horus could be heard all
down the column--a novel sort of band with which to cheer a British army
onwards on a toilsome march!

The cooli too, especially he who hied from the hinterland of Darjiling,
was as merry a soul as you meet on a day's march. Some were quite boys,
not more than sixteen, yet the way they shouldered their loads was
wonderful. The regulation load was eighty pounds, but I have often seen
quite a youngster with a hundred pounds on his back, taking it steadily
along up thousands of feet, and taking it as a matter of course, and
giving you a grinning greeting as you passed him. When off duty, they
would be for ever skipping about like mountain goats, skylarking, and
pulling one another about. The supervising staff of Ghurkhas, too, all
had the jolly Ghurkha face. For a cheery family party it would be hard
to beat that cooli corps.

But that Lhassa column with its train of transport has got well out of
the bog by now, and it behoves us to overtake it.

CHAPTER XII

TO RALUNG: MORE SUPPLY MATTERS: A VISIT TO A MONASTERY

From Gyantse to Ralung is a steady upward incline, and took us three
days. It rained most of the time, both day and night; it was difficult
to get dry again when once you were wet, and there was a good deal of
discomfort experienced in all quarters. One camping ground was
particularly unpleasant, which for the most part consisted of ploughed
land that was not only soaking with the rain, but had recently been
irrigated. As we had risen considerably higher than the Gyantse plain,
the crops on this and similar ground had hardly begun to show. In fact,
from here onwards for many days to come, there seemed very little
chance of obtaining any grazing for our animals. We had taken all the
transport we could, and loaded it with as many supplies as possible, all
selected according to our known needs on the one hand, and the possible
but unknown resources of the country on the other; but even so our
prospects were not rosy. The mule, for instance, cannot live on grain
alone: he must have fodder, and one mule in a very few days will consume
as much fodder as is equivalent in weight to his own authorised load.
Hence, if you provide a mule with a reserve of fodder to last him that
number of days and make him carry it, you might just as well leave him
behind, since he will then be able to carry nothing else except his own
fodder. This, in a country where fodder is not locally procurable, i