A dangerous track--Perilous passage--A curious bridge over a
precipice--Pathetic Shoka custom--Small misadventures--A grand
reception--Tea for all tastes.
AT 4 A.M., before the sun rose, I made a fresh and hurried start. I
proceeded quickly to the spot where I had left the two drunken men. They
had gone ahead.
Indeed the track was a bad and dangerous one, overhanging precipices, and
hardly wide enough to give standing room upon it. We came to a spot where
the narrow path stopped. There was before us a perpendicular rock
descending straight as a wall to the Kali River. The corrosive action of
dripping water and melting snow, of which last there seemed to be a thick
layer higher above on the summit of the cliff, had worn the face of the
rock quite smooth. The distance across this vertical wall-like ravine was
not more than forty or fifty feet. On the other side of it the narrow
track began again.
Owing to this and other dangerous places, this route is but very seldom
used by the natives or by any one else. The road generally taken is on
the opposite side of the Kali River, in Nepal territory. Nevertheless, a
few Shokas possess bits of land on this bank of the stream, and it was by
them that, in order to surmount the obstacle before which I now stood,
the following expedient was devised in former years.
By letting down a man from above with ropes they succeeded in making two
rows of small hollows in the rock, along two parallel horizontal lines,
the higher of which was about six feet or so above the lower. The holes
were dug at intervals of three or four feet along each line, the upper
ones to be caught on by one's hands, the lower ones to support one's
feet, and none of the cavities are deeper than a few inches.
[Illustration: A PERILOUS PASSAGE]
The transit seemed dangerous at any time, and impossible just then,
because the drizzling rain which had set in had wetted the rock and made
it as slippery as glass, but I realised that the thing had to be risked,
and at any cost. With an affected air of assurance, I therefore took off
my shoes and went ahead.
I could not look about me, for I clung with my body to the wall, feeling
my way with my toes and fingers. The cavities were, as a matter of fact,
so shallow that progress was slow and troublesome. When the toes of the
right limb seemed firmly planted in a receptacle, the right arm was made
to slide along the rock until the fingers had obtained a firm grip in the
cavity directly above the one in which the toes were. Then the entire
body had to be shifted from left to right, bringing the left foot and
hand close to the right extremities and suspending one's weight on the
former, so as to render the right foot and arm ready to make the next
move forward, and so on, till I reached the other side and alighted upon
the narrow track, which was itself only five or six inches wide. Chanden
Sing having tied his shoes and mine over his shoulders, proceeded
bare-footed on the same hazardous enterprise. With none of the excitement
of personal danger, the moments of apprehension while he groped his way
with toes and fingers, half paralysed with cold and fear, were to me
worse even than those of my own passage. But he too got across safe and
sound, and after that the rest was comparatively easy.
It was necessary now to look out for signs of the two men, Kachi and
Dola, who had preceded us. I was glad to find a little farther on fresh
footmarks, undoubtedly those of the two Shokas. The track still ascended
and descended nearly all along precipitous cliffs, and was everywhere
dangerously narrow, with here and there bits on shaky crowbars. At one
spot the rugged formation of the cliff forced one suddenly to ascend to
its very top and cross (on all-fours) a rude kind of bridge made of
branches of trees spanned not horizontally, but at an angle of sixty
degrees over a precipice of several hundred feet. I found a white thread
of wool laid over this primitive structure, in accordance with the custom
of the Shokas at the death of relatives or friends away from their native
village. The soul is supposed to migrate during the dark hours of the
night and to return to the birthplace of the deceased, these white
threads showing the way at dangerous places on the road.
Having lost the track more than once, we found ourselves down at the edge
of the Kali and compelled to climb up some three hundred feet over sand
and rolling stones to regain the path.
We arrived at last at Nabi. There I found my loads safe and sound, having
got here by the better track on the Nepalese side previously to the
Chongur bridge being destroyed by the Tibetans, also Kachi and Dola, who
had got over and recovered from their drink. To make up, perhaps, for
their past misbehaviour, and probably to make me overlook or forget it,
they seemed to have induced the natives to welcome me with particular
cordiality. I was invited by them, with much show of hospitality, to
spend the night in the village.
I was led with some ceremony to a primitive sort of ladder with very
roughly carved steps, and shoved, with help from above and below, on to a
flat mud roof. Here a tent had been pitched, the floor of which was
covered with mats and rugs for me to rest on. I no sooner laid myself
down than a string of men, women and children arrived, carrying bowls
with a particularly sumptuous meal of rice, _dhal_, meat, _balab_ (or
boiled buckwheat leaves), curd, milk, broiled corn with sugar,
_chapatis_, _shale_, sweets, native wine and liquor.
During the meal, tea was served in all sorts of fashions. There was
Chinese tea and Indian tea, tea boiled with sugar and tea without it, tea
with milk, and tea with butter and salt in it, pale tea and dark tea,
sweet tea and bitter tea--in fact, tea until I--devoted as I am to
it--wished that no tea-leaf had ever been picked and stewed in boiling
water.