iceless gifts. Similarly,
the Abbot of Pehte saved the fortress and town from another band of
invaders by giving the lake the appearance of green pasturelands, into
which the Dzungarians galloped and were engulfed. I quote these tales,
which have been mentioned in nearly every book on Tibet, as typical of
the country. Doubtless similar legends will be current in a few years
about the British to account for the sparing of Samding, Nagartse, and
Pehte Jong.

Special courtesy was shown the monks and nuns of Samding, in recognition
of the hospitality afforded Sarat Chandra Dass by the last incarnation
of Dorje Phagmo, who entertained the Bengali traveller, and saw that he
was attended to and cared for through a serious illness. A letter was
sent Dorje Phagmo, asking if she would receive three British officers,
including the antiquary of the expedition. But the present incarnation,
a girl of six or seven years, was invisible, and the convent was
reported to be bare of ornament and singularly disappointing. There
were no pigs.

If only one were without the incubus of an army, a month in the Noijin
Kang Sang country and the Yamdok Plain would be a delightful experience.
But when one is accompanying a column one loses more than half the
pleasure of travel. One has to get up at a fixed hour--generally
uncomfortably early--breakfast, and pack and load one's mules and see
them started in their allotted place in the line, ride in a crowd all
day, often at a snail's pace, and halt at a fixed place. Shooting is
forbidden on the line of march. When alone one can wander about with a
gun, pitch camp where one likes, make short or long marches as one
likes, shoot or fish or loiter for days in the same place. The spirit
which impels one to travel in wild places is an impulse, conscious or
unconscious, to be free of laws and restraints, to escape conventions
and social obligations, to temporarily throw one's self back into an
obsolete phase of existence, amidst surroundings which bear little mark
of the arbitrary meddling of man. It is not a high ideal, but men often
deceive themselves when they think they make expeditions in order to add
to science, and forsake the comforts of life, and endure hunger, cold,
fatigue and loneliness, to discover in exactly what parallel of unknown
country a river rises or bends to some particular point of the compass.
How many travellers are there who would spend the same time in an
office poring over maps