In bright sunlight the lake is a deep turquoise blue, but at evening time transient lights and shades fleet over it with the moving clouds, light forget-me-not, deep purple, the azure of a butterfly's wing--then all is swept away, immersed in gloom, before the dark, menacing storm-clouds.
On the 25th I crossed the river with the 1st Mounted Infantry and 40th Pathans. My tent is pitched on the roof of a rambling two-storied house, under the shade of a great walnut-tree. Crops, waist-deep, grow up to the walls--barley, wheat, beans, and peas. On the roof are garden flowers in pots, hollyhocks, and marigolds. The cornfields are bright with English wild-flowers--dandelions, buttercups, astragalus, and a purple Michaelmas daisy.
There is no village, but farmhouses are dotted about the valley, and groves of trees--walnut and peach, and poplar and willow--enclosed within stone walls. Wild birds that are almost tame are nesting in the trees--black and white magpies, crested hoopoes, and turtle-doves. The groves are irrigated like the fields, and carpeted with flowers. Homelike butterflies frequent them, and honey-bees.
Everything is homelike. There is no mystery in the valley, except its access, or, rather, its inaccessibility. We have come to it through snow passes, over barren, rocky wildernesses; we have won it with toil and suffering, through frost and rain and snow and blistering sun.
And now that we had found Arcady, I would have stayed there. Lhasa was only four marches distant, but to me, in that mood of almost immoral indolence, it seemed that this strip of verdure, with its happy pastoral scenes, was the most impassable barrier that Nature had planted in our path. Like the Tibetans, she menaced and threatened us at first, then she turned to us with smiles and cajoleries, entreating us to stay, and her seduction was harder to resist.
To trace the course of the Tsangpo River from Tibet to its outlet into Assam has been the goal of travellers for over a century. Here is one of the few unknown tracts of the world, where no white man has ever penetrated. Until quite recently there was a hot controversy among geographers as to whether the Tsangpo was the main feeder of the Brahmaputra or reappeared in Burmah as the Irawaddy. All attempts to explore the river from India have proved fruitless, owing to the intense hostility of the Abor and Passi Minyang tribes, who oppose all intrusion with their poisoned arrows and stakes, sharp and formidable as spears, cunningly set in the ground to entrap invaders; while the vigilance of the Lamas has made it impossible for any European to get within 150 miles of the Tsangpo Valley from Tibet. It was not until 1882 that all doubt as to the identity of the Tsangpo and Brahmaputra was set aside by the survey of the native explorer A. K. And the course of the Brahmaputra, or Dihong, as it is called in Northern Assam, was never thoroughly investigated until the explorations of Mr. Needham, the Political Officer at Sadiya, and his trained Gurkhas, who penetrated northwards as far as Gina, a village half a day's journey beyond Passi Ghat, and only about seventy miles south of the point reached by A. K. from Tibet.