y forced labour in a few months. That is a
tale of endurance and suffering that might very likely be passed from
father to son for generations.

Bogle's description of the town might have been written by an officer of
the garrison to-day, only he wrote from the inmate's point of view. He
noticed the houses 'so huddled together that one may chance to overlook
them,' and the flat roofs covered with bundles of straw. He knocked his
head against the low ceilings, and ran against the pillars that
supported the beams. 'In the middle of the roof,' he wrote, 'is a hole
to let out smoke, which, however, departs not without making the whole
room as black as a chimney. The opening serves also to let in the light;
the doors are full of holes and crevices, through which the women and
children keep peeping.' Needless to say nothing has changed in the last
hundred and thirty years, unless it is that the women are bolder. I
looked down from the roof this morning on Phari town, lying like a
rabbit-warren beneath the fort. All one can see from the battlement are
the flat roofs of low black houses, from which smoke issues in dense
fumes. The roofs are stacked with straw, and connected by a web of
coloured praying-flags running from house to house, and sometimes over
the narrow alleys that serve as streets. Enormous fat ravens perch on
the wall, and innumerable flocks of twittering sparrows. For warmth's
sake most of the rooms are underground, and in these subterranean dens
Tibetans, black as coal-heavers, huddle together with yaks and mules.
Tibetan women, equally dirty, go about, their faces smeared and blotched
with caoutchouc, wearing a red, hoop-like head-dress, ornamented with
alternate turquoises and ruby-coloured stones.

In the fort the first thing one meets of a morning is a troop of these
grimy sirens, climbing the stairs, burdened with buckets of chopped ice
and sacks of yak-dung, the two necessaries of life. The Tibetan coolie
women are merry folk; they laugh and chatter over their work all day
long, and do not in the least resist the familiarities of the Gurkha
soldiers. Sometimes as they pass one they giggle coyly, and put out the
tongue, which is their way of showing respect to those in high places;
but when one hears their laughter echoing down the stairs it is
difficult to believe that it is not intended for saucy impudence. Their
merriment sounds unnatural in all this filth and cold and discomfort.
Certainly if Bogle re