by Pat Barr
Mrs Bishop and her colourful company left Srinagar at the end of June, and she quickly imposed a strict daily marching routine upon them all. This she did during all her later journeys by allotting fixed hours for travelling, eating, pitching tents and so on. It makes her sound something of a martinet, but it was an effective way of enforcing her authority as a lone woman over assorted coolies, guides, muleteers. Thus, as they followed bridle-tracks that spiralled 13,000 feet high over the Kashmiri mountains, the order of the day was: ‘In bed before nine; tea and toast at six; dress, pack, start with the Afghan and seis (groom) at seven – having sent on a coolie eight miles with the servants’ square tent, the luncheon basket with rice, hard-boiled eggs, cold tea, and cherries, and my cork mattress. Halt at ten; pitch the tent, lie down for two and a half hours (such a luxury but for the proximity of things that creep), and go on again for another hour …’ And on and on, among spruce forests and valleys starred with white jasmine, until they reached a treeless region spiked with ‘mountains of bare gravel and red rock, grey crags, stretches of green turf, sunlit peaks with their snows … eastwards and beyond a long valley filled with a snowfield fringed with pink primulas; and that was CENTRAL ASIA’. She writes it like that, in defiant, triumphant capitals, to remind herself of John Bishop’s wry comment that it was ‘the only formidable rival’ to him in Isabella’s heart. She had lost him; but Central Asia at least she would have.
The part of the promised land she chose to explore first was Ladakh, a part of western Tibet that since 1841 had been a dependency of Kashmir. The province was governed, with varying degrees of inefficiency, by Kashmiri officials; Her Britannic Majesty’s Commissioner resided in Leh, its capital, for four months a year only; its boundaries, in defiance of the British urge for definition, were still ambiguous. For most of the nineteenth century the Tibetan government, under Chinese suzerainty, had adamantly refused to allow foreigners access to ‘Tibet proper’, and thus the country had become to the West a symbol of the ultimately remote and mysterious in the generally remote and mysterious East. Not that all foreigners obeyed the prohibition, for, as the historian Sir Thomas Holdich says, ‘The chronicles of Tibetan exploration are full of the records of vain attempts to unveil the mysteries surrounding that holy of Buddhist holies – the city of Lhasa.’ A few intrepid European explorers, missionaries and spies of the Indian government had penetrated the forbidden barriers; all suffered great hardship and some did not return. Isabella, however, seems not to have succumbed to this ‘Lhasa or bust’ fever, and perhaps she was wise, for, again according to Holdich, when the ‘veil was torn aside’ by the members of the Younghusband Expedition in 1904, mysterious Lhasa proved to be but ‘a scattered unkempt and ill-regulated town full of impurities, infested with savage dogs, obscene pigs and night prowlers revelling in many most unholy institutions’.
Anyway, when Isabella was in the area, the veil was still untorn, and the outlying provinces of Ladakh and Baltistan were under the ‘protection’ of the Indian government in order to keep that section of the precious Himalayan frontier cushioned off from unpredictable, Chinese-infiltrated Tibet. Not that the Ladakhis knew or cared much about such great-power manoeuvres. They continued to trade extensively with China and Russia, and to a smaller extent with India; their country was geographically and climatically part of Tibet; they owed all their cultural, moral and religious allegiance to the Dalai Lama in Lhasa. So, though most of Isabella’s explorations were confined to Ladakh and neighbouring provinces, she was justified in calling her writings on the subject Among the Tibetans.
She met her first Tibetans at the village of Shergol, near the Kashmiri border, and at that point ‘the intensely human interest of the journey began’. In place of the handsome, cringing, sullen Kashmiris she was greeted by the ‘ugly, short, squat, yellow-skinned, flat-nosed, oblique-eyed, uncouth-looking’ Shergolians, to whom she at once took. The headman courteously showed her the local sights: ‘a gonpo or monastery built into the rock with a brightly coloured front, and three chörten or relic-holders painted blue, red and yellow and daubed with coarse arabesques and representations of deities, one having a striking resemblance to Mr Gladstone’. The ‘sights’ were religious; in Tibet they always were.
Each dim and smelly home into which Isabella was invited had its shelf of wooden gods, each village its chörtens, its statues of Buddha, its prayer-wheels – revolving wooden cylinders filled with rolls of paper inscribed with prayers. The cylinders were frequently turned by the villagers, who muttered, as they did so, the universal prayer, Om mani padme hum (O jewel in the lotus O). This oddly appealing mystic formula was the legend, anthem, ave maria, slogan, charm of the people, its continual repetition was a means of acquiring merit, its delineation on wood, stone or paper a philanthropic act. It was inscribed everywhere: on cotton banners in the market-place, on cliff-sides, on personal seals, on large slabs of tinted butter, on monastery bells, bridges, pebbles. In some villages there were a hundred or more prayer-wheels in a row, each emblazoned with ‘om mani’ and with more ‘om manis’ churning out of them, some so large that water power was used to revolve them. Said a British missionary who had lived there, ‘If you were to introduce steam-power into Tibet tomorrow, probably the first use made of it would be to turn a prayer-wheel.’
The continual hum of devotion that vibrated through the bleak land twanged into a positive cacophony inside the gonpos, whence blasted a daily oratorio of religious music. Each gonpo sheltered some three hundred lamas, and Isabella estimates that the total lama population in Ladakh alone was at least 11,000. They were everywhere. Some were solitary, unaffiliated wanderers, ‘travelling without any end in view’, said one historian, ‘so that the places they reach are always those they sought’; others, who dwelt in the monasteries, went jovially in companies – ‘Passing along faces of precipices and over waterless plateaux of blazing red gravel … the journey was cheered by the meeting of red and yellow lamas … each lama twirling his prayer-cylinder, abbots and skushoks (the latter believed to be incarnations of Buddha) with many retainers or gay groups of priestly students, intoning in harsh and high-pitched monotones, Om mani padme hum.’ ‘The lama’, wrote William Carey, a well-known traveller in Tibet, ‘holds the people in the hollow of his hand and many forces meet in that magnetic and masterful grip.’ The forces were Buddhism, Hinduism and demon-worship; they spawned in the mind of the average lama a nightmarish chaos of gods, devils, hobgoblins and saints. Dressed in filthy petticoat-like robes of yellow or red (according to sect) and pointed hat tricked out with coloured feathers, tassels and trailing flaps, carrying holy water in a leathern bottle, pen, purse, and dorje (dumb-bell-shaped badge of office symbolising a thunderbolt) the lama, ignorant, idle and unscrupulous as he sometimes was, embodied the learning, culture and wealth of the land.
Lamas were the only Tibetans permitted to read the nation’s sacred literature, which was contained in volumes of exquisite parchment, that, according to Isabella, ‘when divested of their silken and brocade wrappings’ often contained ‘nothing better than fairy tales and stories of doubtful morality’. Lamas produced most of the country’s music, or what she terms ‘the wild dissonance’ that resulted from the warble of silver horns, the thunder of yak-skin drums, the whistle of conch-shells, the boom of a golden gong. Lamas alone could divine the future, by interpreting the ‘meaning’ of the cracks that appeared in the shoulder-blade of a sheep after it had been charred. Thus they were indispensable for every enterprise – the trading of China tea for Kashmiri silks, the sowing of barley-seed, the celebration of birth, marriage, death, all would surely fail unless they had the lama’s blessing. William Carey conjures up the eerie appearance of the Tibetan holy man when he writes, ‘In any other environment the lama would be merely a dirty and revolting pretender. But strutting in that wild theatre with his trumpet of human thigh-bone at his lips and a skull in his hand, he is the very embodiment of the spirit that haunts the mountains and broods over the wide inhos
pitable deserts and makes a sport of men. It is the spirit of awe and mystery that smites the heart with panic and congeals the blood. And this is the enchantment with which the land is enchanted.’
Such a country, subjugated and dedicated to this consuming religious spirit, would seem stony ground indeed for the Christian missionary, but there were the resolute few, as Isabella found when she eventually reached Leh. On the way to the capital, her expedition crossed arid mountain ridges where the lowest valleys were more than 11,000 feet high. By day the sun banged down unhindered through the rarefied air, shuddered above the rocks and cooked up a temperature between 120° and 130°; at night the mercury slithered below zero. ‘I did not suffer from the climate,’ Isabella explained, ‘but in the case of most Europeans, the air passages become irritated, the skin cracks, and after a time the action of the heart is affected. The hair when released stands out from the head, leather shrivels and splits, horn combs break to pieces, food dries up, rapid evaporation renders water-colour sketching nearly impossible and tea made with water from 15 to 20 degrees below the boiling-point is flavourless and flat.’
After a 160-mile ‘delightful journey’ in these conditions, she saw Leh in the distance, a flat-roofed, squat, vermilion and brown town huddled below a range of 18,000-foot-high mountains and encircled by a plain of blazing-hot gravel. She was expected, for the Tibetans had their own bush telegraph to report the movements of such a rare bird as a female foreigner, and so she was met at the city gates by ‘the wazir’s jemadar or head of police, in artistic attire with attendants in apricot turbans, violet chogas and green leggings, who cleared the way with spears, Gyalpo, frolicking as merrily and as ready to bite, and the Afghan [Usman Shah] striding in front as firmly as though they had not marched for twenty-five days through the rugged passes of the Himalayas’. Though Isabella, in her dusty tweed suit, could not compete with the gay motley of the police escort, Usman Shah did his best on her behalf. As she had noted earlier, the little swashbuckler had exploded into rainbows of colour as the journey progressed. At first he wore, ‘black or white leggings wound round from ankle to knee with broad bands of orange or scarlet serge, white cambric knicker-bockers, a white cambric shirt with a short white muslin frock with hanging sleeves and a leather girdle over it, a red-peaked cap with a dark blue pagri wound round it, with one end hanging over his back, earrings, necklace, bracelets and a profusion of rings’. Later, ‘he blossomed into blue and white muslin with a scarlet sash, wore a gold embroidered peak and a huge white muslin turban, with much change of ornaments, and appeared frequently with a great bunch of poppies or a cluster of crimson roses surmounting all’.
Thus flamboyantly preceded, Isabella rode to the bungalow of the British Joint Commission in Leh. The Commissioner was absent, but she was soon called upon by one of the city’s very few permanent white residents, Mr Redslob of the Moravian Mission. Redslob, a large, cheery German, and linguist, artist, botanist, scholar of all things Tibetan, had spent twenty-five years in the country, during which he and his colleagues had been beating their evangelical heads almost entirely in vain against the unyielding walls of lamaism. Among his successes in Leh were a school, a hospital and a printing press for Tibetan translations of the Gospels. During his visit, jolly Mr Redslob told Isabella some of this, and also asked if she would like to accompany him on a journey to the northern province of Nubra. This meant leaving the capital she had just reached almost immediately, but she did not hesitate, for she was still as ready to go further from ‘civilisation’ as she had been when offered the chance to visit the Malay States from Singapore ten years before. And anyway, her impromptu expeditions often turned out best.
II
Isabella had intended to take Usman Shah on her new adventure, but unfortunately Leh was the end of the road for that colourful buccaneer. While she was sketching his fantastic rig-out that same afternoon, he was recognised by the chief of police as one of a gang of mercenaries who had plundered the town and mortally stabbed an officer but a few months before. So tiny unrepentant Usman, still swaggering, was marched out of town, and Isabella was a little sorry, for he had been completely faithful to her in his fashion and was such fun to look at – though she shuddered to recall how often she had been completely at the mercy of that bright jewelled scimitar he always carried over his shoulder.
The next day, she, Redslob and a scholarly monk called Gergan began their ascent of the Kailas mountain range that lay between the capital and Nubra province. Before nightfall, they reached an altitude of 18,000 feet, men and beasts (but not woman) suffering dreadfully from mountain sickness and wild Gyalpo ‘stopping every few yards, gasping with blood trickling from his nostrils and turning his head to look at me, with the question in his eyes, “What does this mean?”’ The following dawn a series of ‘gruntings and low resonant bellowings’ outside the tent announced the arrival of a new animal in Isabella’s life – the yak. He was a beast of uncertain temper, sturdy, hairy, his ferocious eyes glinting from under a tangle of black curls, given to barging at a prospective rider with his thick curved horns, and to ‘executing fantastic movements on the ledges of precipices’, when the rider was actually astride. He disdained the plough, but condescended to carry burdens when led by a rope through the nostrils, and, usefully, he thrived at altitudes above 11,000 feet. The yak was to the Tibetan what the bear was to the Ainu, the buffalo to the Indian – provider of all good things. The people put yak fat in their cakes, yak meat in their stews, yak butter in their tea and yak dung on their fires; yak skins made carpets and tents; long yak hair was dyed red and exported to China where it was used to decorate the hats of a certain class of mandarin; bushy yak tails were set in silver-tipped antelope horn and exported to India where princes in their carriages used them to fan away the flies.
Isabella’s first yak was deceptively quiet and looked almost elegant with her well-worn Mexican saddle and striped blanket thrown among rather than upon his shaggy locks. ‘His back seemed as broad as that of an elephant, and with his slow, sure, resolute step, he was like a mountain in motion.’ Mounted thus, she crossed the precipitous Digar Pass in a snowstorm and descended into the valley below. It was strange terrain: wolves lurked among the tamarisk thickets, yellow gorges cut deep into the yellow gravel of the rock, patches of loose-grained barley and lucerne sprouted about the villages, and trading cravans, following the route to Yarkand, slithered down from the glaciers to ford the ice-grey Shyok River that roared in full summer spate. On the outward journey, the party were poled across the Shyok in a leaky scow, but on their return, after a week of wandering among the mountain villages, they learned that the scow had been totally wrecked in the rapids two days before, and they would just have to wade. That night, round a camp fire, a noisy group of ‘water guides’ and local headmen cheerfully informed them that the waters were rising steadily as the glaciers above melted, and the consensus seemed to be that the fragile little foreign lady on her ‘spider-legged’ horse would never reach the far bank alive.
However, unless Isabella wished to spend the next few months in the valley, there was no choice; and the next morning, under a magnesium-white sun that was unhelpfully dissolving the snowfields at an ever-increasing rate, they prepared for the crossing. A friendly headman pressed upon Isabella the loan of a huge Yurkand horse, ‘which nearly proved fatal’; the Tibetan servants knelt on the banks and prayed for safety; Mando and the interpreter, white-lipped with terror, wore dark goggles so they might not see the booming surge; everyone dashed quantities of the ice-cold water over their faces ‘to prevent giddiness’; girths were tightened, loads hoisted higher, and with shouts of encouragement the whole caravan plunged in. Isabella’s horse was led by one of the ‘water guides’ – near-naked brown creatures who ‘with elf-locks and pigtails streaming from their heads and their uncouth yells and wild gesticulations looked like true river-demons’. ‘Louder grew the yells as the torrent raged more hoarsely, the chorus of the water guides grew frantic, the water was
up to the man’s armpits and the seat of my saddle, my horse tottered and swerved many times, the nearing shore presented an abrupt bank underscooped by the stream. There was a deeper plunge, an encouraging shout, and Mr Redslob’s strong horse leapt the bank. The men encouraged mine; he made a desperate effort, but fell short and rolled over backwards, into the Shyok with his rider under him. A struggle, a moment of suffocation, and I was extricated by strong arms, to be knocked down again by the rush of the water, to be again dragged up and hauled and hoisted up the crumbling bank. I escaped with a broken rib and some severe bruises, but the horse was drowned.’ Mr Redslob and the guides were so upset by the accident that she felt bound to make light of it, saying that it was the sort of thing for which one must be prepared when wandering about in Central Asia.
