stones, at an angle of about 45°. Neither were the roofs of the houses desirable, because on the roof of every house there was a ferocious Tibetan mastiff, roused to the highest pitch of excitement by our arrival, and desiring nothing better than that some stranger should intrude upon his domain. Consequently the terraced fields presented the only available places for our tents, and they were clearly available, many of them being in stubble, while there was no immediate intention of digging up the ground. Of course a terraced field was the place, but here was the difficulty which threw Chota Khan into a state of amazement, perplexity, and wrath.

A band of handsome and very powerful young Tartar women-clad in red or black tunics, loose trousers, and immense cloth boots, into which a child of five years old might easily have been stuffed-had constituted themselves the guardians of these terraced fields, and whenever Chota Khan or any of his companions attempted to enter, they not only placed their bulky persons in the way, but even showed determined fight. Woman to man, I believe these guardian angels could have given our people a sound thrashing; and I afterwards found it to be a most useful goad for lagging coolies to remark that one Shipki woman could beat two men of Spiti or Lahaul, as the case might be. These angels in big boots were very good-humoured, and seemed to enjoy their little game immensely; but not the less on that account were they pertinacious, and even ferocious, when any attempt was made to get past them. If catching a Tartar be a difficult operation, I should like to know what catching a Tartar young woman must be. When we arrived, Mr Pagell reasoned

with them eloquently in fluent Tibetan, and they allowed the force of his argument to the extent of admitting that there was no spot for us at Shipki on which to pitch our tents, except a terraced field; but they parried the obvious conclusion by reminding him that there was a very nice little piece of campingground about half-way up the six thousand feet we had just come down, and that it was little past the middle of the day. I myself tried gently to pass between them, with the most admiring smiles and affectionate demeanour I could summon up for the occasion, and in the circumstances; but though this seemed to amuse them much, it did not at all induce them to allow me to pass; and when we tried other fields, either the same women or a fresh band opposed our entrance. Meanwhile, groups of men, on the roofs of houses and elsewhere, watched the operations without interfering.

It really looked as if the intention was to compel us to go back from Shipki without allowing us to stay there even for a night. There was much ingenuity in this plan of setting the Tartar damsels to prevent our camping. Had we used force towards these young persons, there would have been a fair reason for the men of the place falling upon us in a murderous manner; and Mr M'Nab, the superintendent of the Hill States, had told me that one of his predecessors in office who tried either to camp at Shipki, or to go farther, very nearly lost his life there. Had I been alone I do not know what might have happened, for, in my weak state, I was beginning to get irritated; and it was fortunate I was accompanied by Mr Pagell, who took the matter quite easily, and said it would be necessary to respect the wishes of the people of the

country. Fortunately, too, at this juncture, he recognised a Lama, for whom he had formerly done some medical service, and the Lama not only took our part generally, but also offered us a narrow field of his own on which to pitch our tents. There was a disposition on the part of the young Tartars to resist this also, but they were a little too late in making up their minds to do so; for whenever the priest showed my friend the wall which was at the end of his field, our servants and coolies, appreciating the exigency of the occasion, made a rush over it and took immediate possession.

We remained at Shipki that afternoon, the whole of the next day, and the greater part of the day after, making unavailing attempts to provide for further progress into Chinese Tibet. We should have been glad to go very lightly burdened, but none of the coolies or yakmen from Kunáwar would accompany us a step further. They said that their duty to their own State had compelled them to take us across the frontier to Shipki, at great inconvenience to themselves, for it was their season of harvest, and many of the men of their villages were away travelling on commercial ventures; but that there was no duty resting on them to take us any further, and they were afraid to do so, because they well knew that if they persisted in advancing with us, the Tartars would either fall upon them and kill them then, or do so on some future occasion when their business might take them across the frontier. We had no hold upon the Kunáwar people for a further journey; it would have been most cruel and unjustifiable to have attempted to force them to accompany us, and they would listen to no offers of increased monetary recompense. The Tartars, on the other hand,

were still more impracticable. They openly derided the idea of our going on into their country, and would not give us any supplies either of carriage or of food.

On the whole, the Shipki people were anything but civil, and at times it looked as if they only wanted a pretext for falling upon us; but at other times they condescended to reason on the matter. They said that they were under express orders from the Lassa Government not to allow any Europeans to pass, and that it would be as much as their possessions and their heads were worth to allow us to do so. Death itself would not be the worst which might befall them, as there were certain dreadful modes of death, which I shall presently describe, to which they might be subjected. On my referring to the Treaty of Tientsin, which gives British subjects a right to travel within the dominions of the Celestial Emperor, and mentioning that I had travelled a great deal in China itself, they first said that they had no information of any such treaty having been concluded; and then they ingeniously argued that, though it might allow foreigners to travel in China Proper, yet it did not apply to Tibet, which was no part of China, and only loosely connected with that country.

When we pressed them for the reasons of this exclusive policy, they answered that they were not bound to give reasons, having simply to obey orders; but that one obvious reason was, that wherever Englishmen had been allowed entrance into a country they had ended in making a conquest of it. We had landed peaceably on the coast of India, and immediately proceeded to conquer the coast. We then took a little more and a little more, always pretending, in

the first instance, to be peaceable travellers and merchants, until we got up to the country of Ranjit Singh, and the next thing heard there was that we had taken Ranjit Singh's dominions. Now we wanted to travel in the country of the Sacred Religion (Lamaism); but the Tibetans knew better than that, and that the only safe course for them, if they wished to preserve their country to themselves, was to keep us out of it altogether. On this we remarked that China had brought trouble on itself by attempting to exclude Europeans, whereas matters had gone smoothly after admitting them, and referred to Japan as an instance of a long-secluded country which had found advantage (I am not sure very much) from admitting Europeans; but they seemed to interpret this as a threat, and replied boisterously, that they might as well be killed. fighting us as be killed for letting us pass- there would be some amusement in that; and if ever war came upon them, they were quite willing to engage in war, because, having the true religion, they were certain to conquer. This argument struck the Moravian missionary as especially ridiculous, and in another way it might have done so to an artillery officer, for a couple of mountain-guns could easily destroy Shipki from the Kúng-ma Pass; but it was not ridiculous in the mouths of these wild Tartar mountaineers, who firmly believed in their extraordinary religion, and whose only experience of warfare has been matchlockskirmishing on their lofty frontiers with the men of Kunáwar, for whom they have the greatest contempt.

It was curious to find these rude men reasoning thus ingeniously, and it struck me forcibly that though the voice was the voice of the rough Tartar