om rosy. There was fortunately some grazing at
Pete-jong for the animals, but both grain and tsampa were growing
short. A day or two more, without some addition of these articles, would
see us depleted.

Pete-jong, a fine square-topped fort, built on a rock, overtopped by
high mountains on one side, and overlooking the blue waters of Lake
Palti on the other, looked magnificent, and more than ever reminded one
of that drop-scene in the theatre. 'What a shame,' my wife says, 'to
draw such horrid comparisons!' But I tell her they are not horrid
really. In fact, a short sojourn in Tibet, a country freed from the
obscurities of a thick atmosphere, and full of great dense mountains and
lakes, and of startlingly crude contrasts of bright colours, quite
revolutionises for the time being one's ideas of landscape art. In one
of those diffident modern impressionist pictures, in which the artist is
afraid to make his sky or water really blue, or his snow really white,
or his mountain-tops really lofty or distinct, one finds nothing that
appeals to one's sense of vivid truth. But in that drop-scene above
alluded to, lit up as it would be by glaring footlights, or in that
glorious wealth of colour that is daubed by machinery on to even so low
a thing as a tradesman's almanac, or, again, in that magic lantern slide
reflected on a sheet, which gave to one as a child such romantic ideas
of nature rampant in Switzerland or the Holy Land, there is more that
represents the clear form and crude colour of the uplands of Tibet than
would ever be found in the works of any up-to-date Royal Academician. As
memory fades, and one becomes used again to denser atmospheres and to
features of the earth's surface that are less pronounced, I suppose
one's ideas will revert to their normal orthodoxy.

Pete-jong, fair and romantic from the outside, is the reverse within. We
left a few troops there, making it a post on our line of communication
(as we had done also in the cases of Nagartse and Ralung). I was sorry
for the Pete-jong garrison. The lower part of the jong was occupied by
byres and barns and dark chambers, all of them empty of all but filth.
Through the centre of the jong, and through the rock on which it was
built, a rough stone track, half path, half staircase, ran upwards,
mostly in pitch darkness. From the walls at the side, from the roof
overhead, and from the ground beneath, moisture seemed to be always
exuding, the walls and roof being