A little farther up is a precipitous rock on the right side of the valley, and two caves open their black mouths in the wall. The lower one (Illust. 190) is the entrance to a passage leading to the upper, where a famous hermit has fixed his solitary abode. The upper opening has a partly natural balcony decorated with streamer-poles and ribands. Below the lower stand mani cairns, long garlands of string with coloured prayer-strips, a prayer-mast, and a metal idol in a niche of the rock.
We tethered our horses at the edge of the ice and went up to the lower grotto. Here two young nuns from Kirong (on the border of Nepal) met us, and two mendicant monks from Nepal, one of whom spoke Hindustani, so that Robert could converse with him. The nuns were pretty, well-grown, sun-burnt, and somewhat like gypsies; their large black eyes had the shimmer of velvet, and their black hair was parted on the forehead and fell in luxuriant waves over their shoulders; they were clothed in red rags and wore Tibetan boots adorned with red ribands. They spoke cheerfully and pleasantly in strikingly soft, extremely sympathetic voices, and were not in the least timid. Their simple dwelling, which we saw, was in the great entrance of the grotto, under a smoke-blackened vault, surrounded by a small wall and a palisade of pama branches, and partly hung with cloth. A sleeping-place was made of rugs of interwoven strips of cloth, and a tea-kettle was boiling on the fire. One of the men had a thick pigtail and a red lama frock; the other wore a sheepskin, and had not had his hair cut in the present, twentieth, century. The dwelling proper was situated in a higher part of the cavern.
All four had come in autumn, and were waiting for the warmer season to proceed to Lhasa, and return thence home again. In the meantime they voluntarily waited on the two holy hermits sojourning in this mountain, and thereby earned their living and gained merit, according to the ideas of their order. When they go off again on their wanderings, other serving brethren and sisters will be found ready to take their place.
A winding staircase on the left, partly natural and partly constructed of flagstones, leads to the upper regions of the cavern. At first it is dark, but becomes lighter as we approach a loophole in the rock. Here and there are streamer-poles, and the holy syllables are incised. From the loophole the staircase turns steeply to the right; if we slipped on the smooth stone we should tumble down right into the nuns’ kitchen, which from here looks like the bottom of a well. The passage ends at a point where a small stone staircase goes up to a trap-door covered with a slab. Pushing aside the slab, one reaches the larger grotto chamber of which we had seen the opening from the valley. But the serving brothers and sisters would not take us so high.
In this upper grotto, Choma-taka, the 100-years-old hermit, Gunsang Ngurbu, of high repute in all the country for his holiness, has dwelt for seven years. Gunsang means hermit, and Ngurbu is a very common name signifying precious stone. Every seventh day his attendants place tsamba, water, tea, and fuel on the steps under the trap-door, and these things are taken in by the old man, who may not speak with men, but only with the gods. Through a hole under the slab I caught sight of a chhorten constructed of stones and mud, and some painted pictures of gods on the wall of the grotto. Behind the chhorten, and unfortunately out of sight, the old man sat in a niche in the wall, crouching down and saying his prayers; now and then he blows a shell horn.
| 191. Robert and Rabsang by the Ice on the Way to the Chang-la-Pod-la. |
| 192. A Lhadse decked with Mani-Stones and Prayer-Streamers. (N.W. of the Kore-la.) |
I wished to push aside the shutter and mount into the upper grotto, but the consciences of my companions would not permit such a thing for all the money in the world. It would disturb the old man in his meditations, and interrupt the period of his seclusion, and, moreover, the old man would throw stones at us. The life of the hermit Ngurbu must be idyllic compared to that of the immured Linga monks, for he sees the valley, the sun, the whirling snow, and the stars sparkling in the sky; but he must suffer from ennui. In another grotto, side by side with Ngurbu’s, lives another hermit, but the two have never met and know nothing of one another. They may eat no meat, only tsamba and tea, and they receive these from the neighbouring nomads and the travellers passing along the road.
After this digression we cross the ice of the river again and pass up over the ever-present detritus. Before us is the flattish saddle of the Chang-la-Pod-la. We accomplish the ascent with great effort, the icy wind blowing right in our faces. I cannot commence my observations at the cairn till I have warmed my hands over a dung fire. The view is limited, flat, and of little use for orientation. However, towards the way we have come, we can see the deeply eroded valleys, and we seem to be higher than the ridges enclosing them. The height is 18,284 feet. Chang signifies north, north country; Pod or Pö, Tibet, i.e. Tibet proper, chiefly inhabited by a settled population. Chang-la-Pod-la is, then, the pass between the northern tableland of the nomads and the country to the south having drainage to the sea. It is this property of a boundary between these two regions which renders the Trans-Himalaya of such prime importance, and therefore there are many passes called Chang-la-Pod-la. Often and often I was told that a pass, whatever might be its especial name, was a Chang-la-Pod-la when it lay on the watershed between the inland drainage of the north and the river basin of the Tsangpo in the south. I had then crossed the Trans-Himalaya a second time by a pass lying 44 miles to the west of the Sela-la, and had been able to ascertain that the huge range of the Nien-chen-tang-la extends thus far. It was still more my earnest desire to follow it step by step to the west.
After we had encamped on the pass, where the thermometer fell at night to −9½°, we rode on April 22 slowly down the valley of the Shak-chu river, which gradually becomes broader, and is begirt by flat rounded mountains, in which rock in situ seldom occurs. We have passed from the maze of mountains intersected by the affluents of the My-chu, abundantly fed by the rains, on to the wide plains of the plateau country, and notice again that the Trans-Himalaya is also an extraordinarily important climatological boundary.