eir belongings smoothly to Lhasa. Before I reached
Kalimpong I wished I had never left the 'radius.' No one should embark
on Asiatic travel who is not thoroughly out of harmony with
civilization.

The servant question is another difficulty. No native bearer wishes to
join the field force. Why should he? He has to cook and pack and do the
work of three men; he has to make long, exhausting marches; he is
exposed to hunger, cold, and fatigue; he may be under fire every day;
and he knows that if he falls into the hands of the Tibetans, like the
unfortunate servants of Captain Parr at Gyantse, he will be brutally
murdered and cut up into mincemeat. In return for which he is fed and
clothed, and earns ten rupees more a month than he would in the security
of his own home. After several unsuccessful trials, I have found one
Jung Bir, a Nepali bearer, who is attached to me because I forget
sometimes to ask for my bazaar account, and do not object to his being
occasionally drunk. In Tibet the poor fellow will have little chance of
drinking.

My first man lost his nerve altogether, and, when told to work, could
only whine out that his father and mother were not with him. My next
applicant was an opium-eater, prematurely bent and aged, with the dazed
look of a toad that has been incarcerated for ages in a rock, and is at
last restored to light and the world by the blow of a mason's hammer. He
wanted money to buy more dreams, and for this he was willing to expose
his poor old body to hardships that would have killed him in a month.
Jung Bir was a Gurkha and more martial. His first care on being engaged
was to buy a long and heavy chopper--'for making mince,' he said; but I
knew it was for the Tibetans.

To reach Ari one has to descend twice, crossing the Teesta at 700 feet,
and the Russett Chu at 1,500 feet. These valleys are hotter than the
plains of India. The streams run east and west, and the cliffs on both
sides catch the heat of the early morning sun and hold it all day. The
closeness, the refraction from the rocks, and the evaporation of the
water, make the atmosphere almost suffocating, and one feels the heat
the more intensely by the change from the bracing air above. Crossing
the Teesta, one enters British Bhutan, a strip of land of less than 300
square miles on the left bank of the river. It was ceded to us with
other territories by the treaty of 1865; or, in plain words, it was
annexed by us as a punishment for the ou