TO PHARI
The 'second advance' began in due course. The first few camping grounds
were small, so that we had to proceed on the three days' march to Phari
in several columns, two columns a day leaving Chumbi together, but
halting at separate camping grounds on the way up, and meeting again at
Phari.
This march to Phari was, until we actually reached the Phari plain,
quite the wettest I have known. It rained incessantly. The first day we
climbed a few miles up to Lingmatam. (How like one another the names of
places in this part of the world are! It took me months to distinguish
between Lingtam, Langram, and Lingmatam.) From Lingmatam (a sopping,
spongy, flat little plain nestling in the hills, that had obviously only
just missed its proper vocation of being a lake instead of a plain) we
marched up a rough bridle-path through pine-woods to Dhota. We had a
very long train of pack-mule transport in our column, and the checks up
that steep narrow winding path were interminable, while rain fell the
whole time. Whenever anything went wrong with a mule's load, which of
course happened frequently owing to the steepness and roughness of the
track, it was impossible to take the mule aside to adjust the load, for
there was no room at the side, and the mule had to be halted where he
was till the adjustment was completed. This involved the halting of say
five hundred mules, who happened to be behind the mule who had first
been halted. And when the latter at last moved off, it of course took an
appreciable interval of time before the next mule followed suit.
Multiply that appreciable interval by the number of mules in the rear,
say five hundred, and you find that it takes perhaps a full half-hour
before the five-hundredth is at last on the move again. Thus that
initial adjustment of a refractory load has cost the rear of the column
half an hour's delay, and by the end of the half-hour you may be sure
that the load of another mule has got loose, and the whole process has
to be repeated. This is just an instance of the trials of a transport
officer, and of his faithful servants, the transport driver and the
pack-mule.
I remember, during one such check, being seated on my pony at a point of
the road where it was impossible to dismount for lack of space, with one
mule's head buried in my pony's tail and another mule's tail flicking my
pony's nose, the rain trickling off my helmet and down my neck, and,
worst of all, a strong aroma rising from the khud beneath where lay the
remains of a mule who had met his death at that spot at a date that was
palpably neither very recent nor yet innocuously remote. To be bound
almost literally hand and foot in the vicinity of a bad smell is a form
of torture which in its way gives points to any inquisition.
Dhota lies at a considerable height above Lingmatam, and, before we
reached camp, many of the mule drivers were somewhat exhausted with
their climb. There was a certain amount of almost inevitable straggling
on the part of some of them--a most unfortunate occurrence, for it
resulted in a few leaving their mules to their own devices just when the
control of the latter was most necessary. For after emerging from the
pine forest a few miles below Dhota we came on to a hillside on which
grew ever so little of the deadly aconite plant. A check would occur
somewhere to the column. Those mules who were left standing without
their drivers would--as is the nature of the beast--try to improve the
shining hour by picking up a little grazing from the roadside. Here and
there a mule would swallow some aconite, and the chances were that
before he reached camp he would foam at the mouth and quickly expire. A
few, though poisoned, reached camp alive, and of these a small
proportion were saved by drastic remedies. But the deaths that day from
aconite poisoning almost reached double figures--a regrettable
occurrence, for the mule is an animal for whom, when one knows him, one
entertains affection, and, besides this, each mule carries two maunds of
useful provisions on his back, and we were not too well off for
transport. After another wet night on another wet camping ground, we
marched into Phari. We had left the green valley of the Chumbi; we had
mounted upwards through the pine forests beyond; we had emerged into a
region of rugged scenery where great rocky precipices hung over us. We
wondered what still wilder regions we were now approaching as we still
climbed higher. But all of a sudden, as it seemed, we had reached the
end of our climb and found ourselves on a level green plain with rolling
green downs around us, the sort of homely gentle scene that meets you
when, for instance, you cross the border between England and Scotland,
or pass on the railway the lower fells of Cumberland--a scene suggestive
of sheep grazing on rich close turf, and of comfortable homesteads
hidden away in the folds of the hills. This abrupt transition brought to
the mind the tale of Jack and the Beanstalk. It seemed that we had
climbed to the top of the world that had hitherto been ours, and were
starting afresh on a new level.
This sensation was chiefly illusory; for that level green plain and
those rolling green downs deceived one with their greenness, and proved
on closer inspection to be but indifferent pastures, while after a mile
or two the plain bent round a corner, and we came in view of such mighty
irregularities of the earth's surface as left no doubt as to our being
still in the very heart of the mountains. For as we turned that corner,
suddenly, as with a sudden flash, and all lit up with the sunlight that
had just dispelled the clouds, Chumalari stood before us, his white top
only a few miles away, but many thousand feet above us, and so reaching
to a height in the sky that to the stranger's eye was almost appalling.
To us men the romance of scenery is very elusive. I have known nice old
ladies to whom a fine sunset was a real substantial joy, giving them the
same nocturnal exhilaration that baser clay can only acquire by
absorbing a bottle of champagne. Given a male mind properly swept and
garnished for the time being by some potent influence--preferably of
course a sweet influence of the feminine gender--even the most
businesslike and prosaic of us can, if only for short intervals at a
time, empty ourselves of the things of this ugly world and assimilate a
little of nature's beauty. But in ordinary humdrum life, when that
sweet feminine influence is no longer at his side (or, if still at his
side, has lost much of its old magic by having been so foolish as to be
now his mere wife), the ordinary brutal humdrum man regards the finest
waterfall in the world as merely a good place at which to dilute his
whiskey, finds blue sunlit waters rather trying to the eyes, and
execrates the glorious sweep of the mountain in front of him as
conducive to perspiration and shortness of breath as he climbs it. We
can't help it, we men; we are built that way; it is the nature of the
beast. But even so when by some strange accident we are taken unawares,
and some rare and magnificent glory of nature suddenly confronts us,
and, without our consenting or even against our will, pierces that crust
of sordid matter-of-factness that usually encases us so securely, as did
that great white mountain Chumalari that day when we met him on the
Phari plain, then we too abandon ourselves and for once in a way find
ourselves drinking in the beauty as greedily as ever that old lady
drinks in her sunset.
A few miles along the plain brought us to Phari.