CHAPTER VI
OVER THE JALAP-LÀ: CHUMBI: BEARDS
After a week of Gnatong I was ordered to Chumbi, where the reinforcements and a portion of the old force had been concentrating preparatory to what is officially described as 'the second advance to Gyantse.'
My way lay through Kapap over the Jalap-Là, and down through Langram and Rinchingong, and thence to Chumbi. The pièce de résistance was the part between Kapap and Langram. There is an easy uninteresting pass between Gnatong and Kapap. Kapap itself looked a bleak dismal spot, lying all in the clouds at the end of a long dark lake. From here you rise to the top of the Jalap-Là, which is about 14,900 feet high. The suffix 'Là' denotes a 'pass.' There was snow on the pass which covered the road in some places. I got into a small drift once, my pony flopping down suddenly till his girths were in the snow. He knew nothing about snow in those days, and must have been very much astonished. One's first acquaintance with so high an altitude impresses one greatly. There is something so strange about the atmosphere that one feels as though one were in another planet. The effect of the atmosphere on distances is most curious. You see the details of a hill in the distance so clearly that it seems far nearer than it is. Distance-judging by eye for military purposes in high altitudes is an art governed by rules entirely different from those that govern it at an ordinary elevation.
I was a bit weak after my attack of mountain sickness, and stuck to my pony's back the whole way. I felt a natural anxiety with regard to the native followers who accompanied me—an orderly, a syce, and a bearer. They were all three plainsmen. Hills of any size whatever were quite strange to them. Whether they would live at the height of Mont Blanc was a question of some moment. I expected at any time to see one or other of them lying down gasping like a freshly caught fish. I think they all died in imagination many times before they reached the top of the pass. They turned wild eyes of anguish and reproach towards me whenever I waited to see how they were getting on. Eventually I found it best to leave them to themselves, and only know that they arrived down the far side alive, but expressing a poor opinion of Tibet as a country (for we now were in Tibet).
The walk down to Langram was trying to the toes, but brought us off the bare mountain tops and into a region of pine-woods, the very smell of which is always comforting. Here I stopped the night, descending next morning to Rinchingong, which is in the Chumbi valley, and stands barely over 9,000 feet. Two miles above Rinchingong we had passed Yatun, the frontier Tibetan village built against that Chinese wall which stretched as a barrier right across the valley, but has since been demolished by British dynamite. Here, besides the dwellings of some Tibetan inhabitants, were the houses of the British official who controls the Chinese customs in this direction, and of Miss Annie Taylor, the lady missionary who has worked for long, and all alone, among the Tibetans of the border, nursing them in sickness, and telling them of Christianity. 'Ani' is Tibetan for nun, and the name 'Ani memsahib' has therefore a double signification to those who use it.
The first glimpse of a building on the north side of the Jalap-Là proclaims the fact that you are no longer in India or under the influence of Indian ideals of domestic or other architecture. The houses in the Chumbi valley are not, however, as typically Tibetan as those further north, being far more Chinese in appearance. It is, in fact, curious that Chinese influence seems more prevalent in the Chumbi valley than in any other part of Eastern Tibet, except Lhassa itself. The number of Chinamen actually resident in the Chumbi valley is itself large, and there seems to have been a great deal of inter-marriage here at one time or another between the local Tibetans and Chinamen proper, the women of such unions having of course been Tibetan, since the Chinaman, when he goes roaming, invariably, I believe, leaves his women folk at home.
The following day brought me into Chumbi. It was pleasant to be in a big camp again, to join a large mess, and get the latest news from headquarters.
The valley itself was a delightful spot to have reached. After the unpleasantnesses of those heights that one had traversed, this valley seemed a sheer Garden of Eden. It was a place to dally in, in which to wander about accompanied by your best girl, picking wild flowers for her, and listening with her to the humming of the bees, and the bubbling of laughing brooks, rather than a place in which to concentrate an army for an advance into the enemy's country.
Chumbi would make a glorious summer sanitarium for British troops in the hot weather, provided that that projected route, which is to avoid the passes and run through Bhutan to the Bengal Duars, ever becomes an accomplished fact. Two thousand feet higher than most hill stations, and yet below the really giddy heights, in a climate no hotter at any time than an English summer, never parched with drought and never visited by protracted spells of rain, not perched on an inconvenient hilltop away from its water supply, but lying in a fertile valley, through which runs a river of pure water that knows not the germ of enteric, with enough flat spaces to hold commodious barracks and to provide good recreation grounds, it seems that it would prove an altogether desirable haven for the invalid soldiers from Calcutta and the Presidency district.