Page:Doughty--Mirrikh or A woman from Mars.djvu/104

 Philpot, he would have travelled to Siberia with us so long as the brandy and tobacco held out.

Thus we found ourselves at the inn near Zhad-uan,on the northern slope of the Himalayas, a spot on God’s footstool  where never Caucasian, certainly never American, trod  before.

There we were, three travelers in Thibet. We had taken possession of the inn and hoped to keep it.

Fancy then our disappointment, when coming up the rocky ascent under the light of those glittering stars, I beheld  a caravan, consisting of three camels and their riders, together with a sort of palanquin, borne on the shoulders of  four men.

“By Jove! its coming here!” groaned the Doctor. “We shall have to share the k’ang with all that crowd.”

“Dey f’lom Lh’asa!” exclaimed Ah Schow, who had flung down the argols and was standing at our side. “Me tink dey come f’lom Trashilunpo too.”

“How do you tell, Ah Schow?” asked Maurice.

“Dat bed come f’lom Calcutta, boss. Me know!”

Now this same Ah Schow was a wonderful man in his way, I want you to understand. He had lived in Lh’asa, he told us; at all events we were amazed when we  learned that to his other accomplishments the fellow  added a knowledge of the Thibetan tongue, which seemed  to bear out his claim. He was with us for many weeks and through many trials. The only objection I ever found to him was that having once run a wash house on Stockton street, San Francisco, he would call whichever one of us he  was addressing, “boss.”

Meanwhile the caravan was steadily approaching and the shrill “sok! sok!” of the camel drivers sounded as if spoken at our very feet, the atmosphere was so wonderfully clear.

The camels came first, loaded with boxes and bales hung about their ungainly hips until it was difficult to tell where  the camel ended and the luggage began. Then followed the palanquin and in the rear we could just catch a glimpse of  several men mounted on mules coming up the pass.

We could not see the faces of the riders, however, and the light was too uncertain to enable us to tell by their  costumes whether they were Thibetans, or Chinese traders  from Bootan or Napaul.

To us they looked like so many sheep walking on their