LHASSA.

Otago Witness, Issue 2666, 19 April 1905, Page 74

LHASSA.

(T P.'s Weekly.)

I have read this very brilliantly written and very brilliantly produced book with a curious 'mixture of feelings. Throughout I have been, haunted by the obstinate question whether the expedition to Lhassa was either necessary or just, and whether its le&ults justify the expenditure of life and of money. And to these questions I canr.ot say that 1 Mve received a satisfactory answer even from so accomplished and so convinced an advocate of tlTe expedition as Mr Percival Landon, the author of this book. But, on the other hand, I have been thrilled — who could 1 fail to be? — by the extraordinary proof the book gives of that daring, that tenacious purpose, that dauntless exploring which have been the characteristics of the British race almost fiom its beginning, and which never received a finer or more remarkable exemplification than in this strange expedition to Lhassa. I have allowed the latter feeling in the end to gain the ascendancy — at least while I am engaged in the work of reviewing this book — and I will therefore pass by all the political issues involved in the expedition and give myself tine pleasure of describing the expedition in. the terms of th© very remarkable chronicler by whom the story has here been told. I. And first, let us see why the expedition came into being. It is but one of the many instances in which a great act >A Central Asian policy has been induced by that rivalry between Russia and England which persists still so strongly, and which all enlightened friends of both empires would like to see done away with by a rational and equitable understanding betv.-cen the two Governments. The secret personal spring of the expedition is an individual called" by various names, but for the moment and by us to be known as Dorjifitf. The reader will at once see that it is a Russianised torm of name ; and Dorjii'ff was a Russianised Central Asian. Born in Mongolia, he was by birth of Russiui nationality. His faith was the faith of Thibet and of the greater part of Asia, that is to say, he was" a Buddhist. One of the facts with regard* to Russia — one of Ihe facts which illustrates and accounts for the great v ar with Japan — is the vast uumber of subjects she has of the most widespread Asiatic creed. It is to preserve her prestige over these millions that probably at this moment she is so unwilling to surrender in her hopeless struggle with Japan. Moving about ■witih that facility which is natural in Asia, ■where so mauy profess the same faith, Dorjieff came to Lhassa. This is the city of cities for one who is a Buddhist, a man of learning, and a monk ; and DorjiefF was not long in attaining distinction. He became piofessor of metaphysics in one of the great monasteries. Up to the age ol 52 he confined himself to the work of the pious professor, but at that epoch in his life there came a remarkable transformation. The pious monk of Thibet goes abroad arnon.gst his co-religionists in other lands to find alms for their common creed, and among the fruitful grounds for such expeditions are some communities in the south-eastern, provinces of Russian Europe. Thither Dorjiefl made his way. Up to this time his purposes were simple, and were purely devotional. But the Russian statesmen, learning of the presence among them of so prominent and powerful a member of the sacred caste which governs Thibet, determined to utilise his services. Dorjieff was taken up. and was appointed an unofficial agent to Russian Lhassa. 11. This was a step which the Indian Government felt theniselves bound to notice. Thibet, like Afghanistan or Persia, is one of the countries which lie between the two mighty Empires ; and which each in turn does its best to enter and to influence. The presence of a Russian or an English envoy in Cabul has — as we all know — been the starting point of some of the bloodiest wars and most costly expeditions in which England has engaged during her tremendous career in Asia ; and similarly the presence afc Thibet of a Russian representative was an act to provoke the most lively interest, and to call for — at least, so Lord Curzon thought — the most prompt and stern coue-ter-artion. For Thibet had hitherto kept herself aloof from all the world. Between ber and the dominion of the British in India there intervened mountains, some of which would seem to dwarf even Mont Blanc ; precipices and oceans of ice ; in short, a barrier almost as impenetrable as that which has still kept the most daring explorer from reaching the North Pole° This seclusion is almost part of the religion of. this- strange people — the one Avhich is 1 still ruled by a government of priests. Time and again the explorer has tried to pass beyond those ten ible frontiers of ice and snow and gigantic mountains ; time after time he has been compelled to turn back. Expeditions, however well equipped, have beer, treated in the same way. "Alone of all the cities in the world, Lhassa has remained inviolate to the step of the infidel. But here was Russia planted there by one of her own agents; and soon there came additional and more alarming rumours of the arrival in Lhassa of large supplies of aim? from Russia. As time went on, Dorjieff took even stronger steps to push forward his Russophile policy. Hi 1 - story was that China, the nominal su/Erain of Thibet, was power'ess ; that England was a lapaeious, an unscrupulous, and a Christian Power which was resolved some day or other to invade and to conquer the inviolate kingdom, and that, therefore, if the liberties and the seclusion of Thibet were to be preserved, it could only 1 c- done by exchanging the suzerainty of Russia for that of China. To these views Doijieff sifc-

* '"Lhassa." By Peiceva' Landon. I\ro volumes. (Hxnst and Blackett.)

ceeded in gaining over the mind of the Dalai Lama. Here we come to Ilie second ! great peisonage in this curious drama. in. Everybody knows vaguely what the Grand Lama means to the Thibetans. He is the Pope and the Emperor combined. Supposed to be the reincarnation of a divine being, he is treated with almost the same reverence as if lie were a god ; there is no power to resist or to equal him; he is alike lord and master of the Thibetan souls and bodies. Though thus, however, normally omnipotent, the poor Grand Lama has been little better than a trembling slave, waiting patiently for the hour of slaughter. By his side has "always been a regent, who exercises the loyal power in his name until he attains his majority. He has nevei for a hundred years been allowed to attain his majority. Chosen for his semi-divine position in infancy, he has been allowed to grow up till he was just approaching 18, and then suddenly he has disappeared, and once more an infant reigns in the great high position. It says something for the Dalai Lama of to-day that he is the first who for a hundred years has been able to pass the Rubicon of his majority. Learning from, the sheer instinct of a strong and perhaps cruel character that you must slay if you are not to be slain, lie took the initiative with the regent, and before the regent could take any steps to slaughter him, < threw that dignitary into prison with many j nl his relatives, and there the regent died in 12 months; From that time forward it seems to have been understood that the present Dalai Lama was not a man to be treated as the other helpless and innocent) babes that have been sent to the slaughter, and people, though they grumbled at his cruelties, were ready to give to him that slavish obedience whicli brutal pud cruel power is always able to command in Oriental' lands. IV. The Dalai L : ima, with his obstinate and impetuous character, was just the kind of» man to listen to such proposals j,s those of Dorjieff. He desired with equal vehemence to get rid of the suzerainty of China and the always threatened cleshe of England to conquer, or at least to influence his kingdom : and accordingly he welcomed the alliance of Rursia as bringing him safety from China and England, and at the same time no peril from Russia. India is only a fortnight away ; Russia is four months ; it is easy to understand how the Dalai Lama thought, the alliance of the remote empire was safer than that of the near. Dorjieff was sent with an Abbot of high, j osition to Ht. Petersburg, was received there by tlie Emperor in great state, and, in short, everything was ripe for the alliance between Russia and Thibet, and i&i tine abolition of the Chinese suzerainty. But the Dalai Lama did not take into his calculations the ingrained, conservatisir of the priests who j formed what we should call the National Council of Thibet. Steadily and obstinately they opposed his policy. The Chinese representative did the same. But the Dalai Lama was obdin*ate and tenacious, and soon began to commit acts towards the Government o-f India which seemed intended to provoke such a rupture as would drive England to arms, aaid in that way force his own advisers into the arms of Russia. There is just on the frontier of India a certain debatable region where the rule of Great Britain ends and the frontier of Thibet begins. The Thibetans were guilty of several acts of aggression on British subjects in this debatable land, and finally, when Lord Cuizon sent a letter to the Dalai Lama to ask for an interview between representatives of Thibet and of England, Ihe Dalai Lama returned the letter unopened. The patience of the Indian Government was at an end ; it was resolved' that an expedition should be sent into Thibet to obtain some kind of treaty which would at once give redress for past wrongs, and open up some way for trade and intercourse between Thibet and India. V. I shall r.i)t go into the wearisome-details of the negotiations which preceded the final despatch of the expedition ; suffice it to say that in the end it became quite inevitable* — ' at least, s>o it seemed to Colonel Young-hus-band, the head of the expedition, and to Lord Cuizon, and finally to the Home Government — that if anything were to be done I which would impose a wholesome readiness j on the pait of the Thibetans to deal civilly with the British power, the capital, Lhassa. itself, must be reached, and Its inviolability deprived of the hold it had upon Thibetan imaginations for so many centuries. Never I did any task seem more difficult, and it is probably owing to the indomitable courage and the trained mind of Colonel Younghusband, as well as the great assistance he got from Captain O'Connor— the enly white man who speaks Thibetan — as well, of course, us the constant support of Lord Curzon, that the expedition was able to come out of its task successfully. At many a momen J the expedition might have died of hunger and of cold on altitudes in compaii'son with which those of Switzerland seemed dw arfish ; at many a moment it rnisjht have b-pr. massacred : at many a n.omen*- it might have just died of sheer t\tigue; but it went right on. and Lha.^a las ce-ised to be the unexplored- and unseen mystery: tl'p last great fortress of seclusion arid isolation has been conquered. VI. It is impossible for me to describe this terrible march in detail ; a passage chosen here and there fioiu the pae.es of Mr Perceval Landon must give The reader some idea of what such a march was- like. The soldiers and the carriers, be it remembered, are at the very start of the road into Thibet climbing up a mountain several thousand foot h'i^h ; and here is the sensation as described by one of the hardy journalists who acc< mpanicd the expedition: Climbing o\cr these boulder-sticwn surfaces would be bad at the sea-level; ln-re, where the .ur is so thin,, it boon

becomes a burden to pull one's solid body over the heartless obstacles. If the •ascent be at all steep the new-comer will sit down every 20 or 30 yards. His muscles are not tired, and he re- ; gains his strength in a surprisingly short time, but at the moment he sinks upon some friendly stone he thinks that another step forward would be his last. Tb,e lungs seem foolishly inadequate to the task imposed upon them : the pluckiness of one's own heart is an unmistakable but terrifying symptom, for it goes on beating with increasing strokes till it shakes the walls of the whole body ; and not the written testimony of the leading heart expert of London will convince you that it is not on the point of bursting its envelope. Then you may be thankful if you escape -mountain sickness. If that should come "upon you, your bitterest enemy will lead your hwse for you. . . . I have seen men in such a state that they seem to have every symptom of habitual drunkenness ; all the limbs shiver, and in the bloodless face the eyes have that extraordinary look of insanity which is, I think, caused by the inability to focus them. The speech comes with difficulty, and in one case I saw the mental coherence was as obviously at fault as the physical . . . for the sufferer himself I do not suppose there can be well condensed into three or four hours such an agony of aching. The brain seems cleft into tn-o, and the wedge, all blunt and splintery, is hammered into it as by mallet strokes at every pulsation of the heart. Partial relief is secured by a violent fit of sickness . . . and through all this you have still to go on, to go on, to go on. Through this horrible suffering, so graphically described, through ice, through snow, the expedition had to go on till they reached a height of nearly 15,000 f t! It is a marvellous story • it shows how little romance and daring have ceased to be great things in the history of the world. VII. This is the first sight of Thibet. It adds to the impressiveness of the scene before the eyes of the explorer that, in the distance, 35 miles away, is Chumolhari — a mountain which is 24,000 ft high ! I cannot find anything in the book which gives a better idea of what a Thibetan village is like than Mr Landor's description of Phari : By common consent Phari was the filthiest town on earth. . . First, there are more than a few reasons why the inhabitants of this town are of necessity dwellers in dirt. To begin with, Pharv is at a height *>! 15,000 ft, and is the highest town worthy of the name in the world. The cold is consequently fearful ; a nightly temperature ranging in February rather downwards than upwards from — 3 Fahr. being often joined with a merciless, grit-laden, cold wina from the north. Cold is admittedly an excuse for dirt, but it is not cold only that palliategp?' the filth of Phari. At this altitude the least exertion brings on breathlessness and apathy. To put on a pair of boots and gaiters is often a serious exertion for the new-comer. . The absence of trees, compelling the wretched people to use argol or dried yak-dung as their only fuel, is another contributory cause. The heavy, greasy, blue fumes of these fires coat the interior of the squat houses with a layer of soot which it would be useless labour to remove. VIII. I must give a further passage describing Phari, to make the picture complete in the minds of my readers : - Unfrozen water is almost non-existent, except during the summer, and so far at least as the women are concerned the dirt which seams their faces is not perhaps unwelcome, for, as we have seen, custom compels the disfigurement with kutch (or raddle resembling dry blood) of the brows and cheeks of women in Thibet. . . . The collection of sod-built houses, one, or at most two, storeys in height, cowers under the southern wall of the Jong for protection against the wind from the bitterest quarters. The houses prop each other up. Rotten and misplaced beams project at intervals through the black layers of peat, and a few small windows, lined with crazy black matchboarding, sometimes distinguish an upper from a lower floor. The door stands open ; it is but three black planks, a couple of rafters, and a padlock. Inside the black glue of argol smoke' coats everything. . ._ . A blue haze fills the room with acrid and penetrating virulence. In the dark room beyond the meal is being cooked, and a dark object stands aside as one enters. It is a woman, barely visible in the dark. Everything in the place is coated and grimed with filth. Afc last one distinguishes in a rude cradle and a blanket, both us black as everything else, an ivory-faced baby. How the children survive is a mystery. It is the same in every house. Nothing has been cleansed since it was made, and the square hole in that flat roof, which serves at once to admit light and air and to emit smoke, looks down upon practically the same interior in 500 hovels. But it is in the streets that the dirt strikes one most. . . . In the middle of the street, between the two banks of filth and offal, runs a stinkuic, channel, which thaws daily. In it horns and bonos and skulls of every beast eaten or not eaten by the Thibetans — there are a few of the latter — lie till the dogs and ravens hove picked them clean enough to be used in the mortared walls and thresholds. The stench is fearfiil. Half-decayed corpses of dogs lie cuddled up with their mangy but survhing brothers smcl sisters, wiio do not resent the scavenging ia\cns. ... A curdled and foul torrent flows in the daytime through the market-place, and half bred yaks

shove the sore-eyed and mouth-ulcered children aside to drink it. The men and women, clothes and faces alike, are as black as the peat walls that form a background to every scene. They have never washed themselves. Ingrained dirt to an extent that it is impossible to dsecribe reduces what would otherwise be a clear, sallow-skinned, but good-complexioned face to a collection of fotil and grotesque negroes. And all this, as Mr Landon finely says, "is heightened by an ever-present contrast" : At the end of every street, hanging in mid-air above this nest of mephitic filth, the cold and almost saint-like purity of the everlasting snows, Chumolhri, a huge wedge of argent a mile high, puts to perpetual shame the dirt of Phari. IX. I pass over the different incidents which occurred to the expedition in their march to Lhassa very rapidly ; they are outside my limits and my purpose in these articles. It is known that over and over again Colonel Younghusband was met by envoys from the Dalai Lama, insisting that the expedition should not go forward, and in one way or another trying to maintain the sacred seclusion of Lhassa ; and that, for one cause or another, Colonel Younghusband found himself unable to accede to these views, and pressed on and" on. It is known also that at one or two points the Thibetans offered something like armed resistance to the advance of the expedition. One reads the account cf these encounters with mingled feelings. On the one hand, there are impressive pictures of the extraordinary bravery of those native Indian troops, who now form so important and momentous a part of the army of India. Who can, for instance, -fail to admire that wonderful Sikh warrior, Wassawa Singh? He and his men, when they had to take measures against the Thibetans, were, it must be remembered, at a height of 18,500 f t; and he and they — they were but a handful, all told — had to scale the almost perpendicular face of 1500 ft scarp in order to command the sangar where the Thibetan force was drawn up. This warrior from "sunny India had probably never seen — certainly had never stood on — ice before. Uut-

Hampered alike by his accoutrements and by the urgent anxiety for rapidity. Wassawa Singh still jrave his men but

— — o — - — o _ _ — scant opportunities of rest. It was such a climb as many a member of the Alpine Club would, under the best circumstances, have declined to attempt, and the Order of Merit, which was afterwards conferred upon Wassawa Singh, was certainly one 5 of the most hardly-earned distinctions of the campaign. There is, alas ! another side to this picture of war. There is no doubt that the Thibetans were but ill-prepared and half-hearted in their attempts to block by force the advance of the expedition ; and, in any case, they were so badly aimed and led that they could do nothing against disciplined troops armed with the latest form of weapon. The result is that the so-called battle reads much more like a battue than a real encounter between armed men. Mr Landon confesses to this view of the struggle quite openly : It was like fighting with a child. The issue was not in doubt, even for the first moment, and under the appalling punishment of lead they staggered, failed, and ran. Straight down the line of fire lay their only path of escape. . . . Two hundred yards away stood a sharply-squared rock, behind which tney thought to find refuge. . It was an awful sight. One watched it with the curious sense of fascination which the display of unchecked power over life and death always exerts when exercised. Men dropped at every yard. Here and there an ugly heap of dead l and wounded was concentrated, but not a space of 20 yards, was without its stricken and shapeless burden. At last the slowly-moving wretches — and the slowness of their escape was horrible and loathsome to vs — reached the corner, where, at anyrate, we knew them safe from the horrible lightning storm which they had themselves challenged. All this was necessary, but none the less it sickened those who took part in it, however well they realised the fact. XI. It is time that I should say something of the religion of the Thibetans — that central fact of their lives -which, more than any other, perhaps, accounts for their desire to keep tneir territory unspotted to the infidel world. Here you find Buddhism in its most ascetic manifestations. I have read few things which have impressed me more deeply than Mr Landon's account of his visit to the monastery of Nyen-de-kyi-buk. The monks here belong to what is known as the 2s r ying-ma sect — a sect apparently which difters from other sects in being more shict. Mr Landon and Captain O'Conßor were received in a courteous manner by the Abbot, "a quiet, sad-eyed man of al out 40" ; there were near by a dozen children "playing about -Kith wholesome bickerings in the dust of the courtyard" — children who, it will be seen, are the most pathetic and even agonising features in. the story of this monastery Mr Landon lias to tell. For here are the doctrine and practice of this strange sect. I give it in the words of the Abbot himself : "These men," said the Abbot . "live here in this mountain of their own free will ; a few of them are allowed a little light whereby reading is possible, but these are the weaker brethren ; the others live in darkness in a square cell partly hewn out of ( the sharp slope of the rock, partly built j up, with the window just within reach i of their upraised hand. There are three ; periods of this immurement. The first i is endured for six months ; the second, '

upon which a monk may enter at any time he pleases, or not at all, is for three years and 93 days ; the third, and last period, is for life. Only this morning," said the Abbot, "a hermit died here, after having lived in darkness for 25 years." The thing was almost revolting, because the men entered willingly upon it. "What happens when they are ill?" O'Connor asked the Abbot. The answer came concisely enough, "They never are." It is true that when pressed he qualified this statement a little, but it seemed still to have considerable truth. XII.

This sounds terrible enough, but the picture becomes even more terrible when it is seen actually in being. Here is what happened : We asked permission to see one of the immured monks. Without any hesitation the Abbot led the way into the sunshine, which lay sweltering over the spring-teeming spaces of the little valley below, and venturesome little green plants were poking up under our feet between the' crevices into the stone footway. We climbed about 40ft, and the Abbot led us into a small courtyard, which had blank walls all round it, over which a peach tree reared its transparent pink and white against the sky. Almost on a level with the ground there was an opening closed wi£lv a flat stone from behind. In front of this window was a ledge 18in in width, with two basins beside it, one at each end. The Abbot was attended by an acolyte, who, by his master's orders, tapped three times sharply on the stone slab : we stood in the little courtyard in the sun, and watched that wicket with cold apprehension. I think, on the whole, it was the most uncanny thing I saw in all Thibet. What on earth was going

to appear when the stone slab, which even then was beginning weakly to quiver, was pushed aside the wildest conjecture could not suggest. After half a minute's pause the stone moved, or tried to move, but it came to rest again. Then very slowly and uncertainly it was pushed back, and a black chasm was revealed. There was again a pause of 30 seconds, during which in agination ran riot, but I do not think that any other thing could have been as intensely pathetic as that which we actually saw. A hand, muffled in a tightly-wound piece of cloth, for all the world like the stump of an arm, was painfully thrust up and very weakly it felt along the slab. After a fruitless fumbling the han slowly quivered back again into darkness. A few moments later there was again one ineffectual effort., and then the stone slab moved noiselessly again across the opening. Once a day water and an unleavened cake of flour is placed for the prisoner on that slab, the signal is given, and he may take it in. His diversion is over for the day, and in the darkness of his cell, where night and day, moon, sunset, and the dawn are alike, he, poor soul, had thought that another day of his long penance was over. I do not know what feelings were uppermost at that moment in the others, but I do know that a physical chill struck through me to the marrow. The awful pathos of that painful movement struggled in me with an intense shame that we had intruded ourselves upon a private misery ; and that we should have added one straw to the burden borne in the darkness by that unseen and unhappy man was a curiously poignant regret. XIII. There are tnree things which add to the tragic and almost incredible hoi Tor of this picture. The first is that this sad-eyed, sweet-spoken Abbot, who has just described and exhibited this scene of awful self-immolation, "was waiting for the moment, now not long to be delayed, when he should bid farewell to the world." The second is that these children whom we have seen playing in thie courtyard are doomed to end their lives in this terrible waj . And the third element of pathos is that h~ no country in the world are there such wondrous and beautiful natural effects to a,ppeal to man to remain in the gladness of the sunlight. Of the many eloquent and poetic descriptions which describe Thibetan scenery mid atmosphere, I have space for just one- or two short passages. They will give you an idea, both of Mr Land - ~ style and of what Thibet is like. Tl. - the first: The colour of Thibet has no parallel in the world. . . . Nowhere is there such a constancy of beauty, night and morning alike, a,s there is in these fertile plains inset in the mountain backbone of the world. . . . There is no colour on God's palette which He has not used along the road. XIV. Here is Mr Landon's first impression of the inviolate city : The sheer magnificence of the unexpected sight which met our unprepared eyes was to us almost a thing in credible. There is nothing missing from this splendid spectacle — architecture, forest trees, wide green places, rivers, streams, and mountains, all lie before one, as one looks down from the height upon Lhassa stretching out at our feet. The dark, forbidding spurs and ravines of the Kyichu, up which we had come, interlock one with another, and had promised nothing of all this ; the beauty of Lhassa is doxibled by its utter unexpectedness. . . . There was nothing — less, perhaps, in such maps and descriptions of Lhassa, as we had than anywhere else — to promise us this city of gigantio palace and golden roof, these wild stretches of woodland, these ucres of close-cropped grazing laoid and marshy grass, ringed amd delimited by high trees or lazy streamlets of brown transparent water, over which the branches almost met. XV. Of all the sights of Lhassa the most re-

markable- is the Potala — a structure half palace, half monastery. Here is Mr Landon's impression of it :

A man can have no eye for anything but the huge upstanding mass of the Potala palace to his left ; it drags the eye of tlze mind like a lodestone, for indeed sheer bulk and magnificent audacity could do no more in architecture than they liave done in this huge palace-temple of the Grand Lama. Simplicity has -wrought a marvel in stone, 900 ft in. length and towering 70ft higher than the golden cross of St. Paul's Cathedral. The Potala would dominate London — Lhassa it simply eclipses. By European standards it is impossible to judge this building; there is r-iOthing there to which comparison can be made.° Perhaps in tiie austerity of its huge curtains of blank, unveiled, unornamented wall and in the flat, unabashed slants of its tremendous south-eastern face there is a suggestion of the massive grandeur of Egyptian work ; but the contrast of colour and surroundings, to which no small part of the magnificence of the sight is due, Egypt cannot boast . . - The- central building of the palace, the Phodang Marpo, the private home of the incarnate divinity himself, stands out four-square upon and between tie wide supporting bulks of masonry, a rich, red-crimson, and, most perfect touch of all, over it against the sky the glittering golden roofs — a note of glory added with the infinite taste and the sparing hand of the old illuminator — recompense the oolonr scheme from end to end, a sequence of green in three shades, of white, of maroon, of gold, and of pale blue. The brown yak-hair curtain, 80ft in height and) 25ft across, hangs like a U*ess of hair down the very centre of the central sanctuary, hiding a central recess. Such, is the Potala.. And here I must leave this fascinating book and fascinating country. — T. P.