a minimum. But he is not. We have seen how the four thousand died in
their passage across Sikkim without doing a day's work. Local drafts did
better. Yet I have often passed the Lieutenant in command of the corps
lamenting their lack of grit. 'Two more of my cows died this morning.
Look, there goes another! D--n the beasts! I believe they do it out of
spite!' And the chief Supply and Transport officer, always a humorist in
adversity, when asked why they were dying off every day, said: 'I think
it must be due to overfeeding.' But we owe much to the yak.

The final advance from Gyantse to Lhasa was a comparatively easy matter.
Crops were plentiful, and large supplies of grain were obtained from the
monasteries and jongs on the road. We found, contrary to anticipation,
that the produce in this part of Tibet was much greater than the
consumption. In many places we found stores that would last a village
three or four years. Our transport animals lived on the country. We
arrived at Lhasa with 2,600 mules and 400 coolies. The yak and donkey
corps were left at the river for convoy work. It would have been
impossible to have pushed through in the winter.

All the produce we consumed on the road was paid for. In this way the
expense of the army's keep fell on the Lhasa Government, who had to pay
the indemnity, and our presence in the country was not directly, at any
rate, a burden on the agricultural population of the villages through
which we passed.

Looking back on the splendid work accomplished by the transport, it is
difficult to select any special phase more memorable than another. The
complete success of the organization and the endurance and grit
displayed by officers and men are equally admirable. I could cite the
coolness of a single officer in a mob of armed and mutinous coolies,
when the compelling will of one man and a few blows straight from the
shoulder kept the discontented harnessed to their work and quelled a
revolt; or the case of another who drove his diseased yaks over the snow
passes into Chumbi, and after two days' rest started with a fresh corps
on ten months of the most tedious labour the mind of man can imagine,
rising every day before daybreak in an almost Arctic cold, traversing
the same featureless tablelands, and camping out at night cheerfully in
the open plain with his escort of thirty rifles. There was always the
chance of a night attack, but no other excitement to break the eternal
monotony. Bu