“Tell us, Bombo Chimbo, is it you, with your glass and measuring instruments, that is keeping back the rain this year? At this season it usually rains heavily, but you perhaps prefer clear weather, to be able to see the country and that the roads may not be soft.”
“No, I long for rain as much as you, for my animals are getting thin, and cannot eat their fill of this poor grass, which has stood here since last summer. Only the gods can control the weather, and the sons of men must take the rain and sunshine as they are sent to them from above.”
They looked at one another doubtfully. It was not the first time that they had ascribed to me powers as great as those of their own gods, and it would have been difficult to have convinced them of their error.
At midnight the men heard a one-year-old child crying and calling for help on the bank of the Kubi-tsangpo. They woke one another in astonishment, and Rabsang and two Tibetans went off with a gun, thinking that it was a ghost. When they came near they heard the child weeping quite distinctly, and our heroes were so frightened that they thought it safest to make all haste back again. When I asked them how they knew that it was a year-old child, they answered, that from the sound it could not have been younger or older. When I suggested that it might have been a wolf cub, as there were no human beings in the neighbourhood, they declared that it must have been an uneasy spirit wandering about the bank.
There must have been something supernatural about, for I dreamed in the night that all the fragments of birch bark which we had seen on our day’s ride were letters of invitation from the Maharaja of Nepal, that I had accepted the invitation, and was lying half asleep on a soft carpet of grass and listening to the rustle of the warm wind among the cedars of the Himalayas. The dream was so vivid that I could not think all day long of anything else but the warm beautiful land behind the mountains.
Even in camp No. 200 I perceived fairly clearly how the land lay, but we were not yet at the actual source, and therefore we continued our march south-westwards on July 12. The foot of the snowy mountains seemed quite near. The river is broad, and divided by islands of mud into several arms. On the left side of the valley, where we march, are a couple of walls of green and black schist, but elsewhere old moraines extend on all sides. We cross a stream flowing from the country below Dongdong to join the Kubi-tsangpo. The Tsechung-tso is a small moraine lake. The valley bottom rises slowly, and consists of loose material sparsely covered with grass. Occasionally a small erratic block of grey granite is seen. Rags, dung, and fragments of bone lie on the summer camping-grounds. At length the river becomes as broad as a small lake, enclosed in morainic rubbish and driftsand.
We camped at the stone wall of Shapka, one of the headquarters of the nomads. Here, on the right bank of the Kubi-tsangpo, stands a dark purple ridge of medium height with patches of snow, which melt in the course of the summer. The land at the foot of this colossal mountain is remarkably flat, and instead of a cone of detritus there is a stream expanded into a lake. The water from the melting snow has washed away all solid matter.
As we came to camp No. 201, at a height of 15,883 feet, the peaks disappeared in clouds, but just before sunset the sky cleared and the last clouds floated away like light white steam over the glaciers of Ngomo-dingding, which clearly displayed their grand structure, with high lateral moraines and concentric rings of grey lumpy terminal moraines. The surface, except where here and there blue crevasses yawned in the ice, was white with snow and the porous melting crust.
When the sun had set, nine peaks in a line from south-east to south-west stood out with remarkable sharpness. Raven-black pinnacles, cliffs and ridges rise out of the white snowfields, and the glaciers emerge from colossal portals. A whole village of tents rising to heaven! The source of the Brahmaputra could not be embellished with a grander and more magnificent background. Holy and thrice holy are these mountains, which from their cold lap give birth and sustenance to the river celebrated from time immemorial in legend and song, the river of Tibet and Assam, the river par excellence, the son of Brahma. One generation after another of black Tibetans has in the course of thousands of years listened to its roar between the two loftiest mountain systems of the world, the Himalaya and the Trans-Himalaya, and one generation after another of the various tribes of Assam has watered its fields with its life-giving floods and drunk of its blessed water. But where the source lay no one knew. Three expeditions had determined its position approximately, but none had been there. No geography had been able to tell us anything of the country round the source of the Brahmaputra. Only a small number of nomads repair thither yearly to spend a couple of short summer months. Here it is, here in the front of three glacier tongues, that the river so revered by the Hindu tribes begins its course of some 1800 miles through the grandest elevations of the world, from which its turbid volumes of water roll first to the east, then southwards, cutting a wild valley through the Himalayas, and finally flowing south-westwards over the plains of Assam. The upper Brahmaputra, the Tsangpo, is truly the chief artery of Tibet, for within its drainage basin is concentrated the great mass of its population, while its lower course is surrounded by the most fruitful and populous provinces of Assam. The Brahmaputra is therefore one of the noblest rivers of the world, and few waterways have a more illustrious descent and a more varied and more glorious career, for nations have grown up on its banks and have lived there, and their history and culture have been intimately connected with it since the earliest times of human records.
Busied with such thoughts, I went out again in the evening to gaze at the cliffs of the nine peaks which showed like dim misty shadows, while the ice and snowfields below, of the same colour as the sky, were not perceptible in the night. Then a flash of lightning blazed up behind Kubi-gangri, as the whole massive is called, and the crest crowned with eternal snow stood suddenly out in sharp pitch-black contours. Singular, entrancing land, where spirit voices are heard in the night and the sky blazes up in bluish light. I listened for a long time to the brook Shapka-chu, gently trickling down its stony bed to the bank of the Kubi-tsangpo.