GOSSIP ON THE ROAD TO THE FRONT
ARI, SIKKIM,
_June 24._
I write in an old forest rest-house on the borders of British Bhutan.
The place is quiet and pastoral; climbing roses overhang the roof and
invade the bedrooms; martins have built their nests in the eaves;
cuckoos are calling among the chestnuts down the hill. Outside is a
flower-garden, gay with geraniums and petunias and familiar English
plants that have overrun their straggling borders and scattered
themselves in the narrow plot of grass that fringes the forest. Some
Government officer must have planted them years ago, and left them to
fight it out with Nature and the caretaker.
The forest has encroached, and it is hard to say where Nature's hand or
Art's begins and ends. Beside a rose-bush there has sprung up the solid
pink club of the wild ginger, and from a bed of amaryllis a giant arum
raises itself four feet in its dappled, snake-like sheath. Gardens have
most charm in spots like this, where their mingled trimness and neglect
contrast with the insolent unconcern of an encroaching forest.
At Ari I am fifty miles from Darjeeling, on the road to Lhasa.
On June 21 I set my face to Lhasa for the second time. I took another
route to Chumbi, viâ Kalimpong and Pedong in British Bhutan. The road is
no further, but it compasses some arduous ascents. On the other hand it
avoids the low, malarious valleys of Sikkim, where the path is
constantly carried away by slips. There is less chance of a block, and
one is above the cholera zone. The Jelap route, which I strike
to-morrow, is closed, owing to cholera and land-slips, so that I shall
not touch the line of communications until within a few miles of Chumbi,
in which time my wound will have had a week longer to heal before I risk
a medical examination and the chance of being sent back. The relief
column is due at Gyantse in a few days; it depends on the length of the
operations there whether I catch the advance to Lhasa.
Through avoiding the Nathu-la route to Chumbi I had to arrange my own
transport. In Darjeeling my coolies bolted without putting a pack on
their backs. More were secured; these disappeared in the night at
Kalimpong without waiting to be paid. Pack-ponies were hired to replace
them, but these are now in a state of collapse. Arguing, and haggling,
and hectoring, and blarneying, and persuading are wearisome at all
times, but more especially in these close steamy valleys, where it is
too much trouble to lift an eyelid, and the air induces an almost
immoral state of lassitude, in which one is tempted to dole out silver
indifferently to anyone who has it in his power to oil the wheels of
life. I could fill a whole chapter with a jeremiad on transport, but it
is enough to indicate, to those who go about in vehicles, that there are
men on the road to Tibet now who would beggar themselves and their
families for generations for a macadamized highway and two hansom cabs
to carry them and their belongings smoothly to Lhasa. Before I reached
Kalimpong I wished I had never left the 'radius.' No one should embark
on Asiatic travel who is not thoroughly out of harmony with
civilization.
The servant question is another difficulty. No native bearer wishes to
join the field force. Why should he? He has to cook and pack and do the
work of three men; he has to make long, exhausting marches; he is
exposed to hunger, cold, and fatigue; he may be under fire every day;
and he knows that if he falls into the hands of the Tibetans, like the
unfortunate servants of Captain Parr at Gyantse, he will be brutally
murdered and cut up into mincemeat. In return for which he is fed and
clothed, and earns ten rupees more a month than he would in the security
of his own home. After several unsuccessful trials, I have found one
Jung Bir, a Nepali bearer, who is attached to me because I forget
sometimes to ask for my bazaar account, and do not object to his being
occasionally drunk. In Tibet the poor fellow will have little chance of
drinking.
My first man lost his nerve altogether, and, when told to work, could
only whine out that his father and mother were not with him. My next
applicant was an opium-eater, prematurely bent and aged, with the dazed
look of a toad that has been incarcerated for ages in a rock, and is at
last restored to light and the world by the blow of a mason's hammer. He
wanted money to buy more dreams, and for this he was willing to expose
his poor old body to hardships that would have killed him in a month.
Jung Bir was a Gurkha and more martial. His first care on being engaged
was to buy a long and heavy chopper--'for making mince,' he said; but I
knew it was for the Tibetans.
To reach Ari one has to descend twice, crossing the Teesta at 700 feet,
and the Russett Chu at 1,500 feet. These valleys are hotter than the
plains of India. The streams run east and west, and the cliffs on both
sides catch the heat of the early morning sun and hold it all day. The
closeness, the refraction from the rocks, and the evaporation of the
water, make the atmosphere almost suffocating, and one feels the heat
the more intensely by the change from the bracing air above. Crossing
the Teesta, one enters British Bhutan, a strip of land of less than 300
square miles on the left bank of the river. It was ceded to us with
other territories by the treaty of 1865; or, in plain words, it was
annexed by us as a punishment for the outrage on Sir Ashley Eden, the
British Envoy, who was captured and grossly insulted by the Bhutanese at
Punakha in the previous year. The Bhutanese were as arrogant, exclusive,
and impossible to deal with, in those days, as the Tibetans are to-day.
Yet they have been brought into line, and are now our friends. Why
should not the Tibetans, who are of the same stock, yield themselves to
enlightenment? Their evolution would be no stranger.
Nine miles above the Teesta bridge is Kalimpong, the capital of British
Bhutan, and virtually the foreign mart for what trade passes out of
Tibet. The Tomos of the Chumbi Valley, who have the monopoly of the
carrying, do not go further south than this. At Kalimpong I found a
horse-dealer with a good selection of 'Bhutia tats.' These excellent
little beasts are now well known to be as strong and plucky a breed of
mountain ponies as can be found anywhere. I discovered that their fame
is not merely modern when I came across what must be the first reference
to them in history in the narrative of Master Ralph Fitch, England's
pioneer to India. 'These northern merchants,' says Fitch, speaking of
the Bhutia, 'report that in their countrie they haue very good horses,
but they be litle.' The Bhutias themselves, equally ubiquitous in the
Sikkim Himalayas, but not equally indispensable, Fitch describes to the
letter. At Kalimpong I found them dirty, lazy, good-natured, independent
rascals, possessed, apparently, of wealth beyond their deserts, for hard
work is as alien to their character as straight dealing. Even the
drovers will pay a coolie good wages to cut grass for them rather than
walk a mile downhill to fetch it themselves.
The main street of Kalimpong is laid out in the correct boulevard style,
with young trees protected by tubs and iron railings. It is dominated by
the church of the Scotch Mission, whose steeple is a landmark for miles.
The place seems to be overrun with the healthiest-looking English
children I have seen anywhere, whose parents are given over to very
practical good works.
I took the Bhutan route chiefly to avoid running the gauntlet of the
medicals; but another inducement was the prospect of meeting Father
Desgodins, a French Roman Catholic, Vicar Apostolic of the Roman
Catholic Mission to Western Tibet, who, after fifty years' intimacy with
various Mongol types, is probably better acquainted with the Tibetans
than any other living European.
I met Father Desgodins at Pedong. The rest-house here looks over the
valley to his symmetrical French presbytery and chapel, perched on the
hillside amid waving maize-fields, whose spring verdure is the greenest
in the world. Scattered over the fields are thatched Lamas' houses and
low-storied gompas, with overhanging eaves and praying-flags--'horses
of the wind,' as the Tibetans picturesquely call them, imagining that
the prayers inscribed on them are carried to the good god, whoever he
may be, who watches their particular fold and fends off intruding
spirits as well as material invaders.
Behind the presbytery are terraced rice-fields, irrigated by perennial
streams, and bordered by thick artemisia scrub, which in the hot sun,
after rain, sends out an aromatic scent, never to be dissociated in
travellers' dreams and reveries from these great southern slopes of the
Himalayas.
Père Desgodins is an erect old gentleman with quiet, steely gray eyes
and a tawny beard now turning gray. He is known to few Englishmen, but
his adventurous travels in Tibet and his devoted, strenuous life are
known throughout Europe.
He was sent out from France to the Tibet Mission shortly after the
murder of Krick and Bourry by the Mishmis. Failing to enter Tibet from
the south through Sikkim, he made preparations for an entry by Ladak.
His journey was arrested by the Indian Mutiny, when he was one of the
besieged at Agra. He afterwards penetrated Western Tibet as far as
Khanam, but was recalled to the Chinese side, where he spent twenty-two
perilous and adventurous years in the establishment of the mission at
Batang and Bonga. The mission was burnt down and the settlement expelled
by the Lamas. In 1888 Father Desgodins was sent to Pedong, his present
post, as Pro-vicar of the Mission to Western Tibet.
With regard to the present situation in Tibet, Father Desgodins
expressed astonishment at our policy of folded arms.
'You have missed the occasion,' he said; 'you should have made your
treaty with the Tibetans themselves in 1888. You could have forced them
to treat then, when they were unprepared for a military invasion. You
should have said to them'--here Père Desgodins took out his watch--'"It
is now one o'clock. Sign that treaty by five, or we advance to-morrow."
What could they have done? Now you are too late. They have been
preparing for this for the last fifteen years.'
Father Desgodins was right. It is the old story of ill-advised
conciliation and forbearance. We were afraid of the bugbear of China.
The British Government says to her victim after the chastisement:
'You've had your lesson. Now run off and be good.' And the spoilt child
of arrested civilization runs off with his tongue in his cheek and
learns to make new arms and friends. The British Government in the
meantime sleeps in smug complacency, and Exeter Hall is appeased.
'But why did you not treat with the Tibetans themselves?' Père Desgodins
asked. 'China!'--here he made an expressive gesture--'I have known China
for fifty years. She is not your friend.' Of course it is to the
interest of China to keep the tea monopoly, and to close the market to
British India. Travellers on the Chinese borders are given passports and
promises of assistance, but the natives of the districts they traverse
are ordered to turn them back and place every obstacle in their way.
Nobody knows this better than Father Desgodins. China's policy is the
same with nations as with individuals. She will always profess
willingness to help, but protest that her subjects are unmanageable and
out of hand. Why, then, deal with China at all? We can only answer that
she had more authority in Lhasa in 1888. Moreover, we were more afraid
of offending her susceptibilities. But that bubble has burst.
Others who hold different views from Père Desgodins say that this very
unruliness of her vassal ought to make China welcome our intervention in
Tibet, if we engage to respect her claims there when we have subdued the
Lamas. This policy might certainly point a temporary way out of the
muddle, whereby we could save our face and be rid of the Tibet incubus
for perhaps a year. But the plan of leaving things to the suzerain Power
has been tried too often.
As I rode down the Pedong street from the presbytery someone called me
by name, and a little, smiling, gnome-like man stepped out of a
whitewashed office. It was Phuntshog, a Tibetan friend whom I had known
six years previously on the North-East frontier. I dismounted,
expecting entertainment.
The office was bare of furniture save a new writing-table and two
chairs, but heaped round the walls were piles of cast steel and iron
plates and files and pipes for bellows. Phuntshog explained that he was
frontier trade examiner, and that the steel had been purchased in
Calcutta by a Lama last year, and was confiscated on the frontier as
contraband. It was material for an armoury. The spoilt child was making
new arms, like the schoolboy who exercises his muscle to avenge himself
after a beating.
'Do you get much of this sort of thing?' I asked.
'Not now,' he said; 'they have given up trying to get it through this
way.'
A few years ago eight Mohammedans, experts in rifle manufacture, had
been decoyed from a Calcutta factory to Lhasa. Two had died there, and
one I traced at Yatung. His wife had not been allowed to pass the
barrier, but he was given a Tibetan helpmate. The wife lived some months
at Yatung, and used to receive large instalments from her husband; once,
I was told, as much as Rs. 1,400. But he never came back. The Tibetans
have learned to make rifles for themselves now. Phuntshog had a story
about another suspicious character, a mysterious Lama who arrived in
Darjeeling in 1901 from Calcutta with 5,000 alms bowls for Tibet, which
he said he had purchased in Germany. The man was detained in Darjeeling
five months under police espionage, and finally sent back to Calcutta.
Our Intelligence Department on this frontier is more alert than it used
to be. Dorjieff, Phuntshog told me, had been to Darjeeling twice, and
stayed in a trader's house at Kalimpong several days. He wore the dress
of a Lama. The ostensible object of his journey was to visit the sacred
Chorten at Khatmandu and the shrines of Benares. He visited these, and
was known to spend some time in Calcutta. On the occasion of the mission
to St. Petersburg Dorjieff and his colleagues entered India through
Nepal, took train to Bombay, and shipped thence to Odessa. The discovery
of the Lamas' visit to India was almost simultaneous with their
departure from Bombay.
Phuntshog is not an admirer of our Tibetan policy. We ought to have laid
ourselves out, he said, to influence the Lamas by secret agents, as
Russia did. There was no chance of a compromise now; they would fight to
the death. Phuntshog said much more which I suspected was inspired by
the daily newspapers, so I questioned him as to the feelings of the
natives of the district.
'The feeling of patriotism is extinct,' he said; and he looked at his
stomach, showing that he spoke the truth. 'We Tibetan British subjects
are fed well and paid well by your Government. We want nothing more. My
family are here. Now I have no trade to examine.' His eyes slowly
surveyed the room, glanced over his office table, with its pen and ink
and blank paper, lit on the 150 maunds of cast-steel, and finally rested
on two volumes by his elbow.
'Do you read much?' I asked.
'Sometimes,' he said. 'I have learnt a good deal from these books.'
They were the Holy Bible and Miss Braddon's 'Dead Men's Shoes.'
'Phuntshog,' I said, 'you are a psychological enigma. Your mind is like
that cast-iron huddled in the corner there, bought in an enlightened
Western city and destined for your benighted Lhasa, but stuck halfway.
Only it was going the other way. You don't understand? Neither do I.'
And here at Ari, as I look across the valley of the Russett Chu to
Pedong, and hear the vesper bell, I cannot help thinking of that strange
conflict of minds--the devotee who, seeing further than most men, has
cared nothing for the things of this incarnation, and Phuntshog, the
strange hybrid product of restless Western energies, stirring and
muddying the shallows of the Eastern mind. Or are they depths?
Who knows? I know nothing, only that these men are inscrutable, and one
cannot see into their hearts.