In the Forbidden Land. Arnold Henry Savage Landor

alt="A Perilous Passage"/>

      A Perilous Passage

       support one's feet, and none of the cavities are deeper than a few inches.

      The transit seemed dangerous at any time, and impossible just then, because the drizzling rain which had set in had wetted the rock and made it as slippery as glass, but I realised that the thing had to be risked, and at any cost. With an affected air of assurance, I therefore took off my shoes and went ahead.

      I could not look about me, for I clung with my body to the wall, feeling my way with my toes and fingers. The cavities were, as a matter of fact, so shallow that progress was slow and troublesome. When the toes of the right limb seemed firmly planted in a receptacle, the right arm was made to slide along the rock until the fingers had obtained a firm grip in the cavity directly above the one in which the toes were. Then the entire body had to be shifted from left to right, bringing the left foot and hand close to the right extremities and suspending one's weight on the former, so as to render the right foot and arm ready to make the next move forward, and so on, till I reached the other side and alighted upon the narrow track, which was itself only five or six inches wide. Chanden Sing having tied his shoes and mine over his shoulders, proceeded bare-footed on the same hazardous enterprise. With none of the excitement of personal danger, the moments of apprehension while he groped his way with toes and fingers, half paralysed with cold and fear, were to me worse even than those of my own passage. But he too got across safe and sound, and after that the rest was comparatively easy.

      It was necessary now to look out for signs of the two men, Kachi and Dola, who had preceded us. I was glad to find a little farther on fresh footmarks, undoubtedly those of the two Shokas. The track still ascended and descended nearly all along precipitous cliffs, and was everywhere dangerously narrow, with here and there bits on shaky crowbars. At one spot the rugged formation of the cliff forced one suddenly to ascend to its very top and cross (on all-fours) a rude kind of bridge made of branches of trees spanned not horizontally, but at an angle of sixty degrees over a precipice of several hundred feet. I found a white thread of wool laid over this primitive structure, in accordance with the custom of the Shokas at the death of relatives or friends away from their native village. The soul is supposed to migrate during the dark hours of the night and to return to the birthplace of the deceased, these white threads showing the way at dangerous places on the road.

      Having lost the track more than once, we found ourselves down at the edge of the Kali and compelled to climb up some three hundred feet over sand and rolling stones to regain the path.

      We arrived at last at Nabi. There I found my loads safe and sound, having got here by the better track on the Nepalese side previously to the Chongur bridge being destroyed by the Tibetans, also Kachi and Dola, who had got over and recovered from their drink. To make up, perhaps, for their past misbehaviour, and probably to make me overlook or forget it, they seemed to have induced the natives to welcome me with particular cordiality. I was invited by them, with much show of hospitality, to spend the night in the village.

      I was led with some ceremony to a primitive sort of ladder with very roughly carved steps, and shoved, with help from above and below, on to a flat mud roof. Here a tent had been pitched, the floor of which was covered with mats and rugs for me to rest on. I no sooner laid myself down than a string of men, women and children arrived, carrying bowls with a particularly sumptuous meal of rice, dhal, meat, balab (or boiled buckwheat leaves), curd, milk, broiled corn with sugar, chapatis, shale, sweets, native wine and liquor.

      During the meal, tea was served in all sorts of fashions. There was Chinese tea and Indian tea, tea boiled with sugar and tea without it, tea with milk, and tea with butter and salt in it, pale tea and dark tea, sweet tea and bitter tea—in fact, tea until I—devoted as I am to it—wished that no tea-leaf had ever been picked and stewed in boiling water.