Page:Sikhim and Bhutan.djvu/45

 My return to Gangtak in the spring of the following year, 1888, was under very different circumstances. Hostilities had commenced, and on the day the main column of our troops crossed the Jeylap Pass into the Chumbi Valley, the second or Entchi column, to which I was attached, made a night march under Colonel Michell, of the 13th Rajputs, from Pakhyong to Gangtak. A fallen tree across the track caused a little delay, and we arrived on the Gangtak ridge at dawn only to find that the Maharaja and Maharani had again fled to Chumbi over the Yak-la road. I was just in time to stop some of His Highness’s ponies, and so lately had they gone their lamps were still burning alongside their beds in the Palace, which, the Maharaja having vacated, was occupied by us, but none of us remained in it very long. It was infested by fleas and they swarmed over us, rendering sleep impossible, and as soon as the sun rose we removed ourselves and our bedding to our tents until we could build huts which would, at any rate, be clean, and would be a better protection from the violent spring hailstorms than the tents.

The Maharaja arrived in Chumbi to find his house there also in the occupation of our troops, and he and the Maharani were sent back to live in Gangtak, and there I met them for the first time.

Thotab Namgyel, Maharaja of Sikhim, was a man of about twenty-eight years of age, of medium height, typically Mongolian in appearance and much disfigured by a bad hare-lip. He was a man of indolent disposition, whose inclination was to live in retirement and aloof from the worries and troubles of the government of his little State, of a very kindly disposition, and although weak and easily led, possessed also a good deal of common sense. He was entirely under the influence of the Maharani, his second wife.

This lady, the daughter of a Tibetan official in Lhasa, is a striking personality. Small and slight, beautifully dressed in brocades, velvets and silks, with much jewellery of rough turquoise, coral and amber, her hair adorned