h taking for its occult
powers. Nature, more kindly, had strewn round them beautiful spring
flowers--primulas, buttercups, potentils. The stream 'bubbled oilily,'
and in the ruined house bees were swarming.

Ten miles beyond the Springs an officer was watering his horse in the
Bamtso Lake. The beast swung round trembling, with eyes astare. Among
the weeds lay the last victim.

CHAPTER VII

A HUMAN MISCELLANY

The Tibetans stood on the roofs of their houses like a row of
cormorants, and watched the doolie pass underneath. At a little distance
it was hard to distinguish the children, so motionless were they, from
the squat praying-flags wrapped in black skin and projecting from the
parapets of the roof. The very babes were impassive and inscrutable.
Beside them perched ravens of an ebony blackness, sleek and well
groomed, and so consequential that they seemed the most human element of
the group.

My Tibetan bearers stopped to converse with a woman on the roof who wore
a huge red hoop in her hair, which was matted and touzled like a
negress's. A child behind was searching it, with apparent success. The
woman asked a question, and the bearers jerked out a few guttural
monosyllables, which she received with indifference. She was not visibly
elated when she heard that the doolie contained the first victim of the
Tibetan arms. I should like to have heard her views on the political
situation and the question of a settlement. Some of her relatives,
perhaps, were killed in the melee at the Hot Springs. Others who had
been taken prisoners might be enlisted in the new doolie corps, and
receiving an unexpected wage; others, perhaps, were wounded and being
treated in our hospitals with all the skill and resources of modern
science; or they were bringing in food-stuffs for our troops, or setting
booby-traps for them, and lying in wait behind sangars to snipe them in
the Red Idol Gorge.

The bearers started again; the hot sun and the continued exertion made
them stink intolerably. Every now and then they put down the doolie, and
began discussing their loot--ear-rings and charms, rough turquoises and
ruby-coloured stones, torn from the bodies of the dead and wounded. For
the moment I was tired of Tibet.

I remembered another exodus when I was disgusted with the country. I had
been allured across the Himalayas by the dazzling purity of the snows. I
had escaped the Avernus of the plains, and I might have been content,
bu