he weight on my
body was the snow that had accumulated on the tent, broken the tent
pole, and fallen upon me. It was six o'clock. My orderly and syce came
to my rescue. They lifted the snow off me and took away my tent pole to
a carpenter to get it mended, while in what space was still left within
the tent I found I could still breathe, and so slept peacefully till in
an hour my tent pole was brought back mended and the tent reconstructed,
and I could get up in comfort.

I had had a very mild experience. Grief of a worse kind had been
widespread through the night, many officers and men losing their only
shelter irretrievably at two or three in the morning. The second column
came in that afternoon rather worn and battered, and the third
column--for from Gyantse we had become three--was snowed up for two
nights at Phari after a terrible march over the Tang-La from Tuna. Their
eventual march into Chumbi was also a severe ordeal. At Chumbi it
remained to await one's day of release. The snow delayed the passage of
the troops hardly at all. Leaving Chumbi in small detachments and using
both the Jalap-La and Natu-La routes, they gradually disappeared. At
length my own turn came. Leaving Chumbi one fine morning, and finding
myself again a passenger, I hastened by double marches to India across
the Natu-La down to Gangtok, through Sikkim, and into Siliguri. Strange
it was to think, as, after that last hot double march from Riang, one
sat under the punkah in Siliguri refreshment room, drinking tumbler
after tumbler of iced ginger-beer, that three days before one had pulled
icicles from one's beard on the top of the Natu-La.

Pleasant to get into the Darjiling mail that night and speed to
Calcutta; pleasant to feel oneself wrapped in the civilisation of the
Indian metropolis; pleasanter still to take train at Howrah, and be
carried up country to the crisp cool autumn of the Panjab and to one's
own fireside.

So the show was over--all over but for its memories, which for my own
part were mainly agreeable. As he lays those memories aside, the
selfish soldier's wish can hardly be other than that on some convenient
date in spring time not too many years distant, ere the person is too
stout and the legs too stiff to relish those high passes, some truculent
grand lama may necessitate and a kind Government organise another summer
trip to Lhassa.

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