No More Learning

Dot friend of ours
haf still too much Ego in his Cosmos, Be quiet, thou! "

Hans hissed long and venomously. We could hear the great beast quaking
in his cage.

"But why in the world didn't you help Bertran instead of letting him be
killed? " I asked.

"My friend," said Hans, composedly stretching himself to slumber, "it
was not nice even to mineself dot I should lif after I had seen dot room
wit der hole in der thatch. Und Bertran, he was her husband. Good-night,
und sleep well. "




NAMGAY DOOLA

ONCE upon a time there was a king who lived on the road to Thibet, very
many miles in the Himalaya Mountains. His kingdom was 11,000 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 400 pounds yearly, and they were expended on 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 own forest and they fell thundering into the Sutlej
River and were swept down to the Plains, 300 miles away, and became
railway ties. Now and again this king, whose name does not matter, would
mount a ring-streaked horse and ride scores of miles to Simlatown to
confer with the lieutenant-governor on matters of state, or 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
ring-streaked 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 was 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 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. I expressed my thanks suitably and inquired if I might
have audience of the king. The prime minister readjusted his turban--it
had fallen off in the struggle--and assured me that the king would
be very pleased to see me. Therefore I dispatched two bottles as a
foretaste, and when the sheep had entered upon another incarnation,
climbed up to the king's palace through the wet. He had sent his army
to escort me, but it stayed to talk with my cook. Soldiers are very much
alike all the world over.

The palace was a four-roomed, white-washed mud-and-timber house, the
finest in all the Hills for a day's journey. The king was dressed in a
purple velvet jacket, white muslin trousers, and a saffron-yellow turban
of price. He gave me audience in a little carpeted room opening off the
palace courtyard, which was occupied by the elephant of state.