A Curious Life for a Lady

by Pat Barr

  And certainly the fording of Tibetan rivers was a notoriously hazardous business, and western travellers have told several chilling tales on the theme. The chilliest comes from the 1840s and is told by the lively Jesuit missionary Abbé Hue, who, with one companion, made the extremely arduous and perilous journey across Mongolia and eastern Tibet to Lhasa. At one stage, the missionaries’ caravan had to ford twelve wide branches of a half-frozen river during the night. ‘Ice cracked in all directions’, Hue explained, ‘animals stumbled and splashed up the water and men shouted and vociferated … When day broke, the Holy Embassy was still dabbling in the water, and when re-formed at last on the opposite bank, it presented a truly ludicrous appearance. Men and animals were all covered with icicles. The horses walked on very dolefully, evidently much incommoded by their tails, which hung down, all in a mass, stiff and motionless as though they had been made of lead instead of hair. The long hair on the legs of the camels had become magnificent icicles which knocked one against the other as the animals advanced, with harmonious discord … As to the long-haired oxen [yaks] they were regular caricatures; nothing can be conceived more ludicrous than their appearance as they slowly advanced with legs separated to the utmost possible width in order to admit of an enormous system of stalactites which hung from their bellies to the ground. The poor brutes had been rendered so perfectly shapeless by the agglomeration of icicles with which they were covered, that they looked as though they were preserved in sugar candy.’

  Compared to this, Isabella’s crossing, though painful, was comparatively easy, and after it they all camped in some apricot orchards to recuperate. ‘There I put into practice what I had learned about broken ribs in St Mary’s Hospital’, she told John Murray, and it must have been most effective, for she makes no further mention of her injury. In the orchards, bundles of gold fruit swung above their heads and they were welcome to eat as much as they wanted, provided they returned the vital stones to the proprietor. From the stones’ kernels women were extracting drops of clear fragrant precious oil that was used to illuminate the shrine-lamps which burned before all those dusty-gilt Buddhas. Babies were given balls of apricot oil and barley mush to suck and their mothers oiled their grubby little bodies with it instead of washing them. The dirtiness of the Tibetan was as legendary as the perils of his rivers. His was not the fecund, loose, shifting dirt of the tropics, but the barren, hard-glazed, ancient filth of a life-time that no apricot oil could hope to dislodge. An eighteenth-century English traveller, George Bogle, recorded that he once prevailed upon a Tibetan woman to wash her child’s face so that he could see the true colour of its skin. The infant, he says, nearly died of convulsions. ‘As for the garments of the Tibetan’, remarked William Carey, ‘they are a zoological perserve.’ But this, the people thought, was as it should be, for didn’t the old proverb tell them that lice and riches went together and he who divested himself of the former was doomed to lose the latter also?

  In these circumstances, wise Isabella always slept in her own tent, except at the village of Hundar, home of Gergan the monk, which they reached the next day. Redslob had been there before and the whole population turned out to greet them. At Gergan’s house, ‘Everything was prepared for us. The mud floors were swept, cotton quilts were laid down on the balconies, blue cornflowers and marigolds were in all the rooms and the women were loaded with coarse jewellery’ – turquoise amulets, silver and brass bangles. It was a typical land-owner’s dwelling, built of stone and sun-dried brick, its ceilings of peeled poplar rods, its living-room floor of split white pebbles set in clay, in the centre of which stood a clay fireplace with brass cooking-pots, bars for roasting barley and a large wooden churn. This was in constant use for the making of that abominable Tibetan tea which only a few stalwart foreigners learned to love. Isabella gives the recipe: ‘For six persons. Boil a teacupful of tea in three pints of water for ten minutes with a heaped dessert-spoonful of soda. Put the infusion into the churn with one pound of butter and a small tablespoonful of salt. Churn until as thick as cream’, – and then slurp from bowl. Often, a mush of parched barley was added to the brew to form a sodden brown tea-ball which was then eaten rather than drunk. To the westerner’s palate, the butter was rank with the flavour of the ancient goatskins in which it had been too long kept.

  The skins and other stores were kept in the small dark rooms that opened off the main living-room, above which, Isabella continues, ‘were the balconies and reception rooms. Wooden posts supported the roofs, and these were wreathed with lucerne, the first fruits of the field. Narrow steep staircases in all Tibetan houses lead to the family rooms. In winter the people live below, alongside of the animals and fodder. In summer they sleep in loosely built booths of poplar branches on the roof. Gergan’s roof was covered, like others at the time, to the depth of two feet with hay, i.e. grass and lucerne, which are wound into long ropes, experience having taught the Tibetans that their scarce fodder is best preserved thus from breakage and waste. I bought hay by the yard for Gyalpo.

  ‘Our food in this hospitable house was simple: apricots, fresh or dried and stewed with honey; zho’s milk, curds and cheese, sour cream, peas, beans, balls of barley dough, barley porridge, and “broth of abominable things”.’ The people pressed this fare upon her and were jolly, friendly and most anxious to amuse her. She liked their broad placid faces and easy ways, though she could not but deplore their polyandrous marital arrangements. (In other parts of Tibet, according to other authorities, polygamy was the rule instead, but allied to a system of ‘temporary marriage’ – a state of affairs which an American traveller uncompromisingly described as little removed from promiscuity, which is, after all, but “indefinite polyandry joined with indefinite polygamy”’). Anyway in Hundar, according to Isabella, who checked her facts with Redslob, only the eldest son might marry and the bride ‘accepts all his brothers as inferior or subordinate husbands … all children being regarded as legally the property of the eldest son, who is addressed by them as “Big Father”, his brothers receiving the title of “Little Father”’. The system might logically lead to a superfluity of women, but Isabella does not mention this – perhaps the Tibetan spinster moved to a polygamous district, or found some consolation in Leh, where there was a large colony of Moslem merchants. The married women at any rate were convinced adherents of the system and sympathised greatly with Isabella in her dismally manless state. Monogamy, they explained, must be a very tedious affair and might result in one’s becoming a ‘widow’ – a term of abuse and reproach hurled only at men and animals!

  Perhaps in these circumstances of domestic rivalry between the various sizes of brother, a husband had to woo his shared bride constantly, which may account for the exceptional charm of some Tibetan love-songs. This excerpt, translated by a colleague of Redslob’s, suggests the prevailing tone which, with its hyperbolic promises of eternal devotion, is oddly reminiscent of a musical-comedy lyric:

  If she, taking the shape of a turquoise dove,

  Should go to soar in the highest skies,

  I, taking the shape of a white falcon,

  Will go to take her home again …

  If she, taking the shape of the fish gold-eye

  Should go to float in the deepest ocean,

  I, taking the shape of a white-breasted otter,

  Will go to take her home again …

  Polyandry also brought different divisions of labour between the sexes. Men wove all the family clothes from the hair of sheep, goat and yak; men also ploughed, and the women followed breaking up the clods. Women cooked the everyday ‘coolie soup’ of dried apricots and spread dung on their house-roofs to dry for fuel. Junior husbands served as yak-drivers, goatherds and churners of the abominable butter. And, in times of discord, men and women beat each other.

  The life was pretty rough, but Isabella saw no dire poverty, and the villagers pressed gifts upon her because she was in Redslob’s company. ‘He drew the best out of them’, she declared. ‘Their supers
titions and beliefs were not to him “rubbish” but subjects for minute investigation and study.’ Consequently he had made many friends, though few converts, and even had entrée to the nearby monastery of Deskyid, and arranged for Isabella to accompany him thither, – a rare privilege for a female foreigner.

  Deskyid, at an altitude of 11,000 feet, was jumbled on top of a perpendicular spur, a ‘vast irregular pile of red, white and yellow temple towers, storehouses, cloisters, galleries and balconies rising for three hundred feet one above another, hanging over chasms, built out on wooden buttresses, and surmounted with flags, tridents and yaks’ tails’. The main temple, dedicated to ‘Wrath and Justice’, suggested to her a hideous inferno: ‘Demon masks of ancient lacquer hung from the pillars, naked swords gleamed in motionless hands, and in a deep recess, whose “darkness was rendered visible” by one lamp, was that indescribable horror the executioner of the Lord of Hell, his many brandished arms holding the intruments of torture, and before him the bell, the thunderbolt and sceptre, the holy water and baptismal flagon. Our joss-sticks fumed on the still air, monks waved censers, and blasts of dissonant music woke the semi-subterranean echoes.’ In the incense-sodden chapel of meditation some lamas were mumbling over their rosaries in a way that the Tibetans themselves likened to the purr of an elderly cat. Their rosary beads came in several exotic varieties: yellow ones from the seeds of a rare Chinese tree, bony ones made from snake spines or discs cut from human skulls, red sandalwood ones, nut-brown beany ones or specially efficacious little nodules dug out of an elephant’s brain. The object of the prolonged rosary-telling was to plunge the devotee into a state of ecstatic contemplation, and though a few seemed very pious, Isabella suspected that the majority were ‘idle and unholy’.

  Unholiness commonly took the form of extortion, for which a lama had ample opportunity. For instance, when attending a funeral his task was to read aloud from a sacred book during the mourning feast – and this he would gabble at the highest possible speed because he was paid by the page. Another of his functions was to exorcise evil spirits from the sick. Again he was paid according to the amount of effort involved. This often resulted in a poor man having but one easily-ousted demon in residence, while a rich man was likely to have been invaded by two or three most tenacious major devils and a whole legion of little servitor hobgoblins who took a very long time to dislodge.

  After seeing the temples, Redslob entered into a good-natured disputation on religious matters with the monastery’s abbot. The monks in attendance laughed ‘sneeringly’ at the foreigner’s efforts – perhaps at his sheer effrontery. But Redslob persevered as he always had, and pressed a copy of the Gospel according to St John upon the abbot, who observed that St Matthew, which Redslob had left on a previous visit, had ‘made very laughable reading’. Perhaps, for the abbot, gospel wit lay partly in its stunning brevity: the equivalent Tibetan sacred work ran to a hundred and eight volumes of 1083 pages each and twelve yaks were needed to carry it.

  III

  A few days after their expedition to Deskyid, Redslob and Isabella returned to Leh through snowstorms that made it seem as if the very mountains were falling apart. The cold was of the searing kind in which metal would stick to the fingers and the skin be torn off in its removal. The scenery was awe-inspiring: scintillating spires and plains of snow stabbed with dramatic flares of colour – blotches of rose-red primulas, sheets of edelweiss, a chasm of ice-green water, a golden eagle feeding on the carcass of a black horse. They ascended a 17,500-foot-high glacier by means of narrow slippery ledges cut into the ice by their guides, and, as even Gyalpo’s clever steely legs were unequal to the challenge, she again rode yak-back.

  The descent was a miserable stumble down miles of crumbling zigzags, and it was a pity that they couldn’t have tried instead the ‘glissade’ method much appreciated by Abbé Huc in similar circumstances. First, he tells us, one of his ‘yaks advanced to the edge of the ice and blowing through his large nostrils some thick clouds of vapour, he manfully put his two front feet on the glacier and whizzed off as if he had been discharged from a cannon. He went down the glacier with his legs extended but as stiff and motionless as if they had been made of marble. Arrived at the bottom he turned over and then ran on bounding and bellowing over the snow’. Then it was the good fathers’ turn: ‘We seated ourselves carefully on the edge of the glacier, we stuck our heels close together on the ice as firmly as possible then, using the handles of our whips by way of helm, we sailed over those frozen waters with the velocity of a locomotive. A sailor would have pronounced us to be going at least twelve knots an hour. In our many travels we had never before experienced a mode of conveyance at once so commodious, so expeditious and above all so refreshing!’ It sounds a pretty tall travellers’ tale too – but how funny it must have looked, and how Isabella would have enjoyed a similar slide.

  However, she returned conventionally to the capital astride Gyalpo and pitched her tent for a fortnight close to the British Postal Agency. In her absence, tribes of merchants from far-flung parts had arrived and ‘the din and stir of trade and amusements ceased not by day or night’. In Leh’s huge bazaar ‘mules, asses, horses and yaks kicked, squealed and bellowed; the dissonance of bargaining tongues rose high; there were mendicant monks, Indian fakirs, Moslem dervishes, Mecca pilgrims, itinerant musicians and Buddhist ballad-howlers; bold-faced women with creels of lucerne on their backs and the wazir’s jemadar and gay attendants moved among the throngs’. And for a while Isabella was there too, breathing its smells of dry fodder, mules’ dung, musty saffron and sour curds, absorbing its colours of apricot and brassy gold, rusty red of dried peppers and lamas’ robe, slithering emerald of brocade, and feeling the push and jostle of a thousand alien shoulders, the alien stare of a thousand slanting eyes. Under tattered awnings, squat men from veiled Lhasa exchanged incense sticks and sacred medallions (guaranteed to contain the ashes of a genuine holy man) for Kashmiri silks, indigo and wheat; merchants from northern Yarkand, padded in sheepskin and astride stout Turkestan horses, offered hemp and received in return borax, turquoise and deer-musk; thickset traders from Afghanistan, their broad faces creased by the wind, spilled out for sale bales of broadcloth and brassware, and bought, in exchange, the thin bright Tibetan gold.

  Gold, Holdich mentions, has been associated with Tibet since the days of Herodotus, who refers, in some wonder, to a well-known travellers’ tale about a race of huge black ants that dwelt to the north-west of India and clawed gold-dust out of the mountains. Traders, mounted on swift camels, who occasionally tried to plunder the precious heaps accumulated by the ants were driven away by ferocious animals. The legend, repeated and embroidered by several chroniclers, lingered for centuries; about the middle of the nineteenth century, Indian survey-spies reached the gold-mining districts of western Tibet. There they found miners grovelling in the ground muffled from head to foot in thick black blankets to protect them from the elements; they were scratching dust from the soil with a very primitive tool – a two-pronged antelope horn, which looked very like antennae; around their bleak huts, fierce Tibetan mastiffs kept constant guard. A grain of truth, like a grain of gold, had survived for a long time.

  Around the end of August the traders roped up their bales again, counted their gains or losses, beat their steeds into action and went stringing away over the desert or the mountains to points north, south, east and west. And Isabella went too, sad to leave Leh, but fortunate to have seen it in 1889 before its ‘civilised amenities’ burgeoned. Soon, British interest in Tibet and its neighbours increased, owing to those ineradicable Foreign Office fears about Russian expansionism in Asia, about which Isabella was to hear much. And so, particularly after Lord Curzon became Viceroy of India in 1898, Britain tightened its hold on Ladakh. The bridle-track that Isabella had followed from Kashmir to Leh was widened to cart-width in case of military need, a British Commissioner went to live year-round in the capital, and gatherings for Tea (unbuttered) and Badminton were held in th
e Residency bungalow. The Commissioner’s Visitor’s Book became full of names of travelling missionaries, army surveyors, ladies who rode side-saddle from Srinagar, cavalry officers on leave from the Indian hill-stations come up for the huntin’. The British sportsmen shot deer, antelope, wild asses and the elusive ibex when they could sight him, and they invariably brought a fox-terrier with them for company. To accompany the terrier was a coolie whose function was the bearing of a basket in which the animal could rest if it became footsore or started to spin round with mountain-sickness.

  From all this clack of too-comprehensible tongues Isabella would have fled as she had fled from the Kashmir season, and perhaps would have been driven on towards the fastnesses of the Tibetan interior. But as it was, she felt she had escaped far enough. On leaving Leh, still astride her wild Gyalpo, she made a detour to the south-eastern Rupchu region, a high-lying gale-torn gravel desert inhabited by nomad Chong pas, wild horses, goats and sheep, then crossed three airless mountain passes and came down to the province of Lahaul or ‘British Tibet’ as it was often called. There, she was approached by ‘a creature in a nondescript dress speaking Hindustani volubly. On a band across his breast were the British crown and a plate with the words, “Commissioner’s chaprassie, Kulu District”. I never felt so extinguished. Liberty seemed lost, and the romance of the desert to have died out in one moment!’

  And so she left that harsh and eerie land. Its most characteristic sounds were the spooky shrieks and thumps of monastic music echoing round the rocks, the bray and bellow of wild ass and yak, the thrashing howl of a wind that chilled the marrow and left the scant grass in the valleys brittle as bone, hard as wire; its most characteristic sights were greasy placid peasants chewing sodden barley balls and mumbling incantations before the dim and dirty godshelf, and the pantomime-antics of frenzied lamas twirling prayer-wheels, exorcising demons; looming over all was what William Carey describes as ‘that unspeakably solemn horizon of snowy peaks over which a dazed eagle may flutter in convulsive flight or the thin black line of trade slowly crawls, dropping its frozen dead as it goes’.