Now, from such a king, always remembering that he possessed one veritable
elephant and could count his descent for 1,200 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 Dongo Pa--the Mountain of the Council of the Gods--upheld the
evening star. The monkeys sung sorrowfully to each other as they hunted for dry
roots in the fern-draped 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 smell is the true smell of the
Himalayas, and if it once gets into the blood of a man he will, at the last,
forgetting everything 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 mists and the boom of the Sutlej River.
A fat-tailed sheep, who did not want to die, bleated lamentably at my tent-
door. He was scuffling with the prime minister and the director-general of
public education, and he was a royal gift to me and my camp servants.
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