PHARI JONG
_February 15._
Icy winds and suffocating smoke are not conducive to a literary style,
though they sometimes inspire a rude eloquence that is quite unfit for
publication. As I write we are huddling over the mess-room brazier--our
youngest optimist would not call it a fire. Men drop in now and then
from fatigue duty, and utter an incisive phrase that expresses the
general feeling, while we who write for an enlightened public must
sacrifice force for euphemism. A week at Phari dispels all illusions;
only a bargee could adequately describe the place. Yet the elements,
which 'feelingly persuade us' what we are, sometimes inspire us with the
eloquence of discomfort.
At Gautsa the air was scented with the fragrance of warm pine-trees, and
there was no indication of winter save the ice on the Ammo Chu. The
torrent roared boisterously beneath its frozen surface, and threw up
little tentacles of frozen spray, which glistened fantastically in the
sun. Three miles further up the stream the wood-belt ends abruptly;
then, after another three miles, one passes the last stunted bush; after
that there is nothing but brown earth and yellow withered grass.
Five miles above Gautsa is Dotah, the most cheerless camp on the march.
The wind blows through the gorge unceasingly, and penetrates to the
bone. On the left bank of the stream is the frozen waterfall, which
might be worshipped by the fanciful and superstitious as embodying the
genius of the place, hard and resistless, a crystallized monument of the
implacable spirit of Nature in these high places.
At Kamparab, where we camped, two miles higher up the stream, the
thermometer fell to 14° below zero. Close by is the meeting-place of the
sources of the Ammo Chu. All the plain is undermined with the warrens of
the long-haired marmots and voles, who sit on their thresholds like a
thousand little spies, and curiously watch our approach, then dive down
into their burrows to tell their wives of the strange bearded invaders.
They are the despair of their rivals, the sappers and miners, who are
trying to make a level road for the new light ekkas. One envies them
their warmth and snugness as one rides against the bitter penetrating
winds.
Twelve miles from Gautsa a turn in the valley brings one into view of
Phari Jong. At first sight it might be a huge isolated rock, but as one
approaches the bastions and battlements become more distinct. Distances
are deceptive in this rarefied air, and objects that one imagines to be
quite close are sometimes found to be several miles distant.
The fort is built on a natural mound in the plain. It is a huge rambling
building six stories high, surrounded by a courtyard, where mules and
ponies are stabled. As a military fortification Phari Jong is by no
means contemptible. The walls are of massive stonework which would take
heavy guns to demolish. The angles are protected from attacking parties
by machicolated galleries, and three enormous bastions project from each
flank. These are crumbling in places, and the Pioneers might destroy the
bastion and breach the wall with a bag or two of guncotton. On the
eastern side there is a square courtyard like an Arab caravanserai,
where cattle are penned. The fortress would hold the whole Tibetan army,
with provisions for a year. It was evacuated the night before we
reconnoitred the valley.
The interior of the Jong is a warren of stairs, landings, and dark
cavernous rooms, which would take a whole day to explore. The walls are
built of stone and mud, and coated with century-old smoke. There are no
chimneys or adequate windows, and the filth is indescribable. When Phari
was first occupied, eighty coolies were employed a whole week clearing
away refuse. Judging by the accretion of dirt, a new-comer might class
the building as medieval; but filth is no criterion of age, for
everything left in the same place becomes quickly coated with grime an
inch thick. The dust that invades one's tent at Chumbi is clean and
wholesome compared to the Phari dirt, which is the filth of human
habitation, the secretion of centuries of foul living. It falls from the
roof on one's head, sticks to one's clothes as one brushes against the
wall, and is blown up into one's eyes and throat from the floor.
The fort is most insanitary, but a military occupation is necessary. The
hacking coughs which are prevalent among officers and men are due to
impurities of the air which affect the lungs. Cartloads of dirt are
being scraped away every day, but gusts of wind from the lower stories
blow up more dust, which penetrates every nook and cranny of the
draughty rooms, so that there is a fresh layer by nightfall. To clear
the lower stories and cellars would be a hopeless task; even now rooms
are found in unexpected places which emit clouds of dust whenever the
wind eddies round the basement.
I explored the ground-floor with a lantern, and was completely lost in
the maze of passages and dark chambers. When we first occupied the fort,
they were filled with straw, gunpowder, and old arms. A hundred and
forty maunds of inferior gunpowder was destroyed, and the arms now
litter the courtyard. These the Tibetans themselves abandoned as
rubbish. The rusty helmets, shields, and breastplates are made of the
thinnest iron plates interlaced with leathern thongs, and would not
stop an arrow. The old bell-mouthed matchlocks, with their wooden
ground-rests, would be more dangerous to the Tibetan marksmen than the
enemy. The slings and bows and arrows are reckoned obsolete even by
these primitive warriors. Perhaps they attribute more efficacy to the
praying-wheels which one encounters at every corner of the fort. The
largest are in niches in the wall to left and right of the gateway; rows
of smaller ones are attached to the banisters on the landings and to the
battlements of the roof. The wheels are covered with grime--the grime of
Lamas' hands. Dirt and religion are inseparable in Tibet. The Lamas
themselves are the most filthy and malodorous folk I have met in the
country. From this it must not be inferred that one class is more
cleanly in its habits than another, for nobody ever thinks of washing.
Soap is not included in the list of sundries that pass the Customs House
at Yatung. If the Lamas are dirtier than the yak-herds and itinerant
merchants it is because they lead an indoor life, whereas the pastoral
folk are continually exposed to the purifying winds of the tablelands,
which are the nearest equivalent in Tibet to a cold bath.
I once read of a Tibetan saint, one of the pupils of Naropa, who was
credited with a hundred miraculous gifts, one of which was that he could
dive into the water like a fish. Wherein the miracle lay had often
puzzled me, but when I met the Lamas of the Kanjut Gompa I understood
at once that it was the holy man's contact with the water.
Phari is eloquent of piety, as it is understood in Tibet. The better
rooms are frescoed with Buddhistic paintings, and on the third floor is
a library, now used as a hospital, where xylograph editions of the
Lamaist scriptures and lives of the saints are pigeon-holed in lockers
in the wall. The books are printed on thin oblong sheets of Chinese
paper, enclosed in boards, and illuminated with quaint coloured
tailpieces of holy men in devotional attitudes. Phari fort, with its
casual blending of East and West, is full of incongruous effects, but
the oddest and most pathetic incongruity is the chorten on the roof,
from which, amidst praying-flags and pious offerings of coloured
raiment, flutters the Union Jack.
_February 18._
The troops are so busy making roads that they have very little time for
amusements. The 8th Gurkhas have already constructed some eight miles of
road on each side of Phari for the ekka transport. Companies of the 23rd
Pioneers are repairing the road at Dotah, Chumbi, and Rinchengong. The
32nd are working at Rinchengong, and the sappers and miners on the
Nathula and at Gautsa.
We have started football, and the Gurkhas have a very good idea of the
game. One loses one's wind completely at this elevation after every
spurt of twenty yards, but recovers it again in a wonderfully short
time. Other amusements are sliding and tobogganing, which are a little
disappointing to enthusiasts. The ice is lumpy and broken, and the
streamlets that run down to the plain are so tortuous that fifty yards
without a spill is considered a good run for a toboggan. The funniest
sight is to see the Gurkha soldiers trying to drag the toboggan uphill,
slipping and tumbling and sprawling on the ice, and immensely enjoying
one another's discomfiture.
To clear the dust from one's throat and shake off the depression caused
by weeks of waiting in the same place, there is nothing like a day's
shooting or exploring in the neighbourhood of Phari. I get up sometimes
before daybreak, and spend the whole day reconnoitring with a small
party of mounted infantry. Yesterday we crossed a pass which looked down
into the Kongbu Valley--a likely camping-ground for the Tibetan troops.
The valley is connected to the north with the Tuna plateau, and is
almost as fertile in its lower stretches as Chumbi. A gray fortress
hangs over the cliff on the western side of the valley, and above it
tower the glaciers of Shudu-Tsenpa and the Gora Pass into Sikkim. On the
eastern side, at a creditable distance from the fort, we could see the
Kongbu nunnery, which looked from where we stood like an old Roman
viaduct. The nuns, I was told, are rarely celibate; they shave the head
and wear no ornaments.
Riding back we saw some burrhel on the opposite hills, too far off to
make a successful stalk possible. The valley is full of them, and a week
later some officers from Phari on a yak-collecting expedition got
several good heads. The Tibetan gazelle, or goa (_Gazella
hirticaudata_), is very common on the Phari plateau, and we bagged two
that afternoon. When the force first occupied the Jong, they were so
tame that a sportsman could walk up to within 100 yards of a herd, and
it was not an uncommon thing for three buck to fall to the same gun in a
morning. Now one has to manoeuvre a great deal to get within 300 yards
of them.
Sportsmen who have travelled in other parts of Tibet say the goa are
very shy and inaccessible. Perhaps their comparative tameness near Phari
may be accounted for by the fact that the old trade route crosses the
plateau, and they have never been molested by the itinerant merchants
and carriers. Gazelle meat is excellent. It has been a great resource
for the garrison. No epicure could wish for anything better.
Another unfamiliar beast that one meets in the neighbourhood of Phari is
the kyang, or Tibetan wild ass (_Equus hemionus_), one or two of which
have been shot for specimens. The kyang is more like a zebra than a
horse or donkey. Its flesh, I believe, is scorned even by
camp-followers. Hare are fairly plentiful, but they are quite
flavourless. A huge solitary gray wolf (_Canis laniger_) was shot the
other day, the only one of its kind I have seen. Occasionally one puts
up a fox. The Tibetan species has a very fine brush that fetches a fancy
price in the bazaar. At present there is too much ice on the plain to
hunt them, but they ought to give good sport in the spring.
It was dark when we rode into the Jong. After a long day in the saddle,
dinner is good, even though it is of yak's flesh, and it is good to sit
in front of a fire even though the smoke chokes you. I went so far as to
pity the cave-dwellers at Chumbi. Phari is certainly very much colder,
but it has its diversions and interests. There is still some shooting to
be had, and the place has a quaint old-world individuality of its own,
which seasons the monotony of life to a contemplative man. One is on the
borderland, and one has a Micawber-like feeling that something may turn
up. After dinner there is bridge, which fleets the time considerably,
but at Chumbi there were no diversions of any kind--nothing but dull,
blank, uninterrupted monotony.
_February 20._
For two days half a blizzard has been blowing, and expeditions have been
impossible. Everything one eats and drinks has the same taste of argol
smoke. At breakfast this morning we had to put our _chapatties_ in our
pockets to keep them clean, and kept our meat covered with a soup-plate,
making surreptitious dives at it with a fork. After a few seconds'
exposure it was covered with grime. Sausages and bully beef, which had
just been boiled, were found to be frozen inside. The smoke in the
mess-room was suffocating. So to bed, wrapped in sheepskins and a
sleeping-bag. Under these depressing conditions I have been reading the
narratives of Bogle and Manning, old English worthies who have left on
record the most vivid impressions of the dirt and cold and misery of
Phari.
It is ninety years since Thomas Manning passed through Phari on his way
to Lhasa. Previously to his visit we only know of two Englishmen who
have set foot in Phari--Bogle in 1774, and Turner in 1783, both
emissaries of Warren Hastings. Manning's journal is mostly taken up with
complaints of his Chinese servant, who seems to have gained some
mysterious ascendancy over him, and to have exercised it most
unhandsomely. As a traveller Manning had a genius for missing effects;
it is characteristic of him that he spent sixteen days at Phari, yet
except for a casual footnote, evidently inserted in his journal after
his return, he makes no mention of the Jong. Were it not for Bogle's
account of thirty years before, we might conclude that the building was
not then in existence.
On October 21, 1811, Manning writes in his diary: 'We arrived at Phari
Jong. Frost. Frost also two days before. I was lodged in a strange
place, but so were the natives.' On the 27th he summarized his
impressions of Phari:--'Dirt, dirt, grease, smoke, misery, but good
mutton.'
Manning's journal is expressive, if monosyllabic. He was of the class
of subjective travellers, who visit the ends of the earth to record
their own personal discomforts. Sensitive, neurotic, ever on the
look-out for slights, he could not have been a happy vagabond. A dozen
lines record the impressions of his first week at Phari. He was cheated;
he was treated civilly; he slighted the magistrates, mistaking them for
idle fellows; he was turned out of his room to make way for Chinese
soldiers; he quarrelled with his servant. A single extract portrays the
man to the life, as if he were sitting dejectedly by his yak-dung fire
at this hour brooding over his wrongs:--
"The Chinaman was cross again." Says I, "Was that a bird at the
magistrate's that flapped so loud?" Answer: "What signifies whether it
was a bird or not?" Where he sat I thought he might see; and I was
curious to know if such large birds frequented the _building_. These are
the answers I get. He is always discontented and grumbling, and takes no
trouble off my hands. Being younger, and, like all Asiatics, able to
stoop and crouch without pain or difficulty, he might assist me in many
things without trouble to himself. A younger brother or any English
young gentleman would in his place of course lay the cloth, and do other
little services when I am tired; but he does not seem to have much of
the generous about him, nor does he in any way serve me, or behave to me
with any show of affection or goodwill: consequently I grow no more
attached to him than the first day I saw him. I could not have thought
it possible for me to have lived so long with anyone without either
disliking him or caring sixpence for him. He has good qualities, too.
The strangeness of his situation may partly excuse him. (I am more
attached to my guide, with all his faults, who has been with me but a
few days.) My guide has behaved so damnably ill since I wrote that, that
I wish it had not come into my mind.'
I give the extract at length, not only as an illuminating portrait of
Manning, but as an incidental proof that he visited the Jong, and that
it was very much the same building then as it is to-day. But had it not
been for the flapping of the bird which occasioned the quarrel with his
Chinese servant, Manning would have left Phari without a reference to
the wonderful old fortress which is the most romantic feature on the
road from India to Gyantse. Appended to the journal is this footnote to
the word _building_, which I have italicized in the extract: 'The
building is immensely large, six or more stories high, a sort of
fortress. At a distance it appears to be all Phari Jong. Indeed, most of
it consists of miserable galleries and holes.'
Members of the mission force who have visited Phari will no doubt
attribute Manning's evident ill-humour and depression during his stay
there to the environments of the place, which have not changed much in
the last ninety years. But his spirits improved as he continued his
journey to Gyantse and Lhasa, and he reveals himself the kindly,
eccentric, and affectionate soul who was the friend and intimate of
Charles Lamb.
Bogle arrived at Phari on October 23, 1774. He and Turner and Manning
all entered Tibet through Bhutan. 'As we advanced,' he wrote in his
journal, 'we came in sight of the castle of Phari Jong, which cuts a
good figure from without. It rises into several towers with the
balconies, and, having few windows, has the look of strength; it is
surrounded by the town.' The only other reference he makes to the Jong
shows us that the fortress was in bad repair so long ago as 1774. 'The
two Lhasa officers who have the government of Phari Jong sent me some
butter, tea, etc., the day after my arrival; and letting me know that
they expected a visit from me, I went. The inside of the castle did not
answer the notion I had formed of it. The stairs are ladders worn to the
bone, and the rooms are little better than garrets.'
The origin of the fort is unknown. Some of the inhabitants of Phari say
that it was built more than a hundred years ago, when the Nepalese were
overrunning Sikkim. But this is obviously incorrect, as the
Tibetan-Nepalese War, in which the Chinese drove the Gurkhas out of
Tibet, and defeated their army within a day's march of Khatmandu, took
place in 1788-1792, whereas Bogle's description of the Jong was written
fourteen years earlier. A more general impression is that centuries ago
orders came from Lhasa to collect stones on the hillsides, and the
building was constructed by forced labour in a few months. That is a
tale of endurance and suffering that might very likely be passed from
father to son for generations.
Bogle's description of the town might have been written by an officer of
the garrison to-day, only he wrote from the inmate's point of view. He
noticed the houses 'so huddled together that one may chance to overlook
them,' and the flat roofs covered with bundles of straw. He knocked his
head against the low ceilings, and ran against the pillars that
supported the beams. 'In the middle of the roof,' he wrote, 'is a hole
to let out smoke, which, however, departs not without making the whole
room as black as a chimney. The opening serves also to let in the light;
the doors are full of holes and crevices, through which the women and
children keep peeping.' Needless to say nothing has changed in the last
hundred and thirty years, unless it is that the women are bolder. I
looked down from the roof this morning on Phari town, lying like a
rabbit-warren beneath the fort. All one can see from the battlement are
the flat roofs of low black houses, from which smoke issues in dense
fumes. The roofs are stacked with straw, and connected by a web of
coloured praying-flags running from house to house, and sometimes over
the narrow alleys that serve as streets. Enormous fat ravens perch on
the wall, and innumerable flocks of twittering sparrows. For warmth's
sake most of the rooms are underground, and in these subterranean dens
Tibetans, black as coal-heavers, huddle together with yaks and mules.
Tibetan women, equally dirty, go about, their faces smeared and blotched
with caoutchouc, wearing a red, hoop-like head-dress, ornamented with
alternate turquoises and ruby-coloured stones.
In the fort the first thing one meets of a morning is a troop of these
grimy sirens, climbing the stairs, burdened with buckets of chopped ice
and sacks of yak-dung, the two necessaries of life. The Tibetan coolie
women are merry folk; they laugh and chatter over their work all day
long, and do not in the least resist the familiarities of the Gurkha
soldiers. Sometimes as they pass one they giggle coyly, and put out the
tongue, which is their way of showing respect to those in high places;
but when one hears their laughter echoing down the stairs it is
difficult to believe that it is not intended for saucy impudence. Their
merriment sounds unnatural in all this filth and cold and discomfort.
Certainly if Bogle returned to Phari he would find the women very much
bolder, though, I am afraid, not any cleaner. Could he see the
Englishmen in Phari to-day, he might not recognise his compatriots.
Often in civilized places I shall think of the group at Phari in the
mess-room after dinner--a group of ruffianly-looking bandits in a
blackened, smut-begrimed room, clad in wool and fur from head to foot,
bearded like wild men of the woods, and sitting round a yak-dung fire,
drinking rum. After a week at Phari the best-groomed man might qualify
for a caricature of Bill Sikes. Perhaps one day in Piccadilly one may
encounter a half-remembered face, and something familiar in walk or gait
may reveal an old friend of the Jong. Then in 'Jimmy's,' memories of
argol-smoke and frozen moustaches will give a zest to a bottle of beaune
or chablis, which one had almost forgotten was once dreamed of among the
unattainable luxuries of life.
_March 26-28._
Orders have come to advance from Phari Jong. It seems impossible,
unnatural, that we are going on. After a week or two the place becomes
part of one's existence; one feels incarcerated there. It is difficult
to imagine life anywhere else. One feels as if one could never again be
cold or dirty, or miserably uncomfortable, without thinking of that gray
fortress with its strange unknown history, standing alone in the
desolate plain. For my own part, speaking figuratively--and unfigurative
language is impotent on an occasion like this--the place will leave an
indelible black streak--very black indeed--on a kaleidoscopic past.
There can be no faint impressions in one's memories of Phari Jong. The
dirt and smoke and dust are elemental, and the cold is the cold of the
Lamas' frigid hell.
All the while I was in Phari I forgot the mystery of Tibet. I have felt
it elsewhere, but in the Jong I only wondered that the inscrutable folk
who had lived in the rooms where we slept, and fled in the night, were
content with their smut-begrimed walls, blackened ceilings, and
chimneyless roofs, and still more how amidst these murky environments
any spiritual instincts could survive to inspire the religious
frescoings on the wall. Yet every figure in this intricate blending of
designs is significant and symbolical. One's first impression is that
these allegories and metaphysical abstractions must have been
meaningless to the inmates of the Jong; for we in Europe cannot
dissociate the artistic expression of religious feeling from cleanliness
and refinement, or at least pious care. One feels that they must be the
relics of a decayed spirituality, preserved not insincerely, but in
ignorant superstition, like other fetishes all over the world. Yet this
feeling of scepticism is not so strong after a month or two in Tibet. At
first one is apt to think of these dirty people as merely animal and
sensual, and to attribute their religious observances to the fear of
demons who will punish the most trivial omission in ritual.
Next one begins to wonder if they really believe in the efficacy of
mechanical prayer, if they take the trouble to square their conscience
with their inclinations, and if they have any sincere desire to be
absorbed in the universal spirit. Then there may come a suspicion that
the better classes, though not given to inquiry, have a settled dogma
and definite convictions about things spiritual and natural that are
not easily upset. Perhaps before we turn our backs on the mystery of
Tibet we will realize that the Lamas despise us as gross materialists
and philistines--we who are always groping and grasping after the
particular, while they are absorbed in the sublime and universal.
After all, devious and unscrupulous as their policy may have been, the
Tibetans have had one definite aim in view for centuries--the
preservation of their Church and State by the exclusion of all foreign
and heretical influences. When we know that the Mongol cannot conceive
of the separation of the spiritual and temporal Government, it is only
natural to infer that the first mission, spiritual or otherwise, to a
foreign Court should introduce the first elements of dissolution in a
system of Government that has held the country intact for centuries. And
let it be remarked that Great Britain is not responsible for this
deviation in a hitherto inveterate policy.
But to return to Phari. My last impression of the place as I passed out
of its narrow alleys was a very dirty old man, seated on a heap of
yak-dung over the gutter. He was turning his prayer-wheel, and muttering
the sacred formula that was to release him from all rebirth in this
suffering world. The wish seemed natural enough.
It was a bright, clear morning when we turned our backs on the old fort
and started once more on the road to Lhasa. Five miles from Phari we
passed the miserable little village of Chuggya, which is apparently
inhabited by ravens and sparrows, and a diminutive mountain-finch that
looks like a half-starved robin. A mile to the right before entering the
village is the monastery of the Red Lamas, which was the lodging-place
of the Bhutanese Envoy during his stay at Phari. The building, which is
a landmark for miles, is stone-built, and coated over with red earth,
which gives it the appearance of brick. Its overhanging gables,
mullioned windows without glass, that look like dominoes in the
distance, the pendent bells, and the gay decorations of Chinese paper,
look quaint and mystical, and are in keeping with the sacred character
of the place. Bogle stopped here on October 27, 1774, and drank tea with
the Abbot. It is very improbable that any other white man has set foot
in the monastery since, until the other day, when some of the garrison
paid it a visit and took photographs of the interior. The Lamas were a
little deprecatory, but evidently amused. I did not expect them to be so
tolerant of intrusion, and their clamour for backsheesh on our departure
dispelled one more illusion.
At Chuggya we were at the very foot of Chumulari (23,930 feet), which
seems to rise sheer from the plain. The western flank is an abrupt wall
of rock, but, as far as one can see, the eastern side is a gradual
ascent of snow, which would present no difficulties to the trained
mountaineer. One could ride up to 17,000 feet, and start the climb from
a base 2,000 feet higher than Mont Blanc. Chumulari is the most sacred
mountain in Tibet, and it is usual for devout Buddhists to stop and
offer a sacrifice as they pass. Bogle gives a detailed account of the
service, the rites of which are very similar to some I witnessed at
Galingka on the Tibetan New Year, February 16.
'Here we halted,' he wrote in his journal, 'and the servants gathering
together a parcel of dried cow-dung, one of them struck fire with his
tinder-box and lighted it. When the fire was well kindled, Parma took
out a book of prayers, one brought a copper cup, another filled it with
a kind of fermented liquor out of a new-killed sheep's paunch, mixing in
some rice and flour; and after throwing some dried herbs and flour into
the flame, they began their rites. Parma acted as chaplain. He chanted
the prayers in a loud voice, the others accompanying him, and every now
and then the little cup was emptied towards the rock, about eight or ten
of these libations being poured forth. The ceremony was finished by
placing upon the heap of stones the little ensign which my fond
imagination had before offered up to my own vanity.'
Most of the flags and banners one sees to-day on the chortens and roofs
of houses, and cairns on the mountain-tops, must be planted with some
such inaugural ceremony.
Facing Chumulari on the west, and apparently only a few miles distant,
are the two Sikkim peaks of Powhunri (23,210 feet) and Shudu-Tsenpa
(22,960 feet). From Chuggya the Tangla is reached by a succession of
gradual rises and depressions. The pass is not impressive, like the
Jelap, as a passage won through a great natural barrier. One might cross
it without noticing the summit, were it not for the customary cairns and
praying-flags which the Lamas raise in all high places.
From a slight rise on the east of the pass one can look down across the
plateau on Tuna, an irregular black line like a caterpillar, dotted with
white spots, which glasses reveal to be tents. The Bamtso lake lies
shimmering to the east beneath brown and yellow hills. At noon objects
dance elusively in the mirage. Distances are deceptive. Yaks grazing are
like black Bedouin tents. Here, then, is the forbidden land. The
approach is as it should be. One's eyes explore the road to Lhasa dimly
through a haze. One would not have it laid out with the precision of a
diagram.