singularly disappointing. There were no pigs.

If only one were without the incubus of an army, a month in the Noijin Kang Sang country and the Yamdok Plain would be a delightful experience. But when one is accompanying a column one loses more than half the pleasure of travel. One has to get up at a fixed hour—generally uncomfortably early—breakfast, and pack and load one's mules and see them started in their allotted place in the line, ride in a crowd all day, often at a snail's pace, and halt at a fixed place. Shooting is forbidden on the line of march. When alone one can wander about with a gun, pitch camp where one likes, make short or long marches as one likes, shoot or fish or loiter for days in the same place. The spirit which impels one to travel in wild places is an impulse, conscious or unconscious, to be free of laws and restraints, to escape conventions and social obligations, to temporarily throw one's self back into an obsolete phase of existence, amidst surroundings which bear little mark of the arbitrary meddling of man. It is not a high ideal, but men often deceive themselves when they think they make expeditions in order to add to science, and forsake the comforts of life, and endure hunger, cold, fatigue and loneliness, to discover in exactly what parallel of unknown country a river rises or bends to some particular point of the compass. How many travellers are there who would spend the same time in an office poring over maps or statistics for the sake of geography or any other science? We like to have a convenient excuse, and make a virtue out of a hobby or an instinct. But why not own up that one travels for the glamour of the thing? In previous wanderings my experience had always been to leave a base with several different objectives in view, and to take the route that proved most alluring when met by a choice of roads—some old deserted city or ruined shrine, some lake or marshland haunted by wild-fowl that have never heard the crack of a gun, or a strip of desert where one must calculate how to get across with just sufficient supplies and no margin. I like to drift to the magnet of great watersheds, lofty mountain passes, frontiers where one emerges among people entirely different in habit and belief from folk the other side, but equally convinced that they are the only enlightened people on earth. Often in India I had dreamed of the great inland waters of Tibet and Mongolia, the haunts of myriads of duck and geese—Yamdok Tso, Tengri Nor, Issik Kul, names of romance to the wild-fowler, to be breathed with reverence and awe. I envied the great flights of mallard and pochard winging northward in March and April to the unknown; and here at last I was camping by the Yamdok Tso itself—with an army.

Yet I have digressed to grumble at the only means by which a sight of these hidden waters was possible. When we passed in July, there were no wild-fowl on the lake except the bar-headed geese and Brahminy duck. The ruddy sheldrake, or Brahminy, is found all over Tibet, and will be associated with the memory of nearly every march and camping-ground. It is distinctly a Buddhist bird. From it is derived the title of the established Church of the Lamas, the Abbots of which wear robes of ruddy sheldrake colour, Gelug-pa.[15] In Burmah the Brahminy is sacred to Buddhism as a symbol of devotion and fidelity, and it was figured on Asoka's pillars in the same emblematical character.[16] The Brahminy is generally found in pairs, and when one is shot the other will often hover round till it falls a victim to conjugal love. In India the bird is considered inedible, but we were glad of it in Tibet, and discovered no trace of fishy flavour.

Early in April, when we passed the Bam Tso and Kala Tso we found the lakes frequented by nearly all the common migratory Indian duck; and again, on our return large flights came in. But during the summer months nothing remained except the geese and sheldrake and the goosander, which is resident in Tibet and the Himalayas. I take it that no respectable duck spends the summer south of the Tengri Nor. At Lhasa, mallard, teal, gadwall, and white-eyed pochard were coming in from the north as we were leaving in the latter half of September, and followed us down to the plains. They make shorter flights than I imagined, and longer stays at their fashionable Central Asian watering-places.

We marched three days along the banks of the Yamdok Tso, and halted a day at Nagartse. Duck were not plentiful on the lake. Black-headed gulls and redshanks were common. The fields of blue borage by the villages were an exquisite sight. On the 22nd we reached Pehte. The jong, a medieval fortress, stands out on the lake like Chillon, only it is more crumbling and dilapidated. The courtyards are neglected and overgrown with nettles. Soldiers, villagers, both men and women, had run away to the hills with their flocks and valuables. Only an old man and two boys were left in charge of the chapel and the fort. The hide fishing-boats were sunk, or carried over to the other side. On July 24 we left the lake near the village of Tamalung, and ascended the ridge on our left to the Khamba Pass, 1,200 feet above the lake level. A sudden turn in the path brought us to the saddle, and we looked down on the great river that has been guarded from European eyes for nearly a century. In the heart of Tibet we had found Arcadia—not a detached oasis, but a continuous strip of verdure, where the Tsangpo cleaves the bleak hills and desert tablelands from west to east.

All the valley was covered with green and yellow cornfields, with scattered homesteads surrounded by clusters of trees, not dwarfish and stunted in the struggle for existence, but stately and spreading—trees that would grace the valley of the Thames or Severn.

We had come through the desert to Arcady. When we left Phari, months and months before, and crossed the Tang la, we entered the desert.

Tuna is built on bare gravel, and in winter-time does not boast a blade of grass. Within a mile there are stunted bushes, dry, withered, and sapless, which lend a sustenance to the gazelle and wild asses, beasts that from the beginning have chosen isolation, and, like the Tibetans, who people the same waste, are content with spare diet so long as they are left alone.

Every Tibetan of the tableland is a hermit by choice, or some strange hereditary instinct has impelled him to accept Nature's most niggard gifts as his birthright, so that he toils a lifetime to win by his own labour and in scanty measure the necessaries which Nature deals lavishly elsewhere, herding his yaks on the waste lands, tilling the unproductive soil for his meagre crop of barley, and searching the hillsides for yak-dung for fuel to warm his stone hut and cook his meal of flour.

Yet north and south of him, barely a week's journey, are warm, fertile valleys, luxuriant crops, unstinted woodlands, where Mongols like himself accept Nature's largess philosophically as the most natural thing in the world.

It seems as if some special and economical law of Providence, such a law as makes at least one man see beauty in every type of woman, even the most unlovely, had ordained it, so that no corner of the earth, not even the Sahara, Tadmor, Tuna, or Guru, should lack men who devote themselves blindly and without question to live there, and care for what one might think God Himself had forgotten and overlooked.

These men—Bedouin, Tibetans, and the like—enjoy one thing, for which they forego most things that men crave for, and that is freedom. They do not possess the gifts that cause strife, and divisions, and law-making, and political parties, and changes of Government. They have too little to share. Their country is invaded only at intervals of centuries. On these occasions they fight bravely, as their one inheritance is at stake. But they are bigoted and benighted; they have not kept time with evolution, and so they are defeated. The conservatism, the exclusiveness, that has kept them free so long has shut the door to 'progress,' which, if they were enlightened and introspective, they would recognise as a pestilence that has infected one half of the world at the expense of the other, making both unhappy and discontented.

The Tuna Plain is like the Palmyra Desert at the point where one comes within view of the snows of Lebanon. It is not monotonous; there is too much play of light and shade for that. Everywhere the sun shines, the mirage dances; the white calcined plain becomes a flock of frightened sheep hurrying down the wind; the stunted sedge by the lakeside leaps up like a squadron in ambush and sweeps rapidly along without ever approaching nearer. Sometimes a herd of wild asses is mingled in the dance, grotesquely magnified; stones and nettles become walls and men. All the country is elusive and unreal.

From the desert to Arcady is not a long journey, but armies travel slowly. After months of waiting and delay we reached the promised land. It was all suddenly unfolded to our view when we stood on the Khamba la. Below us was a purely pastoral landscape. Beyond lay hills even more barren and verdureless than those we had crossed. But every mile or so green fan-shaped valleys, irrigated by clear streams, interrupted the barrenness, opening out into the main valley east and west with perfect symmetry. To the north-east flowed the Kyi Chu, the valley in which Lhasa lay screened, only fifty-six miles distant.

To the south of the pass lay the great Yamdok Lake, wild and beautiful, its channels twining into the dark interstices of the hills—valleys of mystery and gloom, where no white man has ever trod. Lights and shadows fell caressingly on the lake and hills. At one moment a peak was ebony black, at another—as the heavy clouds passed from over it, and the sun's rays illumined it through a thin mist—golden as a field of buttercups. Often at sunset the grassy cones of the hills glow like gilded pagodas, and the Tibetans, I am told, call these sunlit plots the 'golden ground.'

In bright sunlight the lake is a deep turquoise blue, but at evening time transient lights and shades fleet over it with the moving clouds, light forget-me-not, deep purple, the azure of a butterfly's wing—then all is swept away, immersed in gloom, before the dark, menacing storm-clouds.

On the 25th I crossed the river with the 1st Mounted Infantry and 40th Pathans. My tent is pitched on the roof of a rambling two-storied house, under the shade of a great walnut-tree. Crops, waist-deep, grow up to the walls—barley, wheat, beans, and peas. On the roof are garden flowers in pots, hollyhocks, and marigolds. The cornfields are bright with English wild-flowers — dandelions, buttercups, astragalus, and a purple Michaelmas daisy.

There is no village, but farmhouses are dotted about the valley, and groves of trees—walnut and peach, and poplar and willow—enclosed within stone walls. Wild birds that are almost tame are nesting in the trees—black and white magpies, crested hoopoes, and turtle-doves. The groves are irrigated like the fields, and carpeted with flowers. Homelike butterflies frequent them, and honey-bees.

Everything is homelike. There is no mystery in the valley, except its access, or, rather, its inaccessibility. We have come to it through snow passes, over barren, rocky wildernesses; we have won it with toil and suffering, through frost and rain and snow and blistering sun.

And now that we had found Arcady, I would have stayed there. Lhasa was only four marches distant, but to me, in that mood of almost immoral indolence, it seemed that this strip of verdure, with its happy pastoral scenes, was the most impassable barrier that Nature had planted in our path. Like the Tibetans, she menaced and threatened us at first, then she turned to us with smiles and cajoleries, entreating us to stay, and her seduction was harder to resist.

To trace the course of the Tsangpo River from Tibet to its outlet into Assam has been the goal of travellers for over a century. Here is one of the few unknown tracts of the world, where no white man has ever penetrated. Until quite recently there was a hot controversy among geographers as to whether the Tsangpo was the main feeder of the Brahmaputra or reappeared in Burmah as the Irawaddy. All attempts to explore the river from India have proved fruitless, owing to the intense hostility of the Abor and Passi Minyang tribes, who oppose all intrusion with their poisoned arrows and stakes, sharp and formidable as spears, cunningly set in the ground to entrap invaders; while the vigilance of the Lamas has made it impossible for any European to get within 150 miles of the Tsangpo Valley from Tibet. It was not until 1882 that all doubt as to the identity of the Tsangpo and Brahmaputra was set aside by the survey of the native explorer A. K. And the course of the Brahmaputra, or Dihong, as it is called in Northern Assam, was never thoroughly investigated until the explorations of Mr. Needham, the Political Officer at Sadiya, and his trained Gurkhas, who penetrated northwards as far as Gina, a village half a day's journey beyond Passi Ghat, and only about seventy miles south of the point reached by A. K. from Tibet.

The return of the British expedition from Tibet was evidently the opportunity of a century for the investigation of this unexplored country. We had gained the hitherto inaccessible base, and were provided with supplies and transport on the spot; we had no opposition to expect from the Tibetans, who were naturally eager to help us out of the country by whatever road we chose, and had promised to send officials with us to their frontier at Gyala Sendong, who would forage for us and try to impress the villagers into our service. The hostile tribes beyond the frontier were not so likely to resist an expedition moving south to their homes after a successful campaign as a force entering their country from our Indian frontier. In the latter case they would naturally be more suspicious of designs on their independence. The distance from Lhasa to Assam was variously estimated from 500 to 700 miles. I think the calculations were influenced, perhaps unconsciously, by sympathy with, or aversion from, the enterprise.

The ShapÉs, it is true, though they promised to help us if we were determined on it, advised us emphatically not to go by the Tsangpo route. They said that the natives of their own outlying provinces were bandits and cut-throats, practically independent of the Lhasa Government, while the savages beyond the frontier were dangerous people who obeyed no laws. The ShapÉs' notions as to the course of the river were most vague. When questioned, they said there was a legend that it disappeared into a hole in the earth. The country near its mouth was inhabited by savages, who went about unclothed, and fed on monkeys and reptiles. It was rumoured that they were horned like animals, and that mothers did not know their own children. But this they could not vouch for.

It was believed that tracks of a kind existed from village to village all along the route, but these, of course, after a time would become impracticable for pack transport. The mules would have to be abandoned, and sent back to Gyantse by our guides, or presented to the Tibetan officials who accompanied us. Then we were to proceed by forced marches through the jungle, with coolie transport if obtainable; if not, each man was to carry rice for a few days. The distance from the Tibet frontier to Sadiya is not great, and the unexplored country is reckoned not to be more than seven stages. The force would bivouac, and, if their advance were resisted, would confine themselves solely to defensive tactics. In case of opposition, the greatest difficulty would be the care of the wounded, as each invalid would need four carriers. Thus, a few casualties would reduce enormously the fighting strength of the escort.

But opposition was unlikely. Mr. Needham, who has made the tribes of the Dihong Valley the study of a lifetime, and succeeded to some extent in gaining their confidence, considered the chances of resistance small. He would, he said, send messages to the tribes that the force coming through their country from the north were his friends, that they had been engaged in a punitive expedition against the Lamas (whom the Abors detested), that they were returning home by the shortest route to Assam, and had no designs on the territory they traversed. It was proposed that Mr. Needham should go up the river as far as possible and furnish the party with supplies.

All arrangements had been made for the exploring-party, which was to leave the main force at Chaksam Ferry, and was expected to arrive in Sadiya almost simultaneously with the winding up of the expedition at Siliguri. Captain Ryder, R.E., was to command the party, and his escort was to be made up of the 8th Gurkhas, who had long experience of the Assam frontier tribes, and were the best men who could be chosen for the work. Officers were selected, supply and transport details arranged, everything was in readiness, when at the last moment, only a day or two before the party was to start, a message was received from Simla refusing to sanction the expedition. Colonel Younghusband was entirely in favour of it, but the military authorities had a clean slate; they had come through so far without a single disaster, and it seemed that no scientific or geographical considerations could have any weight with them in their determination to take no risks. Of course there were risks, and always must be in enterprises of the kind; but I think the circumstances of the moment reduced them to a minimum, and that the results to be obtained from the projected expedition should have entirely outweighed them.

In European scientific circles much was expected of the Tibetan expedition. But it has added very little to science. The surveys that were made have done little more than modify the previous investigations of native surveyors.[17]

An expedition to the mountains bordering the Tengri Nor, only nine days north of Lhasa, would have linked all the unknown country north of the Tsang po with the tracts explored by Sven Hedin, and left the map without a hiatus in four degrees of longitude from Cape Comorin to the Arctic Ocean. But military considerations were paramount.

For myself, the abandonment of the expedition was a great disappointment. I had counted on it as early as February, and had made all preparations to join it.