MY FIRST MISSION TO BHUTAN
Bhutanese looked upon as marvellous. The real pass, Kyu-la, 13,900 feet, lay a little way off with a small lake to the east, and we reached it about 7.15 A.M. Looking hack over the valley we had ascended, we had a grand view of the Jeylap range behind a finely wooded foreground. Turning round, the aspect entirely changed; about a mile and a half away was the Hah-la, which was wrongly marked on our maps as the Meru-la; between the two passes was a hollow dip, flanked on the north by precipitous cliffs and on the south by a deep snowdrift ending in space, and somewhere between the two our track lay—verily, as our guide called it, “a Bridge of Death.” Woe to the poor traveller caught between these two horns, should the wind rise and the snow fall; for him there was no shelter from the storm, no means by which to light a fire to warm him, not a tree or a shrub to be seen over the wind-swept fields of snow, only bleak and bare outcrops of rock. But in our case the little wind there was soon died down, and in perfect weather we climbed down the snow-slope to the bottom of the hollow, where we found we could ride for some distance, and finally reached the Hah-la about an hour later. On the top were many “obos,” offerings to the spirits of the pass, a fact that bore significant testimony to the story of our guide, and looking back, as I cast my contribution on the nearest cairn and threw my “airy horse” (Lung-ta) aloft, I breathed a silent but fervent prayer that though my horse could not materialise, the spirits of the air might remain still and grant a safe and sure passage to the next wayfarer. Climbing a knoll to the south, I had a fine view of an unknown snowy ridge, which ended suddenly on the north-west in an enormous precipice, apparently giving outlet to the Am-mo-chhu, and, as far as I could gather, called Tso-na. To the north the fine mass of Chumolhari was seen in the distance, and nearer the snow-peaks of Massong-chung-dong, which dominate the head of the Hah valley, and about which there runs a legend that there once lived in Hah two men so
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