Occasionally one puts
up a fox. The Tibetan species has a very fine brush that fetches a fancy
price in the bazaar. At present there is too much ice on the plain to
hunt them, but they ought to give good sport in the spring.

It was dark when we rode into the Jong. After a long day in the saddle,
dinner is good, even though it is of yak's flesh, and it is good to sit
in front of a fire even though the smoke chokes you. I went so far as to
pity the cave-dwellers at Chumbi. Phari is certainly very much colder,
but it has its diversions and interests. There is still some shooting to
be had, and the place has a quaint old-world individuality of its own,
which seasons the monotony of life to a contemplative man. One is on the
borderland, and one has a Micawber-like feeling that something may turn
up. After dinner there is bridge, which fleets the time considerably,
but at Chumbi there were no diversions of any kind--nothing but dull,
blank, uninterrupted monotony.

_February 20._

For two days half a blizzard has been blowing, and expeditions have been
impossible. Everything one eats and drinks has the same taste of argol
smoke. At breakfast this morning we had to put our _chapatties_ in our
pockets to keep them clean, and kept our meat covered with a soup-plate,
making surreptitious dives at it with a fork. After a few seconds'
exposure it was covered with grime. Sausages and bully beef, which had
just been boiled, were found to be frozen inside. The smoke in the
mess-room was suffocating. So to bed, wrapped in sheepskins and a
sleeping-bag. Under these depressing conditions I have been reading the
narratives of Bogle and Manning, old English worthies who have left on
record the most vivid impressions of the dirt and cold and misery of
Phari.

It is ninety years since Thomas Manning passed through Phari on his way
to Lhasa. Previously to his visit we only know of two Englishmen who
have set foot in Phari--Bogle in 1774, and Turner in 1783, both
emissaries of Warren Hastings. Manning's journal is mostly taken up with
complaints of his Chinese servant, who seems to have gained some
mysterious ascendancy over him, and to have exercised it most
unhandsomely. As a traveller Manning had a genius for missing effects;
it is characteristic of him that he spent sixteen days at Phari, yet
except for a casual footnote, evidently inserted in his journal after
his return, he makes no mention of the Jong. Were it not for Bogle's