Mandala of Sherlock Holmes (11 page)

‘Well he can’t. And that’s that.’

‘Begging your pardon, Sir, but it would be very difficult to stop him, apart from restraining him physically. He has impressed me as an extremely resourceful and determined gentleman. He could pass himself off as a native any day.’

‘Is he that good? In his disguise, I mean?’

‘I am not exaggerating, Sir, when I say that, till now, I have never seen such a master of the art.’

‘Hmmm …‘the Colonel looked thoughtful, ‘and how is he managing with his study of the language?’

‘Well, he is not absolutely fluent yet, but competent enough to pass himself off as, let us say, a … a Ladakhi or some such person. Ah yes, a Ladakhi disguise would be the most suitable thing for Mr Holmes. It would convenientiy explain the few undisguisable elements of his features — like his prominent nose, for one thing.’

‘Yes, and the spring caravan to Lhassa from Leh leaves in a few months. Why is it, Huree, that I still cannot get over this very nasty suspicion that you have very conveniently arranged matters to suit your needs.’

‘Oh Sir! I assure you that …’

He dismissed my protestations with a wave of his hand.

‘Anyway, as you said, we can’t stop him. There are a number of reasons why we can’t, not least of all, London — but that doesn’t concern you.’ He looked out of the window down at the red tin roofs of the houses in the bazaar below. Finally he turned around and shrugged his shoulders. ‘Ah well, the violence and dangers he might face in Thibet will probably be no more than what he has already encountered in this country. And what about you, Huree? Mr Holmes asked me if it were possible for you to accompany him to Thibet.’

My heart leapt with joy; but I was careful not to let anything show on my face. ‘Me, Sir?’

‘Yes, you, Huree. What do you think about it?’

‘Well, Sir, I am naturally pleased that Mr Holmes should regard my services so highly. But my accompanying him to Thibet is, of course, quite out of the question — without Departmental approval,’ I added, conscientiously.

‘Yes, of course, quite,’ said the Colonel dryly. ‘Now Hurree, as you well know, and have made sure, you are going with Mr Holmes to Thibet. But don’t think you can spend your time there peacefully collecting data on quaint native customs and religions. I want work!’ He opened his despatch box and delved into a mass of letters and documents.

‘Why, of course, Sir,’ I replied with dignity.

‘Hmm … Now listen carefully’ He held out a letter written on rough Thibetan paper; the kind manufactured from the bark of one of those species of
Daphne
plants
(Edgeworthia gardneri)
which comes mostly from Bhootan. ‘This is a secret report I received from K.21 just a week ago. His monastery is, as you know, close to the main caravan route from Kashgar to Lhassa, and is therefore a good place to pick up news from the Thibetan capital. Evidently things are not as they should be in Lhassa. There are rumours that two senior ministers have been removed in disgrace from the cabinet, and a much respected abbot of the Drepung monastery gaoled like a common criminal. K.21 feels that the Manchu Amban is behind these events, and it is probably an attempt to undermine the position of the Grand Lama and strengthen Chinese influence in Thibet. It seems that these particular ministers and the abbot wanted the young Grand Lama to be enthroned before his constitutional age. They were opposed to the Regency, which has acquired the reputation of being influenced by the Chinese representative, the Amban.’

‘Would that be Count O-erh-t’ai, the man who hates the English?’

‘Yes, and we’ve found out why he’s so rabidly xenophobic. It seems that his father, the Marquis T’o-shih, was burned to death when British troops set fire to the Imperial Summer Palace in Pekin.’
¹

‘And he now wants to ensure that no one but China has any influence in Thibet.’

‘Exactly. The Thibetans haven’t taken too kindly to his meddling though. We have reports of angry mobs demonstrating before the Chinese legation in Lhassa, and the possibility of the Emperor despatching more Chinese troops to reinforce the garrison in Lhassa.’

‘By Gad, Sir. That is a pretty kettle of fish that is boiling there. I myself have been the recipient of such snippets of rumours from certain Bhotia merchants of my acquaintance.’

‘I need to have more than rumours. It is vitally important that you get to Lhassa and learn the truth of the situation there.’

‘Not to worry. Sir. This time I will most assuredly not fail to get to Lhassa; and once there ascertain the veridicality of the situation.’

1. In 1860 an Anglo-French expedition led by Lord Elgin occupied Peking after defeating Imperial Chinese forces and forcing the Emperor to flee to Jehol. Every palace, temple and mansion in the capital was thoroughly plundered, and the Imperial Summer Palace burned to the ground. The occasion that provoked this war was the ‘Arrow’ incident of 1856, when a Chinese-owned but Hong Kong-registered ship, the
Arrow,
was forcefully boarded by Chinese police at Canton for the alleged purpose of searching out a notorious pirate. Incidentally, Elgin is buried in an old church yard at Dharamsala, the present headquarters of the Dalai Lama in northern India.

THIBET

10

More Bundobust

Sherlock Holmes was eager to be off, but the Colonel and I counselled patience. The passes would be snow-bound till late spring, and the Leh-Lhassa caravan
¹
wouldn’t start till then. It was also felt to be wiser not to join the caravan at Leh itself, as there was a Thibetan trade agency there whose officials might take an undue interest in our
bona fides.
Instead we would travel by the Hindustan-Thibet road and cross Thibet over the Shipki
la,
or Shipki pass, and as if by a happy chance, encounter the caravan somewhere around the vicinity of Kailash, the holy mountain.

In the meantime there were preparations to be made. I have, for very sound reasons, always taken pride in my faculty of organisation, or bundobast, as we call it in this country, and the reader must forgive me for the rather detailed description I have provided of the extensive arrangements I made to ensure the success of our expedition.

In order of importance, the first thing I had to do was hire our expedition sirdar. We were very lucky to acquire the services of Kintup, a sturdy mountaineer of Sikkhimese extraction, who had on previous occasions performed a few commissions for the Department,
²
and had also been my guide on my last lbortive trip to Thibet. He was living in Darjeeling at the time, eking out a living as a tailor. But I telegraphed him a message and some TA (travelling allowance) money, and he arrived in Simla a week later, eager to be off on another adventure.

‘This time we
will
get to the Holy City, Babuji,’ he reassured me, his rough callused hands clasping mine in greeting. ‘We will not make the mistake of staying overlong in Shigatse, as we did the last time.’

He was a thickset, active man, with a look of dogged determination about his rugged, weather-beaten features. He had all the alertness of a mountaineer, and with the strength of a lion he was a host in himself. He and Mr Holmes took to each other at once.

We also hired two other men. To look after our pack animals we got Shukkur Ali Gaffuru, whose father was a man of Yarkand and mother a Lamaist of Spiti, the mixed race being called Argon, generally distinguished by physical hardihood and loyalty. For our cook we got Jamspel, a cheerful young Ladakhi who, in spite of certain limitations in his culinary ability was not averse to bathing occasionally, and was skilled in lighting and maintaining yak-dung fires under all circumstances and climatic conditions.

Kintup and I travelled to nearby Narkhanda for the animal mela, or fair, where we purchased twelve sturdy mules to carry our baggage and provisions. For riding we purchased five shaggy little tats, or hill ponies, which in spite of their ludicrous size and hirsuteness, were stronger and better equipped to survive in the desolate highlands of Thibet than most horses.

I also had to arrange for the purchase or preparation of various other items: tents, saddles, pack-saddles and panniers,
yakdans,
which are small leather-covered wooden boxes such as are used in Turkestan, kitchen utensils and dekchis frieze blankets, gutta-percha undersheets, a tent-bed for Mr Holmes, bashliks, rifles, knives, note-books, writing material, talkan, or roasted barley meal, which the Thibetans call
tsampa,
preserved meat, tobacco, etcetera, etcetera. I instructed Jamspel to bake a large quantity of
khura,
or hard Ladakhi biscuits, which keep practically forever. I was rather partial to them and they were very good to nibble on to relieve the tedium of a long journey.

I managed to order a complete medicine chestfrom Burroughs and Wellcome of London, with drugs prepared specially for a high and cold climate. All the remedies were in convenient tabloids, and stowed in a robust and beautifully crafted wooden chest.

At this point I think that I ought to inform the reader of certain other preparations I made demi-officially in the larger interests of science and Imperial advancement. We fieldmen were not only in the business of collecting political information, as my previous conversation with Colonel Creighton may have led the reader into believing. In fact the bulk of our duties, the rice and daal of departmental activities, was concerned with geographical and ethnological information. Therefore, we fieldmen, or to use the proper Departmental term, chainmen, were trained and equipped essentially to perform such tasks.

Initially we were trained in route survey and reconnaissance work. We were taught the use of sextant and compass, and how to calculate altitudes by observing the boiling point of water. But since this bally business cannot be convenientiy conducted because of the deplorably suspicious and hostile nature of the ignorant inhabitants of unexplored lands — and since it is occasionally inexpedient to carry measuring chains and other conspicuous tools of the trade — the Department has devised some very ingenious methods and contrivances to circumvent suspicion and hostility.

First of all we were trained to take, by much practice, a pace which, whether we walked up mountains, down valleys, or on level ground, always remained the same — thirty inches in my case. We also learned how to keep an exact count of the number of such paces we took in a day, or between any two landmarks. This was done with the aid of a Buddhist rosary, which you may know comprises one hundred and eight beads. Eight of these were removed, leaving a mathematically convenient one hundred, but not a sufficient reduction to be noticeable. At every hundredth pace a bead was slipped. Each complete circuit of the rosary therefore represented ten thousand paces — five miles in my case, as I covered a mile in two thousand paces. Because the Buddhist rosary has attached to it two short secondary strings each of ten smaller beads, these were used for recording every completed circuit of the rosary.

Not only was the Buddhist rosary ingeniously adapted to the purpose of exploration, so were prayer-wheels
(mani lag-‘khor).
These were fitted with a secret catch which enabled one to open the copper cylinder and insert or remove the scrolls of paper bearing one’s route notes and other intelligence. Compasses were also concealed inside the wheels. Larger instruments like altazimuths and chronometers were concealed in specially-built false bottoms in
yakdans
while secret pockets were added to our clothing. Thermometers, for measuring altitude, were concealed in hollowed-out staves, and mercury—necessary for setting an artificial horizon when taking sextant readings — was hidden in a secret cowrie shell and poured into a pilgrim’s bowl whenever needed.

Lurgan, who had a great facility for deception, had devised most of these contrivances, and had taught us fieldmen how to use them.

1. This annual trade caravan was also a tribute envoy to the Grand Lama from the king of Ladakh. Known as the Lopchag (annual prostration) mission it was established in the seventeenth century at the end of the Ladakh-Tibet-Mongol War. See’The Lapchak Missionfrom Ladakh to Lhasa in British Indian Foreign Policy,’ John Bray,
The Tibet Journal,
Vol. XV No. 4.

2. In 1881, Kintup (or K.P. as he is listed in Departmental records) was sent secretly to Southern Tibet to throw marked logs into the Tsangpo river to prove its continuity with the Bhramaputra. This intrepid spy pushed his way through unexplored jungles infested with wild animals, cannibals and head-hunters, and after four years of thrilling adventures and narrow escapes finally managed to throw the marked logs into the river. But there was no one watching for them below in Assam as the officer in charge of the experiment had died. For a full account of Kintup’s feats see ‘Exploration on the Tsangpo in 18804’,
Geographical Journal
XXXVIII (1911).
Survey of India Records IX,
L.A. Waddel.

11

On the Hindustan-Thibet Road

Ho there, Gaffuru.’ The deep booming voice of Kintup was strangely muffled by the dense fog of the early morning. ‘Tighten the girth of the bay mule lest he throws his load.’

He finishedchecking the loads on the mules and the trappings on the ponies, and then walked over to me, his thick felt boots softly crunching the gravel on the garden path of Runnymeade Cottage.

‘Babuji, thou may’st tell the sahib that all is ready for the journey.’

I stepped into the cottage where Mr Holmes was bidding farewell to old Lurgan. A month earlier, Colonel Creighton had revealed to him the true identity of Sigerson, the Norwegian traveller, and had recruited Lurgan to help in the preparations for the journey. He turned to me as I entered the room.

‘Ah, I think old Huree Babu here wants to tell you that everything is ready for your departure, Mr Holmes.’ He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out an old tartar pipe, beautifully chased with silver and with a jade stem. ‘It is an Eastern custom to offer a gift to the departing traveller. Anyway, I don’t see how you could go on smoking that very English cherrywood in your Ladakhi disguise. Please, I insist.’

Mr Holmes accepted the gift and thanked Lurgan warmly. Lurgan turned to me and handed me a cylindrical iron pen case of Thibetan design.

‘Seeing that your modern binoculars made the Chinese authorities suspect you on your last trip, I thought it as well that we were more circumspect this time. You just take off the cap and peer through it from the small hole at the bottom and — hey presto! It’s a telescope. Is it not clever? I think it is the best thing I’ve done since the hollow prayer wheel. Well, old chap, best of luck. Do try not to create a diplomatic incident again. It just upsets the Colonel, and you know how difficult he is to work with then.’

We rode silently out of the garden. I turned round in my saddle to see Lurgan’s dark outline against the comfortable glow of the open cottage door. He raised his right hand in farewell. I shivered a little, as much because of the penetrating chill of the foggy morning as at the realisation that once more I was leaving comfort and security to face the hardships and perils of the unknown. As I have confessed before, I am an awfully fearful sort of man —which is a serious detriment in my profession — but somehow or the other, the more fearful I become, the more dam’ tight places I get into.

Yet fear at least performs the useful function of making one careful. I had taken a number of precautions to ensure that anyone taking undue interest in our activities would not learn very much. Even our silent, stealthy departure on this dark morning was one of my attempts to ‘muddy the well of inquiry with the stick of precaution,’ as they would say in Afghanistan.

Our small khafila wended its way out of Chota Simla on to the Hindustan-Thibet Road, planned and commenced in 1850 by Major Kennedy, secretary to Sir Charles Napier who completed the conquest of the Punjab and Sind. This redoubtable feat of Imperial road building majestically traverses the lofty barriers of the high Himalayas for two hundred and three miles to end at Shipki
la
on the Thibetan frontier.

Gradually the darkness was dispelled, though the clammy mist clung cheerlessly to the cold mountainside. The indistinct shapes of our animals and riders merged like wet inkstains with the dark outiines of trees and bushes, while the muffled clip-clop of shod hooves, the creak of strained leather, the steady breathing and occasional snorts of our patient beasts filtered so faintly through the mist that they seemed like sounds from some half-forgotten dream.

‘Lha Gyalol
Victory to the gods!’

The deep voice of Kintup, riding in the lead, rolled back to us. This Lamaist invocation, generally shouted by Thibetans at the start of a journey, or at the top of a pass or mountain, was taken up softly by his co-religionist, Jamspel, our Ladakhi cook. I rode beside the lanky figure of Sherlock Holmes, muffled in a sheepskin-lined Ladakhi robe, and sitting awkwardly astride his small hill pony.

‘Well, Sir,’ I ventured, ‘we begin our quest.’

‘ “
Caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare current!”
Horace is not too reassuring about the benefits of travel, but let us pray that our passage over these mountains will provide us more inspiration than he got from his sea voyage.’

From Simla, the firstday’s journey towards the interior of the mountains is usually Fagu, a distance of fourteen miles. Here, and for several stages farther, as far as the road lies through British territory, there are dak bungalows provided by the government for the accommodation of travellers upon the payment of a small fixed sum per day. Though often in bad repair, and therefore very uncomfortable in rainy weather, these houses are a very great convenience, as they enable travellers to dispense with the carriage of tents.

The road from Simla to Fagu followed the course of the main range, not always on the very crest of the ridge, but seldom at any great distance from it. About four miles from Simla there was a sudden increase in the elevation of the range, and at the same time it turned very abruptly towards the southeast. The road ascended \he steep face of the ridge in a series of zigzags. Near the top of the ascent it suddenly surfaced from under the thick fog to present us a dawnlit view of the remarkable peak of Shali, right across the valley in the northeast, its bold rocky mass seeming to overhang the Sutlej valley.

We arrived at the Fagu bungalow in the late afternoon, in the midst of pelting rain. However, drinking mugs of hot tea and warming ourselves before a bright fire, we soon forgot the discomforts of the wet ride. For two more days we rode along the crest of the main ridge past the hamlets of Matiana, Narkhanda, and Kotgarh; the last being the seat of an establishment of European missionaries performing noble works of charity and conversion among the artless people of these hills.

From Kotgarh we commenced our descent from the main ridge down into the valley of the Sutlej river. The road was very steep and the change in vegetation dramatic — one moment alpine, the next, tropical. The heat also rapidly increased till the road reached the bank of the Sutlej, at the village of Kepu. We continued our journey up the valley to Nirat, a distance of
seven
miles, and next day arrived at Rampur, the capital of Bushair.

The district of Bushair is an independent hill state governed by a Hindu rajah. His dominion also extends over Kunawar, the district further up the valley whose inhabitants are Tartar by race and Buddhists of the Lamaist persuasion.

The town of Rampur is on a small level tract of ground about a hundred feet above the river which it overhangs. The houses are substantially built, but mostly one-storied, with steeply sloping slated roofs. The town has a good deal of trade with Thibet, principally in shawl wool, and is the seat of a small manufacturing unit of soft white shawl cloth. The river here is crossed by a rope suspension bridge. It consists of nine stout ropes, which are stretched from one side of the river to the other. The width of the Sutlej at the bridge is about two hundred and eleven feet.

The Sutlej is one of the four major rivers whose source is the most sacred mountain of Kailash and the fabulous dual lakes by it. The Thibetans fancifully regard it as flowing from a peacock’s mouth, and have thus named it. The Indus, the Bramhaputra and the Karnali rivers also have their sources in the same area and are called,‘Flowing from the Lion’s mouth, Flowing fromthe Elephant’s Mouth, and Flowing from the Horse’s Mouth’ respectively, by the Thibetans, who, like most other Asiatics, prefer the fabulous explanation to the scientific one.

We stayed at Rampur for two days as guests of the old whisky-loving rajah. He was well-disposed towards me as I had, in a previous passage through the town (in the role of a hakim) successfully treated him for gout, and members of his rag, tag and bobtail court for various other ailments.

From Rampur onwards, the valley of the Sutlej narrowed and the mountains became more lofty and precipitous. After four days, when we reached the town of Chini, the lush vegetation of the lower valley had given way to occasional wind-racked junipers and desiccated shrubs. The breeze now had a knife-edge to it which caused me to tie the hanging lappets of my moth-eaten rabbit-skin cap down firmly over my ears.

But nothing seemed to bother Mr Holmes. The windier, the colder, the bleaker, and the closer to Thibet we got, the more cheerful and animated he became. When he was not asking me incessant questions about the Thibetan language and customs, he was humming snatches of tunes to himself and smiling in an enigmatic way.

From Chini — nothing more than a large collection of rude stone huts inhabited by sallow, greasy, duffle-clad mountaineers and their equally greasy sheep — we wended our way up to Poo, the last but one village before Shipki
la,
and Thibet. It is normally a five-day ride from Chini to Poo, but it took us six. You see, we ran into something unexpected on the fourth day.