Chapter III

On the 14th July the expedition moved out from Gyangtse along the road to Lhasa. Grass and a glory of flowers covered the glens which led up to the Karo La. The serious fighting was over, and the second crossing of that pass was remarkable only for the fact that some rock platforms and caves had to be cleared by our panting troops at an altitude of over 19,000 feet. In the rest of the story the soldier finds little place, and the interest attaches itself to the durbars of the Commissioner and the treasure-house of natural and artistic wonders which the Mission was approaching. For after Gyangtse the resistance of the Tibetans was at an end. Half-sullenly and half-curiously they permitted our advance, delaying us a little with fruitless negotiations, while in Lhasa the game of high politics which the Dalai Lama had played was turning against him, and, like another deity, he was meditating a pilgrimage.

After the Karo La came the Yam-dok--or, as some call it, the Yu-tso or Turquoise Lake--the most wonderful natural feature of the plateau. Its curious shape, its pale blue waters, its shores of white sand fringed with dog-roses and forget-me-nots, the cloud of fable which has always brooded over it, and its august environment, make it unique among the lakes of the world. I quote a fragment of Mr. Landon's description:--

"Below lie both the outer and the inner lakes, this following with counter-indentations the in-and-out windings of the other's shore-line. The mass and colour of the purple distance is Scotland at her best--Scotland, too, in the slow drift of a slant-roofed raincloud in among the hills. At one's feet the water is like that of the Lake of Geneva. But the tattered outline of the beach, with its projecting lines of needle-rocks, its wide, white curving sandspits, its jagged islets, its precipitous spurs, and, above all, the mysterious tarns strung one beyond another into the heart of the hills, all these are the Yam-dok's own, and not another's. If you are lucky, you may see the snowy slopes of To-nang gartered by the waters, and always on the horizon are the everlasting ice-fields of the Himalayas, bitterly ringing with argent the sun and colour of the still blue lake. You will not ask for the added glories of a Tibetan sunset; the grey spin and scatter of a rain-threaded afterglow, or the tangled sweep of a thundercloud's edge against the blue, will give you all you wish, and you will have seen the finest view in all this strange land."

On the shore lies the convent of Samding, the home of the Dorje Phagmo, or pig goddess, which was jealously respected by the troops, since its abbess had nursed Chundra Dass, one of the adventurous agents of the Indian Government, when he fell sick during his travels. The present incarnation, a little girl of six, declined to reveal herself. Nothing was more satisfactory in the whole tale of the expedition than the way in which any service done at any time to a British subject, white or black, met with full recognition. Such conduct cannot have failed to have raised the prestige of the Power which showed itself so mindful of its servants. Prestige and reputation of a kind, indeed, we already possessed. Tibetan monasteries had a trick of sending their most valuable belongings to the nearest convent, for, they argued, the English do not enter nunneries or war with women.

On July 24th the expedition crossed the Khamba La and descended to the broad green valley of the Tsangpo. The crossing of that river, a work of real difficulty, was made tragic by the death of Major Bretherton, the brilliant transport officer, to whom, perhaps, more than to any other soldier, the military success in the enterprise was due. Not the least of the mysteries of Tibet was this secret stream, which the traveller, after miles of bleak upland, finds flowing among English woods and meadows. In Assam and Bengal it was the Brahmaputra; but when it entered the hills it was as unknown to civilized man as Alph or the Four Rivers of Eden. What its middle course was like and how it broke through the mountain barrier were questions which no one had answered,* nor at the time was there any accurate knowledge of its upper valleys.

* See Chapter II.

Once on the north bank Lhasa was but a short way off, and in growing excitement the expedition covered the last stages. It was one of the great moments of life, and we can all understand and envy the final hurried miles, till through the haze the eye caught the gleam of golden roofs and white terraces. The first prospect brought no disappointment. If the streets were squalid, they were set in a green plain seamed with waters; trees and gardens were everywhere; while, above, the huge Assisi-like citadel of the Potala typified the massive secrecy of generations, and the ring of dark hills reminded the onlooker that this garden ground was planted on the roof of the world.

Meanwhile the expedition set itself down outside the gates to abide the pleasure of the sullen and perturbed masters. The deity of the place had gone on a journey, no one quite knew whither. He had kept his moonlight flitting a secret, and had gone off on the northern road with Dorjieff and a small escort to claim the hospitality of his spiritual brother of Urga. He had played his impossible game with spirit and subtlety, and he had a pretty taste for romance in its ending. "When one looks for mystery in Lhasa," wrote Mr. Candler, "one's thoughts dwell solely on the Dalai Lama and the Potala. I cannot help dwelling on the flight of the thirteenth incarnation. It plunges us into mediævalism. To my mind there is no picture so engrossing in modern history as that exodus when the spiritual head of the Buddhist Church, the temporal ruler of six millions, stole out of his palace by night, and was borne away in his palanquin."

The romance which Mr. Candler saw in the Potala, Mr. Landon found most conspicuously in the church of the Jo-kang. The palace was magnificent from the outside, but within it was only a warren of small rooms and broken stairways. The great cathedral, on the other hand, was hidden away among trees and streets, so that its golden roof could only be seen from a distance, but inside it was a shrine of all that was mysterious and splendid. The contrast was allegorical of the difference between the temporal ruler of Lamaism--gaudy, tyrannical, and hollow--and the sway of the Buddhist Church, which by hidden ways and unseen agencies dominated the imagination of Asia. The Chinese Amban, having a natural desire to pay back the people who had so grossly neglected him, invited certain members of the Mission to enter this Holy of Holies. The visitors were the first white men to approach the inner sanctuary of the Buddhist faith. They were stoned on leaving the building, but the sight was one worth risking much to see. In the central shrine sat the great golden Buddha, roped with jewels, crowned with turquoise and pearl, surrounded by dim rough-hewn shapes which loomed out fitfully in the glare of the butter-lamps, while the maroon-clad monks droned their eternal chant before the silver altar. And the statue was as strange as its environment.

"For this is no ordinary presentation of the Master. The features are smooth and almost childish; beautiful they are not, but there is no need of beauty here. There is no trace of that inscrutable smile which, from Mukden to Ceylon, is inseparable from our conception of the features of the Great Teacher. Here there is nothing of the saddened smile of the Melancholia, who has known too much and has renounced it all as vanity. Here, instead, is the quiet happiness and the quick capacity for pleasure of the boy who had never yet known either pain, or disease, or death. It is Gautama as a pure and eager prince, without any thought for the morrow or care for to-day."

Mr. Landon has other pictures of almost equal charm. He takes us to the famous Ling-kor, the sacred road which encircled the town, worn with the feet of generations of men seeking salvation. We see the unclean abode of the Ragyabas, that strange unholy caste of beggar scavengers; we walk in the gardens of the Lu-kang, by the willow-fringed lake and the glades of velvet turf; and, not least, we visit the temple of the Chief Wizard, where every form of human torment is delicately portrayed in fresco and carving. But if we wish to realize the savagery at the heart of this proud theocracy, we must go with Mr. Candler to the neighbouring Depung monastery on the quest for supplies, and see the tribe of inquisitors buzzing out like angry wasps, and submitting only when the guns were trained on them. For these weeks of waiting in Lhasa were an anxious time for all concerned. Our own position was precarious in the extreme, and, had the Lhasans once realized it, impossible. Winter was approaching, the Government was urging the Mission to get its Treaty and come home, and yet day after day had to pass without result, and the Commissioner could only wait, and oppose to the obstinacy of the monks a stronger and quieter determination. Sir Francis Younghusband was indeed almost the only man in the Empire fitted for the task. "He sat through every durbar," says Mr. Candler, "a monument of patience and inflexibility, impassive as one of their own Buddhas. Priests and councillors found that appeals to his mercy were hopeless. He, too, had orders from his King to go to Lhasa; if he faltered, his life also was at stake; decapitation would await him on his return. That was the impression he purposely gave them. It curtailed palaver. How in the name of all their Buddhas were they to stop such a man?"

At last on 1st September, when after a month's diplomacy the Tibetans had only admitted two of our demands, the time came to deliver our ultimatum. The delegates were told that if all our terms were not accepted within a week, General Macdonald would consider the question of using stronger arguments. Our forbearance was justified by its results, for the opposition suddenly subsided, and we gained what we asked without any coercion. It was a diplomatic triumph of a high order, obtained in the face of difficulties which seemed to put diplomacy out of the question. The final scene came on 7th September, when in the audience chamber of the Potala the Treaty was signed by the Commissioner, and by the acting Regent, who affixed the seal of the Dalai Lama, the four Shapes, a representative of the Tsong-du, and the heads of the great monasteries. Thereafter came a limelight photograph of the gathering, and with this very modern climax the great Asian mystery became a thing of the past. The Dalai Lama had already been formally deposed, his spiritual powers were transferred to our friend the Tashe Lama, and, with the Treaty in our baggage and a real prestige in our wake, we began the homeward march.