To Lhassa at Last Part 1

To Lha.s.sa at Last.

by Powell Millington.

PREFACE

When the Sikkim-Tibet Mission Force marched to Lha.s.sa, it carried along with it, besides fighting men and diplomatists, a strong contingent that represented literature and the deeper sciences. We were full of brains in that Lha.s.sa column. There were men in it who had made the subject of Tibet their own before they had set foot in the country, and were already qualified to discourse upon it, whether in its political, its topographical, its ethnological, or its archaeological aspect. There was a man who came with us armed only with a bicycle wheel and a cyclometer, with which he has corrected all preconceived notions of Tibetan distances. There was a man with a hammer (the 'Martol Walah Sahib' the natives called him), who, if his pony stumbled over a stone, got off his pony and beat the stone with his hammer, not really vindictively but merely to find out what precious ore the stone might contain. Then there was a man with a b.u.t.terfly-net, who pickled the flies that got into his eye, and chased those that did not with his b.u.t.terfly-net and pickled them also. There was a man too with a trowel, who did a lot of useful weeding by the roadside. There was a committee too of licensed curio-hunters, who collected curios with much enterprise and scientific precision for the British Museum. Lastly, there was a select band of press correspondents, who threw periodical literary light on our proceedings from start to finish.

Who can doubt that all the above-named are not now, in this month of November 1904, writing for their lives, so as to produce at the earliest opportunity the results of their scientific or literary labours in the shape of books that will give valuable information to the serious student, or prove a substantial contribution to literature?

Apart from the above enterprises, a flood of Blue-books, compiled by the authorised political and military officials, will doubtless also shortly appear, even though that appearance may in some cases be but a swift transference from the printing-press to the pigeonhole.

Surely, then, for one who is not ordered by authority to compile a Blue-book, who has no gospel of Tibetan scientific discoveries to proclaim to the world, and who has no harvest--in the shape of letters previously sent to the press and capable of republication--ready at hand for reaping, to sit down and write a book on Tibet, merely because he happens to have been to Lha.s.sa and back, is a work of supererogation which needs a word of apology.

My apology is that this book will be avowedly a book by a 'man in the street'--a man, that is, who occupied an inconspicuous single-fly tent in a back street of the brigade camp. As such it will throw no searching light upon the subject, but may afford a simple but distinctive view of it, and one uncaught by the searchlights of the official minute, the scientist's lore, and the war correspondent's art.

But, my prospective reader, as you finger this slight volume at the bookstall, I trust that this preface may at once catch your eye, so that, if what you want to read about Tibet is an elaborate appreciation or a collection of solid information, you may drop the book like the proverbial hot potato before that jealous-eyed man behind the stall makes you buy it as a punishment for fingering it, and may seize instead upon one of those weightier tomes that are now racing it through the press.

POWELL MILLINGTON.

_November 1904._

TO LHa.s.sA AT LAST

CHAPTER I

THE WRITING ON THE WALL

'Ain't this ripping?' said I to my wife.

'Yes, delightful,' she said.

It really was rather nice. It had been quite hot in the plains, and was pleasantly cool up here. My wife and family had preceded me and had been settled for some weeks in the house which we had taken in the hills for the hot weather, and now I had just arrived on two months' leave. We were sitting over the fire in the drawing-room after dinner, a cosy little room made homelike by a careful selection of draperies and ornaments from the larger drawing-room in the plains.

'Just ripping,' I repeated with sad lack of originality. The ride up the hill from the plains had been fatiguing. The fire was soporific. There was whiskey and soda at my elbow and a cheroot in my mouth (I'm a privileged husband and smoke in the drawing-room).

'Ripping,' I said for the third time, half dozing.

'Come, get up, lazy-bones, and go to bed. You are hopeless as you are.'

So I was led to bed. We put out the lamps, and on the hall table found our bedroom candles, which we lit preparatory to climbing the stairs.

The staircase set me musing. Some hill houses have them, but they are rare in the plains. The smallness of the rooms, the existence of that narrow staircase, the domestic process of lighting the bedroom candles, the necessity of not waking the baby, the sense of security and of being cut adrift even temporarily from the ties of officialdom--all suggested the peaceful conditions of life enjoyed by the small but solid householder at home.

'We've got it at last,' I exclaimed.

'Got what?' asked my wife.

'Why, the life of the bank clerk at home,' I replied; 'that bank clerk whom we have always envied, who lives at Tooting in a little house just like this, with a creaking staircase just like this, who never gets harried from pillar to post, who is peaceful and domestic, and gets fat as soon as he can afford to. And here I am, for two months at any rate, and I'm living in a Tooting villa just like the bank clerk, and in the bosom of my family, and I'm going to get fat too.'

So up we went to bed, full of peace. There was a big black centipede crawling on the bedroom wall, a sinister-looking object, looking on the white surface like mysterious handwriting, bringing with it to the fanciful mind suggestions of 'Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin.' My wife has a horror of centipedes. I was at once detailed to destroy it: a feat soon accomplished.

'That dispels the bank clerk idea altogether, does it not?' one of us remarked to the other. 'Bank clerks at Tooting don't have centipedes on their bedroom walls, do they?'

When I had gone to my dressing-room, I heard the sound below of a key turning in a lock. It was a servant opening the back door.

A moment later I heard the tread of the servant's bare feet on the stairs. This was unusual. My bearer does not voluntarily visit me at this hour.

Yes, it was the bearer. He came to the dressing-room door and presented me with a telegram. It was 'urgent,' as denoted by the yellow colour of the envelope. 'Urgent' telegrams when addressed to officers on leave are apt to involve some interference with their plans.

I read the telegram and signed the receipt. The servant asked if he was wanted any more. 'Yes, very much wanted,' I answered; 'but go downstairs now and I'll call you later.'

Then came the process of breaking the news to my wife. It is difficult not to be clumsy on these occasions. I went into the bedroom with the telegram concealed somewhere on my person. There she sat unconcerned, and I had to break it to her and did not know how to begin. I got to within a foot or two of her and then stopped, held out a beckoning hand to her, and said roughly:

'Come here.'

'What is it?' she said, sitting transfixed. There was something in my face which alarmed her.

I beckoned again, and again said, 'Come here.'

'Oh!' she cried, 'take it off, take it off! It must be a centipede on my shoulder that you are pointing at. I know it must be.'

'No, dear, it's not half so bad as that: it's only that I'm ordered to Tibet.'

CHAPTER II

PRELIMINARIES

The next day was Sunday--not a good day on which to start preparations.

I had a great many things to do. The first was to visit the civil surgeon, and be examined for fitness for residing in high alt.i.tudes. He lived at the top of a steep hill himself, and as I arrived there on foot but alive, he pa.s.sed me without difficulty. Then my pony who had come with me had to be despatched with the syce on two double marches to the railway terminus. Then I had to procure free railway pa.s.ses from the station staff officer, whose office, the day being Sunday, was of course closed. There was also the putting of oneself, on the one hand, and one's wife and family on the other, on sound financial bases, preparatory to an indefinite period of separation. There was also a lot of sorting and packing to be done, and farewell visits to be made, where these were officially expected of one. (One's real friends, of course, one left without a thought.)

I got off on the Monday. People at home are often horror-struck at the speed with which the married officer has to leave his family when ordered on service. Fond parents have been known to forbid their daughters marrying soldiers on this very account. They are quite wrong.

Given that you have to separate, it is much better to get the separation over as quickly as possible. In this case the speed with which those busy thirty-six hours pa.s.sed between the receipt of the telegram and my departure was a real G.o.dsend. A long-drawn-out antic.i.p.ation of separation would by comparison have been intolerable.

My wife came to the top of the road that leads to the plains to see me off. The quickest mode of conveyance was the 'rickshaw.' There ought to be some glamour of romance about a wife seeing her husband off to the wars, but how could there be when the husband started in a rickshaw? I stepped solemnly into the vehicle, and an officious 'jampani' tried to tuck me up with a rug as though I had been something very dainty and precious, while my wife, who still preserves a critical eye for Indian manners and customs, exclaims:--

'Oh dear, oh dear, this is a funny country, when one's husband starts for field service in a perambulator!'

The rickshaw carried me at break-neck pace to the plains, where, with my ears singing from the sudden drop of 6,000 feet, and the heat oppressing me, I took train to my former station, to which I had to make a detour before proceeding to the base.