There are just about half a dozen prime necessities of no great bulk which always seem to run out sooner than expected on field service. A reserve in a supply column of the following would always come in useful: of matches, three mule loads; of wax candles, seven mule loads; of soap, ten mule loads; of some strong forbidding kind of tobacco that in times of privation would go a very long way, ten mule loads; of chocolate creams and barley sugar, thirty mule loads. Sixty such mules laid out per brigade would be much blessed.
When relations with the Tibetans had become less strained, we used to go in organised parties to visit the bazaar in Lhassa city itself. These parties reminded one of a Sunday-school treat. The part of curate would be played by some field-officer who would collect his school children outside camp. These would consist of those officers, soldiers, sepoys, and followers whose turn it was to go. He would conduct us with careful supervision from the camp to the city, and there let us loose for two hours to play in the bazaar. The bazaar was one circular street, surrounding the cathedral which, though once or twice entered by favoured individuals, was out of bounds for us.
In the city the same kinds of things were for sale as were brought to the camp bazaar, but there was a larger variety of imported goods. How some of those things ever got to Lhassa was a mystery. In one shop I saw a whole row of small looking-glasses 'made in Austria,' and beside them a score or so of penknives 'made in Germany.' The British tradesman's pictorial almanac will, I suppose, be found hanging on the gates of the new Jerusalem; it had certainly penetrated Lhassa, usually in the form of a royal family group. One coronation group on the wall of a Kashmiri shop was especially fine. Strangest of all to find was a bicycle of the Rover pattern—quite out of gear, but doubtless interesting to the Tibetan as a Western curio. He may have thought it was a species of Christian prayer-wheel.
I was short of dinner plates, and bought one. It was of tin, and had stamped on it a comprehensive lesson in both political and physical geography. All round the rim faces of clocks were stamped. Each face was encircled with a scroll containing the name and the number of the population of some large city of the world, while the clock in the centre showed what the time was in that city when the clock in London stood at twelve noon. The population of London as stamped on the plate stood at quite a low figure, but London was selected as the honoured city whose clock should stand at the precise hour of noon, and the whole geography lesson was in English. One would therefore come to the conclusion that the plate was a British product, dating back to the period of some not very recent census. To have traced that plate from Birmingham to Lhassa would have been interesting.
Beggars swarmed in the bazaar. One man earned an obviously ample livelihood by carrying his grandfather on his back through the streets. The grandfather was certainly the quintessence of decrepitude, and as such would appeal to the benevolent, who apparently never thought of suggesting to the young man that it would be better to leave grandfather at home in bed, and go out unencumbered to earn an honest living. Malefactors in chains are also seen crawling about, a peripatetic prison being apparently less felt by the Lhassa exchequer than one of bricks and mortar.
CHAPTER XXI
ENOUGH OF LHASSA: A TRIP DOWN COUNTRY: LIFE IN A POST: TRUE HOSPITALITY: A BHUTYA PONY
Since I reached India, I have been told that every moment I spent in the romantic environs of Lhassa must have been intensely interesting, and that to have been to Lhassa is the envy of the world. I suppose, like the brute one is, one got blasé and indifferent to one's good fortune, but it is certain that those 'crowded hours of glorious life' began to pall. We did the best we could to while away the time. An energetic race committee provided gymkhanas and a 'sky meeting' (just, says the intelligent foreigner, what a British army would indulge in, on arrival at such a place). A football tournament followed. Football at thirteen thousand feet is like playing the game at an ordinary level—with an eighty-pound load on your back. Less strain on the lungs was a rifle meeting. To escort our military or political betters to the city on a state visit was another mild form of entertainment. The Chinese Amban often received such visits. The ordinary officer who formed part of the escort did not take part in the actual visit. He stayed outside on the doorsteps. Sometimes he was known to go into the Amban's kitchen, where an elderly matron gave him a cup of tea.
Luckily, though it rained generally once in the twenty-four hours, it did so mostly at night, so that we were seldom confined to our tents in the daytime. Even so, we felt rather like prisoners. Going out beyond the vicinity of the camp meant going out armed, and proceeding to any distance meant being accompanied by an escort, such precautions having been specially indicated by the attack made on two officers by a certain fanatical lama.