Through India and Burmah with pen and brush

by A. Hugh Fisher

There is no regiment quartered at Darjeeling, but the planters of the district make Company A of the Northern Bengal Mounted Rifles (who possessed a Maxim gun before any regular troops in India); and one morning I rode out to the Lebong parade-ground, above the Runjeet valley, to see a muster. Tea-planters and other business-men thoroughly enjoyed the occasion, and there was a spirited display of tent-pegging with swords instead of lances.

Darjeeling is about 7000 feet high on a ridge above the Runjeet River, which reaches the Ganges via another river called the Teester: and one day I rode with Righi 12 miles down to the Runjeet, and having previously obtained the necessary Government permit we crossed by a suspension bridge to a village in Independent Sikkim, where we were refreshed with native beer made from Marwa, a kind of millet seed and sucked through a hollow reed from a long-shaped vessel made of a section of bamboo.

The river here flowed along the bottom of a magnificent gorge with precipitous sides, and on the return journey I had as wild a ride as I am likely to experience.

Righi had started back a full half-hour before me, and my pony hearing afar off the neigh of his companion, galloped hard along a narrow ledge with a sheer drop below. Full of spirit, and very strong, these Thibetan ponies will gallop up a steep slope where another horse would crawl; and here, on the level, mine went like the wind, kicking loose stones into the flood below.

Near Darjeeling there is a small Llama monastery, a two-storeyed building with a broad foot-wide black border painted round the doors and window openings. Outside stand, in a semicircle, tall poles with long strips of linen prayer-flags fastened lengthwise from the tops downwards, and on each side of the main entrance a row of prayer-wheels mounted on end and fastened to the wall under wooden eaves. The sight of these last carried me back far to the West to a little Gothic church of St Nicholas in Prisiac, where a wooden prayer-wheel of local make, of which I think there are few in Europe, is dropping to pieces with age.

Within the monastery a row of clean-looking brass bowls of water stood in front of some bronze figures, and on each side of a central shrine was ranged a series of pigeon-holes containing the monastery library, while, leaning against the latter, stood some metal trumpets 6 feet long, jointed and telescopic. Upstairs I was shown the large grotesque wooden masks and beautiful brocaded silk dresses for the priest-dances.

I have travelled in many parts of the world now, but I have not yet found any place where there is no dancing. Even inanimate nature quickens into rhythmic movement. The waves dance to the sun and the stars dance in the sea, and in the world of sentient beings birds dance to their mates. It expressed the exuberance of children's joy before ever it became an art, and whether or not Aristotle was justified in his high estimate, dancing is more universal than poetry.

I could not see a Thibetan priest dance, but I did enjoy, thanks again to Mr Righi, a dance of Thibetan peasants, very elaborately costumed and weirdly pantomimic. It was called the "Amban" dance, and represented the homage of a group of Thibetan heads of villages to the "Amban," who was, as far as I could understand, some kind of ambassador or trading representative of the Chinese Government—but mingled with it were imagery and symbolism of local legend and mythology.

The dance was held at night on an open space of grass, and began with the appearance of a little strange flitting figure bearing a stick in each hand which held a white cloth stretched above the head. Up and down like some erratic moth the figure bounded, ran and postured; and presently the "Amban" presented himself grandly dressed on a hobby-horse and wearing a long peacock's feather in his conical Chinese hat. Later in the dance entered two "lions" or "dragons," gigantic creatures made up of two men each, with undulating bodies (hung with white Yak hair), tails, and wildly grotesque scarlet heads with enormous eyes and gaping "practicable" mouths, from which large red tongues flapped or depended. Then came a peacock, a sacred bird, which the dragons sought vainly to harm; and an extremely funny turtle, which they eventually devoured, the child performer slipping out of its bamboo framework before the latter was gobbled up.

Sunday morning is the best time to see the bazaar at Darjeeling, and the types of people from many different provinces. Here was a bearded Kashmiri squatting at his door, grinding seeds in a small mortar; there was a group of Nepauli ladies richly-dressed and accompanied by servants. They wore a strange head-dress, a large circular plaque fastened at an angle above the hair and ornamented with jewels; there were Lepchu men from Sikkim, bare-footed, with hats of felt-like material with folded-up brims and clothes of European pattern under ample cloaks.