At first the waiting among those iris-clad meadows was pleasant and idyllic enough; the country people brought abundant supplies, and members of the staff rode through the neighbourhood and had tea with various dignitaries of the Church; but early in May things took a turn for the worse. It was reported that the Tibetans were fortifying the Karo La, the next pass on the Lhasa road; and, since it is the first principle of frontier warfare to strike quickly, Colonel Brander was dispatched with the larger part of the garrison to disperse them. He performed the task with conspicuous success, and the incident is remarkable for one of the strangest pieces of fighting in our military history. It was necessary to enfilade a sangar in which the enemy was ensconced, and a native officer, Wassawa Singh, with twelve Gurkhas, was detached for the work. They climbed by means of cracks and chimneys up a 1,500 feet cliff—an exploit which would have done credit to any Alpine club, even if the climbers had not been cumbered with weapons, exposed to fire, and labouring at a height of nearly 19,000 feet.
During the engagement disquieting news arrived from Gyangtse that the jong had been reoccupied by the enemy and that the Mission was undergoing a continuous bombardment. Colonel Brander hurried back, to find that the world had moved fast in his absence, and that there was a new type of Tibetan army to be faced—a type possessed of both dash and persistence, with some notion of strategy, and with guns which, at short range, could do real execution. So began the blockade of the Mission house; an imperfect blockade, for the telegraph wires remained intact, the mail was delivered with fair regularity, and the besieged endured no special privations. "The honours," says Mr. Perceval Landon,* "were pretty evenly divided. Neither the Tibetans nor we were able to storm the other's defences; a mutual fusillade compelled each side to protect its occupants by an elaborate system of traverses; and straying beyond the narrow tracts of the fortifications was, on either side, severely discouraged by the other."
* Lhasa, by Perceval Landon.
An attempt to cut our communications failed, and by the capture of Pala the garrison greatly strengthened its position. Our troops had an experience of the type of fighting which has scarcely been known since the great sackings of the Thirty Years' War. In an upland country we expect attacks on fortified hilltops, and long-range encounters, such as we saw in South Africa. But in an episode like the capture of Naini, it was mediæval street fighting that we had to face. The Castle of Otranto provided no more endless labyrinths than those Tibetan monasteries. "Bands of desperate swordsmen were found in knots under trap-doors and behind sharp turnings. They would not surrender, and had to be killed by rifle shots fired at a distance of a few feet."
On the 26th June General Macdonald arrived with a relieving force, and soon after came the Tongsa Penlop, the temporal ruler of Bhutan, a genial potentate in rich vari-coloured robes and a Homburg hat. The Tibetan offensive had weakened, but the jong had to be taken before the Mission could advance. Down the middle of the precipitous south-eastern face of the great rock ran a deep fissure, across which walls had been built. It was decided to breach these walls by our gun fire and then to attack by way of the cleft. The actual assault was a brilliant and intrepid exploit, for which Lieutenant Grant of the 8th Gurkhas most deservedly received the Victoria Cross. With our guns battering the walls above, he and his men scrambled up the ravine, while masses of rubble poured down on them, and every now and then carried off a man. Then the Gurkhas' bugles warned the guns to cease, and the last climb began up a face so steep that there was no possible shelter from the enemy's fire. By such desperate mountaineering the invaders at last reached the wreckage of the Tibetan wall. Grant and one of the Gurkhas were the first two men over, and to the observers below their death seemed a certainty. They were two against the whole enemy force in the Jong, and had the Tibetans reserved their fire and waited at the bastions, they could have picked off every man of the assault as his head appeared above the breach. But the bold course proved the wise one, and presently the garrison surrendered. Rarely has the Victoria Cross been better earned, and it is satisfactory to know that Lieutenant Grant reaped the reward of perfect fearlessness and received only a slight wound.
III
On the 14th July the expedition moved out from Gyangtse along the road to Lhasa. Grass and a glory of flowers covered the glens which led up to the Karo La. The serious fighting was over, and the second crossing of that pass was remarkable only for the fact that some rock platforms and caves had to be cleared by our panting troops at an altitude of over 19,000 feet. In the rest of the story the soldier finds little place, and the interest attaches itself to the durbars of the Commissioner and the treasure-house of natural and artistic wonders which the Mission was approaching. For after Gyangtse the resistance of the Tibetans was at an end. Half-sullenly and half-curiously they permitted our advance, delaying us a little with fruitless negotiations, while in Lhasa the game of high politics which the Dalai Lama had played was turning against him, and, like another deity, he was meditating a pilgrimage.
After the Karo La came the Yam-dok—or, as some call it, the Yu-tso or Turquoise Lake—the most wonderful natural feature of the plateau. Its curious shape, its pale blue waters, its shores of white sand fringed with dog-roses and forget-me-nots, the cloud of fable which has always brooded over it, and its august environment, make it unique among the lakes of the world. I quote a fragment of Mr. Landon's description:—
"Below lie both the outer and the inner lakes, this following with counter-indentations the in-and-out windings of the other's shore-line. The mass and colour of the purple distance is Scotland at her best—Scotland, too, in the slow drift of a slant-roofed raincloud in among the hills. At one's feet the water is like that of the Lake of Geneva. But the tattered outline of the beach, with its projecting lines of needle-rocks, its wide, white curving sandspits, its jagged islets, its precipitous spurs, and, above all, the mysterious tarns strung one beyond another into the heart of the hills, all these are the Yam-dok's own, and not another's. If you are lucky, you may see the snowy slopes of To-nang gartered by the waters, and always on the horizon are the everlasting ice-fields of the Himalayas, bitterly ringing with argent the sun and colour of the still blue lake. You will not ask for the added glories of a Tibetan sunset; the grey spin and scatter of a rain-threaded afterglow, or the tangled sweep of a thundercloud's edge against the blue, will give you all you wish, and you will have seen the finest view in all this strange land."
On the shore lies the convent of Samding, the home of the Dorje Phagmo, or pig goddess, which was jealously respected by the troops, since its abbess had nursed Chundra Dass, one of the adventurous agents of the Indian Government, when he fell sick during his travels. The present incarnation, a little girl of six, declined to reveal herself. Nothing was more satisfactory in the whole tale of the expedition than the way in which any service done at any time to a British subject, white or black, met with full recognition. Such conduct cannot have failed to have raised the prestige of the Power which showed itself so mindful of its servants. Prestige and reputation of a kind, indeed, we already possessed. Tibetan monasteries had a trick of sending their most valuable belongings to the nearest convent, for, they argued, the English do not enter nunneries or war with women.