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.