From Gyantse to Ralung is a steady upward incline, and took us three days. It rained most of the time, both day and night; it was difficult to get dry again when once you were wet, and there was a good deal of discomfort experienced in all quarters. One camping ground was particularly unpleasant, which for the most part consisted of ploughed land that was not only soaking with the rain, but had recently been irrigated. As we had risen considerably higher than the Gyantse plain, the crops on this and similar ground had hardly begun to show. In fact, from here onwards for many days to come, there seemed very little chance of obtaining any grazing for our animals. We had taken all the transport we could, and loaded it with as many supplies as possible, all selected according to our known needs on the one hand, and the possible but unknown resources of the country on the other; but even so our prospects were not rosy. The mule, for instance, cannot live on grain alone: he must have fodder, and one mule in a very few days will consume as much fodder as is equivalent in weight to his own authorised load. Hence, if you provide a mule with a reserve of fodder to last him that number of days and make him carry it, you might just as well leave him behind, since he will then be able to carry nothing else except his own fodder. This, in a country where fodder is not locally procurable, is, at any rate in the case of the pack mule, one of the great problems of army transport, and we were brought face to face with it more than once during this march. Grain too is heavy stuff, or, in other words, gets quickly consumed. We used over two hundred maunds a day, or more than a hundred mule loads, and so could not start our march with many days' supply in reserve without excluding other things that also had to be carried. The next heaviest item was tsampa (the Tibetan barley flour which we were now using as a substitute for the 'áta' or coarsely ground wheat flour usually consumed by natives). Of this we used seventy maunds daily, and so had only a few days in reserve. Meat, though a large item, is much more tractable stuff, for it walks on its four feet till you kill it. It can even be of use in carrying other things. For instance, we had made up our minds that, if sheep and cows ran short, we would eat each yak that, on account of the depletion of supplies, had no longer a load to carry! The other items of food, though many of them costly and highly essential, were none of them very bulky, and of these we had been able to bring along some weeks' reserve.
Our more pressing needs were therefore confined to fodder and grain and tsampa, and many were the foraging parties that went forth on arrival in camp, or that made a detour from the line of march in search of these articles, some drawing blank, some getting very little, and some occasionally a fair haul. At Ralung we got a fair haul. There is a very fine monastery there, situated up a valley five miles from where we camped. I remember spending a very pleasant afternoon there. I had gone there, immediately after arriving in camp, with my commanding officer to see what could be got out of the place. We found some whole barley, some tsampa, and a fair stock of straw. My commanding officer left me there to await the necessary transport while he went back to camp to send it. I really had a very pleasant time, being hospitably entertained both by the monks and also the nuns—especially the latter. They brought me out 'chang' to drink, a home-brewed light wine, made I believe from barley, and the carcass of a sheep that had been cooked whole, and from which you were expected to pick off your individual requirements. It had already had a lot taken from it, and from a certain self-assertiveness that there was about it, I concluded that it had been a standing dish for a considerable period, and contented myself with my own sandwiches. Then they came and talked to me through the interpreter whom I had with me, and quite a youthful little nun in a picturesque woolly red cap came and sat beside me and did her knitting. My overcoat had been wet through for three days, and the sun coming out gave me a chance of drying it. Quite warm and cosy it all was, with ladies' society and all thrown in. I was quite sorry when, after several hours of waiting, a long serpent-shaped line of mules slowly trailed up the valley and came for the grain, the tsampa, and the straw.
We were paying again for what we foraged, and I remember doling out what must have seemed to the recipients a prodigious number of rupees. Tibetan monasteries are undeniably rich, but, especially in outlying parts, I fancy they do all their buying and selling in kind. For instance, they collect their taxes in kind, and it is certainly feasible for them to obtain labour, clothing, and such necessaries without having recourse to coin. The fact that the average Lama was unused to dealing in large sums of money seemed to always have one of two opposite effects. He either did not seem to grasp the fact that a large sum of money really represented 'articles of value,' and had no desire whatever to part with any of his possessions in exchange for it, or else, being either less ignorant and knowing its value, or more simple-minded and attracted by its glitter, he would accept the money with pronounced greed.
The effect of all the coin that we took to and left in the country must have had a curious economic effect on Tibet. For a country that trades largely by barter to be suddenly flooded with rupees should, according to the ordinary principles of political economy, raise the current prices of all commodities to an extraordinary extent. However, Tibet, queer country that it is, has probably a political economy all of its very own, and will arrange such a matter entirely differently from Western expectation.
Even our rupees, as such, were not always approved, a distinction being sometimes drawn between those enfaced with King Edward's head and those enfaced with Queen Victoria's. The latter were approved on the ground that they were 'Kampani' rupees, the Queen's face being apparently regarded as the trade mark of the East India Company, of which the past generation of Tibetans must have heard and passed on the memory to their children, who still thought it was in existence. A new symbol, such as that of a man's head, was thus naturally viewed at first with suspicion.
CHAPTER XIII
THE KARO-LÀ
The next day brought us just under the Karo-Là pass, and we camped at a height of 16,600 feet, with a great mass of snow so near us on the hillside that, while the sun was still up, it quite hurt our eyes to look in that direction. Avalanches of snow kept falling from the mass, coming down with a great thud that was almost startling. There was a little mountain sickness that night; but, considering the height and the fatigue that had been involved in reaching it, there was remarkably little. A very little reconnoitring to the front in the early afternoon had revealed the enemy in position a mile or so the other side of the pass. They had built two walls, one behind the other, on what appeared to be admirably selected ground. They seemed in fact to have been studying tactics to some purpose.
It was pleasant to get up the next morning in a sharp frost, and to get, as it were, one glimpse into winter—a glimpse, however, that only lasted till the sun got up. Cold for the past few months had not been our bugbear, but rain, and to-day there was no rain, the sky was cloudless, and the air crisp and fresh, and as soon as the sun was up, even moderately warm.