On one or other of these animals the rice-bag would eventually reach Lhassa, or, if it foregathered with the Lhassa column on its way up, it might be handed over to one of the coolis who accompanied that column. It probably reached Lhassa intact, its waterproof bag having protected it from all weathers; but it might also have got a small hole somewhere among its ample coverings, and lost a pound or two on the way, or—for such is human nature—arrive still weighing the original eighty pounds, but containing a stone or two in the place where some few odd pounds of rice ought to have been.
The manners and customs of our various transport animals would form an interesting study in natural history. The yak, to the uninitiated intruder, was of course the most striking. The mule we know, and the donkey we know, and the cooli was more or less of the same species as ourselves; but the yak was a novelty. The yak is a buffalo in petticoats. This seems an incongruous combination, for the à priori idea of a buffalo is of something fierce, and of petticoats, of something not fierce. But in this case petticoat influence has altogether prevailed, for the yak is the mildest natured of animals. He moves very slowly, takes life very quietly, and is content with little here below, or rather here above, for if you take him below 9,000 feet he pines for the heights. I believe he is really at his cosiest when lying in a snowdrift on a winter's day with his petticoats around him and only his horns showing. He then feels really well tucked up.
Both yaks and donkeys were very cheap forms of transport. It is true that yaks had a way of dying and donkeys of deserting, but even so their initial cost was very small, they needed very few drivers in proportion to their numbers, and possessed the art of living on the country. An animal that along a line of communications of some four hundred miles' length, and lying in an inhospitable country, neither asks you to bring him up fodder or even grain from the base, nor yet expects you to go foraging for him, is indeed a treasure.
The yak and donkey drivers were Tibetans, as also were many of the hospital ambulance carriers. The most noticeable points about these Tibetans were that they were inveterate gamblers, and were also very much married. The idea of accompanying us without their womenkind was quite foreign to them, and we had to accede to their prejudices in the matter. Merry little souls those women mostly were. Their foreheads and noses usually smeared with that pigment of sows' blood which proclaims to the world the Tibetan woman's chastity, they were ever to be seen laughing or chaffing one another, either on the march or else in camp, over their domestic duties or their knitting. Their stocking-knitting was of a high order, except that the art of 'turning a heel' was unknown to them.
I remember passing a knot of them one day as we climbed one of the worst passes that we had to encounter on the march—a climb of four thousand feet without a break. Hill people know better than any one the advantage of breathing rhythmically, and the Tibetan loves to acquire this rhythm by singing over any work that strains him at all. Tibetan men and women, as they thresh their corn with the flail, chant pretty ditties in unison, and Tibetan boatmen on the Sangpo will sometimes sing to their work. And here was this band of women singing cheerily as they climbed that mountain side, and never pausing in their song. They were well up with the advance guard too, and the chorus could be heard all down the column—a novel sort of band with which to cheer a British army onwards on a toilsome march!
The cooli too, especially he who hied from the hinterland of Darjiling, was as merry a soul as you meet on a day's march. Some were quite boys, not more than sixteen, yet the way they shouldered their loads was wonderful. The regulation load was eighty pounds, but I have often seen quite a youngster with a hundred pounds on his back, taking it steadily along up thousands of feet, and taking it as a matter of course, and giving you a grinning greeting as you passed him. When off duty, they would be for ever skipping about like mountain goats, skylarking, and pulling one another about. The supervising staff of Ghurkhas, too, all had the jolly Ghurkha face. For a cheery family party it would be hard to beat that cooli corps.
But that Lhassa column with its train of transport has got well out of the bog by now, and it behoves us to overtake it.