Ch. 25: Namgay Doola

There came to the beach a poor exile of Erin,
The dew on his wet robe hung heavy and chill;
Ere the steamer that brought him had passed out of hearin',
He was Alderman Mike inthrojuicin' a bill!
AMERICAN SONG.

Once upon a time there was a King who lived on the road to Thibet, very
many miles in the Himalayas. His Kingdom was eleven thousand feet above
the sea and exactly four miles square; but most of the miles stood on
end owing to the nature of the country. His revenues were rather less
than four hundred pounds yearly, and they were expended in the
maintenance of one elephant and a standing army of five men. He was
tributary to the Indian Government, who allowed him certain sums for
keeping a section of the Himalaya-Thibet road in repair. He further
increased his revenues by selling timber to the railway-companies; for
he would cut the great deodar trees in his one forest, and they fell
thundering into the Sutlej river and were swept down to the plains three
hundred miles away and became railway-ties. Now and again this King,
whose name does not matter, would mount a ringstraked horse and ride
scores of miles to Simla-town to confer with the Lieutenant-Governor on
matters of state, or to assure the Viceroy that his sword was at the
service of the Queen-Empress. Then the Viceroy would cause a ruffle of
drums to be sounded, and the ringstraked horse and the cavalry of the
State---two men in tatters--and the herald who bore the silver stick
before the King would trot back to their own place, which lay between
the tail of a heaven-climbing glacier and a dark birch-forest.

Now, from such a King, always remembering that he possessed one
veritable elephant, and could count his descent for twelve hundred
years, I expected, when it was my fate to wander through his dominions,
no more than mere license to live.

The night had closed in rain, and rolling clouds blotted out the lights
of the villages in the valley. Forty miles away, untouched by cloud or
storm, the white shoulder of Donga Pa--the Mountain of the Council of
the Gods--upheld the Evening Star. The monkeys sang sorrowfully to each
other as they hunted for dry roosts in the fern-wreathed trees, and the
last puff of the day-wind brought from the unseen villages the scent of
damp wood-smoke, hot cakes, dripping undergrowth, and rotting pine-
cones. That is the true smell of the Himalayas, and if once it creeps
into the blood of a man, that man will at the last, forgetting all else,
return to the hills to die. The clouds closed and the smell went away,
and there remained nothing in all the world except chilling white mist
and the boom of the Sutlej river racing through the valley below. A fat-
tailed sheep, who did not want to die, bleated