ON THE TRACK OF 
 THE ABOR 
 
 BY 
 
 POWELL MILLINGTON 
 
 AUTHOR OF 
 TO LHASSA AT LAST," "A HOMEWARD MAIL' 
 
 LONDON 
 
 SMITH, ELDER to* CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE 
 1912 
 
 [All rights reserved] 
 
Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON S* Co. 
 At the Ballantyne Press, Edinburgh 
 
PREFACE 
 
 IT is told against my wife by one of the less 
 charitable of her friends that when I had just 
 got my orders to join the Abor expedition, 
 she said to someone in her haste : 
 
 " It is such a bore that my husband has to 
 go off on that silly Abor expedition to fight 
 those stupid aborigines with their queer 
 arboreal habits." 
 
 But when these terrible though unconscious 
 puns have been forgiven, the impression left 
 by the remark will be found profoundly 
 accurate. It would really be ridiculous to 
 write a whole book in the hope of improving 
 upon it, and this is not my object. I am only 
 going to record the happenings of some por- 
 
vi ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 tions of the force engaged in the recent 
 expedition, and add a few comments and 
 reflections. 
 
 War on its most romantic side is seen 
 from the front ; but there is another side 
 with its own responsibilities, its own dangers, 
 its own humours, its own importance, as being 
 the very foundation for the vanward pomp 
 and circumstance. 
 
 This is the burden of my tale. It was 
 on the " Lines of Communications " that my 
 lot was mainly cast, where arms and men 
 and incidents are viewed under more of a 
 business aspect and in the simpler human 
 relations. 
 
 I am indebted to my friend, Captain 
 Coleridge of the 8th Gurkha Rifles, for much 
 of the data upon which the appendices at the 
 end of the volume are based. I must also 
 express the hope that any mistakes that I may 
 
PREFACE vii 
 
 have made in passing on the information 
 which he has so kindly given me will be 
 attributed to me, the guilty one, and not to 
 him. 
 
 POWELL MILLINGTON. 
 
 Sept. 1912. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 PAGE 
 
 A shifting of scenes Dibrugarh Life on a house-boat 
 
 A cholera-scare A juvenile offender . . . i 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 A visit to Kobo " The fauna of delirium tremens " 
 Kobo as a name Swiss Family Robinson at Kobo 
 The collapse of the Kamrup "flat" ... 7 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 The composition of the force The Naga carriers and 
 
 their manners and customs . . . . 17 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 A steamer stuck fast An autumn spate JBdstia-bmldmg 
 
 Town-planning Street-naming Time-killing . 26 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 The start of the two columns An eclipse of the sun 
 "Six-mile camp" A toilsome march to Pillung A 
 windfall in a thatch .... 58 
 
x ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Lokhpur and a thunderstorm The clearing of Pasighat 
 
 camp A hunt for a well Abors and Abor ladies . 44 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 The arrival of the boat convoy Boats, boatmen, and 
 
 boating on the Dihong 51 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 The friendship of certain Pa~si gams Political presents 
 A digression on " punitive globe-trotting " Tree- 
 felling Making and abandoning the post at 
 Pasighat 63 
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 Janakmukh and its wild bananas Abor paths and mule 
 roads Gradients by water and by land Problems 
 of road-making ........ 76 
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 The Jhum of Ramidambang Jhums in general The 
 
 irrepressible forest 86 
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 Sirpo River and the Rengings A discourse on Abor 
 warfare as exemplified at Kikar Monying A few 
 other "scraps" "The battle of Janakmukh" . 93 
 
CONTENTS xi 
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 
 PAGE 
 
 " Coolie-col " Ranging to Rotung Agar Kalek and 
 
 Mount Bapu 106 
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 
 Kikar Monying and some uses of telegraphy Puak and 
 Babuk Junction with the Ledum column Taking 
 ofKebong Peace-making at Yambung . . . 120 
 
 CHAPTER XIV 
 
 A ceremony at Komsing A cairn in the jungle A 
 
 Gurkhali in durance Frank confessions . . .133 
 
 CHAPTER XV 
 
 Abor villages near Ja'nakmukh Navigation of the Dihong 
 near Janakmukh Crossing the river on the way to 
 Ayang . . .143 
 
 CHAPTER XVI 
 
 The road to Ayang The jhum The village The 
 granary The dwellings The occupations and sports 
 The manners and customs Forms of hospitality 
 and funerals 152 
 
 CHAPTER XVII 
 
 What we were fed on, and how our food was brought 
 
 to us 169 
 
 CHAPTER XVIII 
 The end of the expedition An attempt to summarise . 189 
 
xii ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 APPENDICES 
 
 . PAGE 
 
 I. LOWER ABOR-LAND (a map and a note) . . 205 
 
 II. ROUGH SKETCH OF THE ACTION AT KIKAR 
 
 MONYING 209 
 
 III. THE FAN OF RECONNAISSANCE (a map and a 
 
 note) 211 
 
 IV. THE OLD AND NEW VIEWS OF THE COURSES 
 
 OF THE TSANGPO AND DiHONG (a map and 
 
 a note) 215 
 
On the Track of the Abor 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 A shifting of scenes Dibrugarh Life on a house-boat 
 A cholera scare A juvenile offender. 
 
 AN officer seems always to be doing some- 
 thing incongruous when he receives the order 
 to proceed on field-service. On this occasion 
 I was doing scene-shifter at a children's play, 
 performed in aid of the Society for the 
 Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. I was 
 methodically shifting scenes when the tele- 
 gram came that told me that my own scene 
 was to be shifted. The Abor expedition was 
 to begin at once, and I was to start forth- 
 with for Dibrugarh. 
 
 Dibrugarh, as most atlases will show, is 
 near the far north-east corner of Assam. I 
 
 was stationed at the moment in a little hill- 
 
 A 
 
2 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 station in the North- West Frontier province, so 
 had before me a journey just coterminous with 
 the whole Himalaya. A sudden jump from the 
 North- West to the North-East Frontier, typical 
 as it was of foreshadowed changes in Indian 
 strategy, was not without its fascination. 
 
 The journey itself, at the end of August, 
 was far from fascinating : first a ride through 
 the rain ; then a tonga-drive to Rawulpindi 
 and into the heat ; then through the heat a 
 railway journey of five days and five nights, 
 relieved but twice by crossing in a steamer, 
 first the Ganges and then the Brahmaputra. 
 
 Dirty and bored I at last reached the 
 Dibrugarh ghat, on the left bank of the 
 Brahmaputra. There I found three brother 
 officers who had just beaten me in the race 
 to get there first. 
 
 It at once became our business to collect 
 local supplies and stow them in a large " flat " 
 for subsequent despatch up the river to the 
 future base of operations. Meanwhile the 
 
AT DIBRUGARH 3 
 
 upper portions of the " flat " made a delightful 
 place to live in. We enjoyed, in fact, for 
 the next fortnight all the luxuries of a house- 
 boat, and when, as often, there was a breeze 
 on the river that did not reach the land, we 
 revelled in its coolness and owned ourselves 
 very lucky. 
 
 Dibrugarh is almost the last outpost of 
 civilisation on the North-East Frontier. Up to 
 Dibrugarh extend tea-gardens, roads, railway 
 trains, motor-cars, horses, carriages, and shops. 
 The life of the Assam planter extends to 
 Dibrugarh, and culminates in the Dibrugarh 
 club and on the Dibrugarh polo - ground. 
 Beyond lie the jungle, the Upper Brahmaputra, 
 and the less known of the Brahmaputra's 
 tributaries, and in the jungle and on the 
 banks of these rivers flourish the Miris, the 
 Mishmis, the Abors, and other wild men. 
 
 One morning, after we had been collecting 
 supplies for several days, three of us were 
 woken up very early by different people, who 
 
4 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 gave us the same alarming news that a young 
 Indian follower of ours was lying prostrate 
 with all the symptoms of cholera, and that he 
 had been so lying since the middle of the 
 night. Being in separate cabins we had re- 
 ceived the information independently, and so 
 took independent action. We had no doctor 
 with us. But one of us, well stocked by fond 
 wife with good chlorodyne, hurried to the 
 spot where the poor youth lay and poured 
 chlorodyne down his throat. Another, ignorant 
 of the treatment already administered, followed 
 it up a moment later with a bumper dose of 
 camphorydine. A third, in equal ignorance, 
 bicycled off to a neighbouring charitable dis- 
 pensary. He returned shortly with the most 
 potent anti-cholera specific that a sleepy 
 hospital babu could concoct at five o'clock 
 in the morning, and duly administered it. 
 
 The patient, according to all the canons of 
 medicine, ought to have died promptly from 
 his triple dose of opiates, but instead he slept 
 
A CHOLERA SCARE 5 
 
 the clock round peacefully and awoke cured. 
 It transpired, meanwhile, that he had not really 
 been suffering from cholera at all. He had, 
 however, gone to bed the night before danger- 
 ously near to a leaking tin of liquid gur 
 (coarse Indian sugar), and had spent the early 
 part of the night sucking greedily at the leak, 
 so that it was not really surprising that by early 
 morning he was feeling a trifle bilious. 
 
 I eventually found that the previous career 
 of this youth had not been without interest. 
 He was now a carpenter by trade, and 
 belonged to my own particular gang of 
 artisans. But three months later urgent in- 
 quiries reached me concerning his whereabouts 
 from the police authorities in Calcutta. It 
 appeared that in his early boyhood he had 
 killed a playmate in a quarrel, been locked up 
 in a reformatory, and subsequently appren- 
 ticed under police supervision to the trade of 
 carpenter. His adventurous spirit had, how- 
 ever, driven him to escape from the humdrum 
 
6 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 control of the police and join the Abor ex- 
 pedition. This sin against police discipline 
 was, I believe, eventually forgiven him on 
 my representing how well, under police super- 
 vision, he had learnt his trade. For, despite 
 his murderous propensities and love of coarse 
 sweetmeats, he was quite the best artisan I 
 had. He was specially skilful at converting 
 empty packing-cases into comfortable mess- 
 chairs a warlike art that in its higher 
 branches is little understood. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 A visit to Kobo " The fauna of delirium tremens " Kobo as 
 a name Swiss Family Robinson at Kobo The collapse 
 of the " Kamrup " flat. 
 
 OUR immediate destination was Kobo, some 
 thirty miles up the river on the right (and so 
 the far) bank. It could be reached by river 
 direct from Dibrugarh, or from the eastern 
 terminus of the railway near Saikhowa. 
 Saikhowa was on the banks of the Dibong, 
 which joins the Brahmaputra a few miles 
 above Kobo. It is above this junction that 
 the Brahmaputra itself becomes the Dihong. 
 The Saikhowa route was used throughout the 
 expedition for the post, which came down- 
 stream and across to Kobo in country boats, 
 but this route was impracticable for steamers 
 in the drier weather. Hence troops and stores 
 were always sent to Kobo by the Dibrugarh 
 route. 
 
8 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 Our small contingent of the Supply and 
 Transport Corps soon needed access to Kobo, 
 which was then held by a detachment of 
 Military Police. We were lucky in securing 
 a motor-launch in which to communicate with 
 the place before we eventually settled down 
 there. 
 
 I had one pleasant little trip to Kobo by 
 myself in the launch at this period, but re- 
 member it chiefly for the introduction it gave 
 me into the insect life of the country. The 
 "Sarang" or skipper, a cheerful Mussulman 
 with a prominent and most grotesquely mis- 
 shapen set of teeth, took me in charge. 
 
 We started at midday, and had to stop 
 en route for the night. I wanted to anchor in 
 mid-stream to avoid the heat and insect life 
 of the dry, or rather swampy, land. But, the 
 anchor being out of order, this was forbidden 
 by the merciless Sarang. He moored me 
 instead to a bank, alongside a small settle- 
 ment of men and buffaloes. The contrast 
 
INSECT HORDES 9 
 
 between the cool clear breezes of the open 
 water and the swarming muggy atmosphere 
 of the river-side was extraordinary. In a few 
 moments I found myself in a perfect purgatory 
 of insect life, all the worse for the proximity 
 of cattle and unclean human beings. 
 
 The head-man of the hamlet, with two wives 
 in tow, came promptly to salaam, to ask for 
 a drink, to offer me one indifferent egg, and 
 to invite me to a village Nautch. He was 
 a Miri and talked a sort of Assamese, while 
 I answered in the usual bad Hindustani of 
 the Sahib-log, and, as often happens with such 
 unpromising combinations, we got on famously. 
 After at last disposing of the old gentleman I 
 sat down to the first of the many bad dinners 
 with which my ex-golf-caddie, now promoted to 
 general factotum, provided me on this expedi- 
 tion. The head-man's indifferent egg served 
 on toast as a savoury was perhaps the best 
 part of it. 
 
 As soon as it was dark and my hurricane- 
 
io ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 lamp was lit to show me the way to my mouth, 
 the fun for the insects grew faster and more 
 furious. I had never before seen, swallowed, 
 heard, or smelt such swarms all at once. It 
 soon was necessary to hang the lamp outside 
 the cabin window, as far away as possible from 
 my food. In this way they were decoyed away, 
 but sat down and died in their hundreds on 
 the outer surface of the lamp till they dimmed 
 its light. I was most embarrassed, however, 
 when I found a cheery croaking green frog 
 sitting at my elbow on the table. While I 
 wondered how he could have got there, he 
 undertook to show me by spreading a pair of 
 well-developed wings and flying off to another 
 perch. The conventional fear of the effects of 
 injudicious living of course assailed me, and I 
 was glad when the Sarang came by and assured 
 me in answer to my earnest inquiries that it 
 was quite right and proper in this country for 
 frogs to have wings. 
 
 The way in which various species of insect 
 
'FAUNA OF DELIRIUM TREMENS' n 
 
 and reptile appear to be blended with one 
 another in these parts is certainly disconcerting 
 to the novice. The earth-worm, for instance 
 (always a monster in size), wriggles often like 
 a snake instead of crawling sedately like a 
 worm, and sometimes he runs on legs like a 
 centipede. 
 
 I once, too, saw a lizard but no ; one does 
 oneself no good by this sort of story. Either 
 it is not believed or is used as evidence against 
 one hereafter. Sir Frederick Treves puts 
 this point very aptly in one of his writings, 
 where he describes a certain damp country 
 that he visited as full of "the fauna of 
 delirium tremens." 
 
 Kobo, like other places in these wilds, got 
 its name in a happy-go-lucky way. It was not 
 a place at all when it was christened. It was 
 just the spot where a reconnoitring party 
 happened to put in to shore. They found a 
 man standing on the bank, who lived in a hut 
 some miles distant. They asked the man his 
 
12 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 name, and he said it was " Kobo," and they 
 thought it would do duty for this spot as well 
 as for the man who lived a half-day's march 
 away. 
 
 To the uninitiated, when listening to an 
 Assamese conversation, most words in that 
 language seem to end in " obo," so the name 
 Kobo seemed at any rate quite typical and 
 to have the right ring. I only once heard it 
 objected to as a name, and that was by a 
 sergeant who had a very special complaint 
 against it. He showed me an envelope 
 addressed to him at Kobo in a fair feminine 
 hand, and complained that the letter had taken 
 six weeks to reach him. He wondered why, 
 and asked me to help him to discover the 
 reason. I examined the envelope, which told 
 quite an interesting tale of its own wander- 
 ings. It had started from Allahabad after the 
 Kobo post-office had been opened, but before 
 the fact had been duly intimated to all other 
 post-offices in India. The babu in the Alia- 
 
KOBO AND ITS TRIALS 13 
 
 habad post-office, having more skill in textual 
 emendation than knowledge of Kobo, had 
 written " Try Kobe" on the envelope. Hence 
 the letter went to Kobe in Japan, and thence 
 back in despair to Allahabad. But by that 
 time Kobo had become well known in postal 
 circles, and the tender message reached its 
 proper destination at last. 
 
 One of us four officers left Dibrugarh for 
 good some days ahead of the others, and 
 started planting a small colony at Kobo. 
 Guarded by the Military Police already on 
 the spot, and assisted by a gang of Gurkhali 
 coolies, he experienced the delights and hard- 
 ships of the typical pioneer in a new country. 
 His adventures must have been as much those 
 of a Swiss Family Robinson as of the ad- 
 vanced party of a military expedition. His 
 daily occupation consisted of cutting down 
 trees, of clearing jungle, of putting to human 
 uses as much as he could out of what he had 
 cut and cleared, and of making away with the 
 
14 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 rest. When I joined him after he had done 
 a week's hard work, I found Kobo quite a 
 promising village. We all slept under roofs of 
 sorts, and a baniah had sprung out of the 
 ground and was selling cigarettes. The local 
 newspaper, however, which in the truly enter- 
 prising colony is supposed to be among the 
 earliest institutions, did not start till a few 
 weeks later. It did start eventually, was pro- 
 duced by an office cyclostyle, and was called 
 the Kobo Times. It did not, however, last 
 very long, for apparently the anonymous 
 editor's wit began, I was told, at length to 
 outreach his discretion, and the paper had 
 to be suppressed. 
 
 The night I arrived at Kobo there was a 
 new moon, and the aforesaid baniah, consti- 
 tuting himself the local intelligence officer, 
 assured us that the new moon was considered 
 favourable by Abors for warlike enterprises, 
 and that therefore we were bound to be 
 attacked that night. We made the usual 
 
COLLAPSE OF THE 'KAMRUP' 15 
 
 preparations for a night alarm, but, despite the 
 baniah, the Abors let us sleep in peace. 
 
 By coming somewhat early to Kobo I missed 
 the first real sensation of the Abor expedition, 
 the collapse of the "Kamrup" flat. It was 
 she upon whom we had lived so peacefully at 
 Dibrugarh, and whom we had made so replete 
 below decks with the good things of Assam. 
 She had borne the burden of us and our rations 
 bravely while she lay moored near the bank. 
 But when lashed to a tug and towed up a 
 swift current the strain was too great for her. 
 Her poor old back broke, and she had to 
 be taken back hastily to the river-side. Her 
 cargo was all saved without mishap, and I 
 believe she is still afloat, resting from her 
 labours and enjoying again the dignified ease 
 of a house-boat. The delay caused by this 
 false start was minimised by the presence of 
 another spare flat at Dibrugarh, and by the 
 willing hands of the Dibrugarh regiment of 
 Mahrattas, who furnished a monster fatigue- 
 party to shift the cargo. 
 
16 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 After the arrival of the new flat at Kobo we 
 were a larger party, but still awaited the 
 arrival of several large steamers that were to 
 bring stores from Calcutta, troops from all 
 parts, and Naga carriers from the Naga Hills. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 The composition of the force The Naga carriers and their 
 manners and customs. 
 
 ALL these troops, carriers, and rations poured 
 into Kobo in due course. The force comprised 
 the first battalion of the 8th Gurkha Rifles from 
 Shillong, the first battalion of the 2nd Gurkha 
 Rifles from Dehra Dun, a company of Sappers 
 and Miners from Rurki, the 32nd Sikh 
 Pioneers from the Punjab, and the machine-gun 
 detachment of the Assam Valley Light Horse. 
 The last named were our only European unit, 
 and they were part of a well-known corps of 
 volunteers. Their patriotism in joining us, and 
 the personal sacrifices that some of them made 
 by doing so, cannot be passed by without a 
 word of admiration from the professional 
 soldier. The Sappers and Miners arrived, 
 still mourning the death of an officer who had 
 
i8 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 recently lost his life at Rurki in an accident 
 from a hand-grenade, while practising with the 
 company an attack upon a sham Abor stockade. 
 
 Except for a few regimental mules and pack- 
 ponies, whose normal function was. to carry 
 machine-guns or engineering equipment, the 
 transport at the beginning of the expedition 
 consisted only of carriers. They were, however, 
 shortly reinforced, first by one-half and later by 
 the other half of the 26th Mule Corps. The 
 carriers that first joined us were all Nagas, 
 though these were latterly reinforced and 
 eventually replaced by two corps of Gurkhalis. 
 
 The Naga was on the whole a most popular 
 person. He is three parts a savage ; but if you 
 judge savagery by the superficial area of a 
 man's nakedness, the fraction that you would 
 not call pure savage would be a small one 
 indeed. He came from the Naga Hills, still 
 farther to the east and visible on fine days from 
 Kobo. But his journey to join us had been 
 quite a long one. Many days' marching had 
 
NAGA CARRIERS 19 
 
 been necessary to bring him from his village 
 to a ghat on the Brahmaputra called Kukli 
 Mukh. From here he came up past Dibrugarh 
 by steamer. 
 
 There were several tribes of Nagas repre- 
 sented in the carrier corps the Tankals, the 
 Aos, the Semas, the Lotas, and the Angamis. 
 Each tribe has its own customs, modes of dress 
 (or rather sporadic ornament), and in most 
 cases more than one language. The social 
 organisation of the village followed them into 
 the field, and each small gang of villagers 
 throughout the expedition worked under a 
 representative head-man called a Gambora. 
 The Gamboras were a leisured class, being 
 there mainly to see their villagers do the work 
 that was set them. To make this matter 
 quite clear they were provided with red 
 blankets as a sign of office. 
 
 To the learned in racial matters the dis- 
 tinctions between the particular tribes would 
 perhaps prove the most interesting points con- 
 
20 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 earning the Nagas, but the plain man speaking 
 of them casually must deal with them all as 
 one class. In all cases their ears were made 
 by artificial aids into their most prominent 
 feature. It was first necessary not merely to 
 pierce the lobe, but to stretch the hole made 
 to an extent that would admit of a considerable 
 bulk of some substance being held in it as an 
 ornament. It did not much matter of what 
 this substance exactly consisted. A small 
 metal cylinder that has once held shaving-soap 
 would do admirably, or a roll of cardboard 
 made from the coverings of packets of cheap 
 cigarettes. Besides earrings, necklaces were 
 also worn. Those of beads or cowries were 
 apparently considered quite chic, though to 
 be thoroughly smart it was well to have the 
 neck encircled by parts of the hornbill's beak. 
 Fashions, however, changed, and at one period 
 of the expedition the dernier cri in neck 
 ornaments was a key that had opened a tin of 
 bully-beef. It was worn dangling like a locket. 
 
THE USE OF THE DAO ' 21 
 
 It is therefore not surprising that the bronze 
 identification disc, which is stamped with a 
 number and issued to all followers, and which 
 also must be worn round the neck like a 
 locket, is said to have been one of the aids 
 to luring these lovers of ornament into our 
 Service. 
 
 Their hair was left untouched as far as a 
 certain line below the ears, where it was cut 
 abruptly and formed a ridge. The method of 
 hair-cutting was interesting. You needed a 
 friend as barber. He laid your tresses across 
 the edge of his dao (or big knife), and taking 
 a block of wood tapped away with the latter 
 at the hair till the dao gradually worked its 
 way through to the wood, while the ends of 
 the hair fell away. 
 
 The dao when not in use generally lay 
 in a wooden socket that rested against the 
 lowest part of the Naga's backbone, and was 
 secured by a very low waistband. The 
 dao rattled in the socket as its owner 
 
22 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 shuffled along. It struck me that there was 
 much method in the choice of this position for 
 a weight that had to be suspended from a 
 waistband ; and I altered the position of the 
 revolver on my own back accordingly. This 
 clumsy weapon certainly seemed to be less 
 heavy thereafter when aligned along the very 
 end of my spine like a Naga's dao. 
 
 Besides his dao the Naga carried a spear, 
 iron-spiked at both ends. On his back he 
 carried his personal property in a commodious 
 conical basket. On the top of that came the 
 sixty-pound load which he was carrying for 
 the Maharani. (With the Naga, as well as 
 the Abor, Queen Victoria still sways the 
 imagination. Intervening kings have not yet 
 been realised, and the impersonal "Sirkar" 
 of the Indian is of no account.) 
 
 A long line of Nagas breasting a hill or 
 trotting loose-kneed down one, each dao jing- 
 ling in its socket and each spear brandished, 
 each back bent with its load, but the body's 
 
A STRANGE ' CHANTY' 23 
 
 movements scarcely impeded, was an exhila- 
 rating sight. It struck terror too on one or 
 more occasions into the Abors, who, it is said, 
 were more afraid at the beginning of the 
 expedition of these primitive warriors than of 
 our civilised troops equipped with all their 
 scientific weapons. 
 
 It was not only the sight of the Naga that 
 was impressive. The sounds that he emitted 
 as he went about his work added to the 
 impression. Whether on fatigue or on the 
 march, he punctuated each pace or repeated 
 movement with a rhythmical grunt ; these 
 grunts varying in pitch formed a kind of 
 chant that regulated the breath and cheated 
 the labour. If you were a Naga and had 
 been set to climb a hill your subsequent 
 fatigue at the top would be less if all the way 
 up you had punctuated each fall of the left 
 foot with a grunt like " Heigh," and each fall 
 of the right foot with a grunt like " Ho." 
 Though rigid silence might have saved you 
 
24 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 more actual breath, yet to the tune of Heigh- 
 Ho you would have gone up the hill like a 
 bird. And the moral effect of the " Heigh- 
 Ho " chorus was not only exhilarating to 
 yourself and your comrades, but was also cal- 
 culated to strike alarm among any enemies 
 that might be lurking near. 
 
 The Nagas had their faults, but they were 
 mostly the faults of children. They squabbled 
 sometimes like children, and, like children, 
 would hide sometimes when wanted for irk- 
 some duties. They had, as a rule, very few 
 notions concerning religion, though a few of 
 the Aos were Christians. These sang the 
 hymns of Moody and Sankey in Naga lan- 
 guage on Sunday evenings under the direction 
 of a Gambora, who was also a deacon. Strict 
 teetotalism and abstinence from dog's meat 
 were included in these Nagas' Christian code. 
 Most Nagas ate dogs greedily if they got the 
 chance, and would relish a goat that had died 
 a natural death, and some of them once saved 
 
A SACRIFICE WITHHELD 25 
 
 me in the same accommodating way from the 
 labour of cremating a dead mule. 
 
 Some of them seemed to believe in the 
 efficacy of sacrifice. For at Kobo, in one 
 of our Naga carrier corps, a man fell sick. 
 His commandant, who belonged to a mess 
 which I was, for the time being, running, 
 came to me with a request that I should sell 
 him or present him with a chicken, for it had 
 been stated by his Nagas that the sacrifice 
 of a chicken might save the sick man's life. 
 Chickens were, however, scarce. Though all 
 for supporting indigenous religions, in accord- 
 ance with our Government's avowed principles, 
 I yet thought we might just as well enjoy our 
 chicken ourselves as give it to these Nagas, and 
 despite my hard heart the patient recovered. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 A steamer stuck fast An autumn spate JBdsfta-bmldmg 
 Town-planning Street-naming Time-killing. 
 
 IT was a matter of some wonder that all the 
 passengers and cargoes that were destined for 
 Kobo arrived with so little delay or mishap. 
 " Snags " and shifting sandbanks, a swift cur- 
 rent and, near Kobo, a succession of " pebble- 
 beds " were the chief dangers to navigation. 
 But the only real accident occurred when a 
 steamer that had already brought its load 
 alongside the primitive Kobo wharf sat down 
 through some mischance on the anchor of 
 another steamer. Several plates in the bottom 
 were at once ripped open. Day and night, 
 with the aid of pioneers, sappers, and other 
 handy men, the pumps worked their hardest 
 in the hope of lifting the vessel off this tena- 
 cious anchor. But nothing seemed likely to 
 
A SPATE OUT OF SEASON 27 
 
 be of any avail, except such a rise in the 
 river's level as would lift bodily upward what- 
 ever lay upon her surface ; and the season 
 for higher levels had passed. We were only 
 waiting for the streams, swamps, and nul- 
 lahs to dry up a little more before we made 
 our start from Kobo. But just when this 
 steamer seemed doomed to be "neaped" for 
 the winter at Kobo, the unexpected happened. 
 We were visited with a flood out of season. 
 This, while lifting the steamer into safety, yet 
 delayed our own movements many days and 
 kept us all very wet meanwhile. 
 
 First one snug hut by the river-side and 
 then another was encroached upon by the 
 rising river, the occupants having to turn out 
 in the night and run with bag and baggage 
 higher up the bank. The 32nd Pioneers had 
 levelled a piece of ground for their mess near 
 the river and been enjoying some of the river 
 breeze which those of us further inland had 
 been envying them. But one night this 
 
28 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 pleasant promontory was all submerged, and 
 the mess had to be reconstructed hurriedly and 
 further inland. A bazaar newly built for timid 
 Miri traders was quickly submerged. Our 
 scanty supply of goats for slaughter, that had 
 hitherto been comfortably ensconced in a pen 
 near their drinking water, were rescued with 
 difficulty at four o'clock one morning. Mean- 
 while the flood grew and grew, the water becom- 
 ing ever muddier and bringing with it a steady 
 procession of tree-trunks, torn from the banks 
 upstream, and destined, when the spate was 
 over, to sow the sandbanks with a new crop 
 of " snags." 
 
 There were at last barely two or three feet 
 left between the river and the higher level 
 of the camp, where, luckily, most of us lay. 
 A little more persistence in the flood would 
 have seen us strutting about on stilts or perch- 
 ing in trees. But the fall began while we 
 still had a little margin of safety. Great were 
 the dryings of clothes as the sun came out. 
 
BASHAS 29 
 
 Each bdsha (or hut) was like an old clothes' 
 shop in the East End of London, and the 
 garments exposed for view after the wearing 
 and the weathering they had had would have 
 done little credit to any respectable neighbour- 
 hood. 
 
 Kobo was now quite a big place, and daily 
 grew more comfortable and spick and span 
 as the time for our move forward drew near. 
 The jungle had now been cleared for many 
 acres, and the camp laid out on a spacious 
 scale. Many of the force were in tents, but 
 these were not to be carried further, owing 
 to the drain that they would have made upon 
 our transport, and so many of us were al- 
 ready living in bdshas, or improvised huts. 
 
 A volume could be written about bdshas. 
 Bdsha building on the North- East Frontier 
 is quite an art, and has an architecture all its 
 own. The primary rule is to give a very 
 steep slope to the roof to enable Assam rain 
 to run off quickly. There are roughly three 
 
30 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 kinds of bdsha. In the small bdsha for 
 summer use the roof slopes up from back 
 to front. Your bed-platform or chang lies 
 along the low back wall. You may fill in 
 the sides, but will probably leave the lofty 
 front of the bdsha quite unwalled, so as to 
 let in all the breeze there may be, while the 
 roof keeps off the rain or the sun as the case 
 may be. 
 
 You get a somewhat stuffier effect, and one 
 more adapted to winter, if you reverse the 
 slope, so that your open front is lower than 
 the wall at the back. 
 
 If, however, you wish to accommodate your- 
 self in some style, you run to a ridge-pole and 
 have the roof sloping downwards on either 
 side of it. Small tree-stems and bamboos 
 fresh cut from the jungle make all the frame- 
 work. The uprights should end in catapult 
 forks to hold up the ridge-pole and the other 
 main horizontal pieces. Bark cut into strips 
 makes the rope that square-lashes each piece 
 
A CORDUROY BED 31 
 
 of the framework to the piece which it crosses. 
 Grass or leaves fill in the walls and roof, and 
 the instrument that fells the timber, digs the 
 holes for the uprights, strips the bark for 
 the binding, and cuts the grass or leaves for 
 filling in the framework, is the common dao 
 of the country, or else the kukri of the Gurkha. 
 
 The chang or platform is a most desirable 
 addition, for it is well to have more than 
 a waterproof sheet between yourself and the 
 damp and animated ground. But the sur- 
 face of the chang, constructed as it often is 
 like a piece of corduroy road, is often most 
 uncompromising. One extra thick and knotty 
 crosspiece will often be found lying just where 
 the small of the back has to come. 
 
 The roof is usually the least satisfactory 
 part. It often only tempers the rain instead 
 of actually keeping it out. What, too, may 
 one night be rain-proof, may two nights later 
 be like a sieve. Such is the shrinkage caused 
 by the drying up of the grass or the leaves. 
 
32 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 There were many kinds of roofing material 
 available. Grass, if pressed tightly enough 
 and laid on thickly enough, was probably the 
 best, but the wild banana leaf did wonders 
 till it shrivelled. 
 
 It was a common sight to see a Naga 
 carrying a couple or so of these leaves home 
 with him, using them for the time being as 
 an umbrella, but intending them ultimately 
 for a new roof for his house. A secondary 
 use, too, was soon found for the waterproof 
 bags that were placed outside all our sacks 
 of rations. Instead of their being all sent 
 back as soon as empty (to save the purchase 
 of new bags for the next lot of rations), they 
 had a way sometimes of adhering to the roofs 
 of bdshas, and thus filling up the holes in the 
 thatch. 
 
 The camp at Kobo had been fairly well laid 
 out some days before the G.O.C. arrived. 
 But to set a finishing touch upon the pre- 
 parations, an officer interested in the matter 
 
NEW STREET-NAMES 33 
 
 asked me to join him in inventing names for 
 the various streets. We had, that is to say, 
 to sit down methodically for two hours one 
 wet afternoon with a set of stencils and try 
 to be appropriate. Out of compliment to 
 the G.O.C. the fine broad road along the 
 river- bank was called " Boulevard Bower." 
 Two other important arteries were called 
 " Regent Street" and "Piccadilly." The 
 road leading inland into Abor country was 
 called " Rue de Kebong." " Harley Street," 
 of course, led past the hospitals. The mili- 
 tary policemen were bounded on one side 
 by "Scotland Yard," and on the other by 
 "Bow Street." The path that led past the 
 lines of the savage Nagas was given the 
 still notorious name of "Sidney Street." 
 This last name proved the least satisfactory, 
 for those officers who were not careful 
 readers of their newspapers kept asking us 
 the reason of the name. It is always trying 
 
 to be made to explain a joke, especially 
 
 c 
 
34 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 when you are aware that it is after all only 
 a feeble one, and it was therefore trying to 
 be made to recount several times over in 
 cold blood to critical ears the tale of Mr. 
 Winston Churchill's pitched battle against 
 the Sidney Street anarchists. 
 
 Time undoubtedly hung heavily at Kobo. 
 Fatigues to unload stores, parades to practise 
 jungle warfare, and military engineering in its 
 various forms constituted for most of us the 
 only kinds of duty. There was little but 
 drudgery in the first of these kinds, though 
 I did once surprise a Sepoy who had found it 
 interesting. He had helped in emptying a 
 whole holdful of rum, and three hours after 
 his party had been dismissed I found him lying 
 at the far end of the hold. The temperature 
 there was over 100, but he was sleeping 
 peacefully, and hugging in his arms a missing 
 keg, the bung of which was noticeably loose, 
 and which was undoubtedly short in weight. 
 
 Practice in jungle warfare consisted of 
 
PRELIMINARY PRACTICE 35 
 
 marches in single file round the camp peri- 
 meter at a pace suitable to a long column in 
 thick country, but yet sadly suggestive of 
 funerals. Every bayonet was fixed, and the 
 whole column arranged on a careful system of 
 sandwiching, each short string of followers, 
 armed only with daos or spears, being guarded 
 at either end by a string of fighting men. 
 Occasional pairs of fighting men were also 
 interspersed among the followers. 
 
 Road-making towards Pobo-Mukh a ghat 
 that lay a few miles down the river, and also 
 towards Mishing, where the flanking columns 
 were to proceed occupied sappers and pioneers 
 and any carriers or coolies that were available. 
 Meanwhile, in the camp itself, a certain amount 
 of fortification and clearing still remained to be 
 done. A few elephants that we had with us 
 helped greatly at clearing tree-trunks, each 
 massive beast putting the whole weight of 
 a tug-of-war team into his task. Perhaps the 
 most noticeable engineering feat at Kobo was 
 
36 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 the erection of a " crow's .nest," or post of 
 observation, at the top of a tree at least one 
 hundred and fifty feet high. 
 
 What some of us suffered from most was 
 lack of violent exercise. The excellent Kobo 
 football ground was not yet in existence, and 
 walks up the " Rue de Kebong" (sometimes 
 with gun in hand on the chance of an "imperial" 
 pigeon) were the favourite form of recreation. 
 The river was still too muddy for fishing. 
 One officer, in his zeal for exercise, is said one 
 day to have nearly lost his life. He was wont, 
 shortly before " Retreat," to go for a run by 
 himself up the " Rue de Kebong," which de- 
 bouched on a chapri or grass-covered plain 
 about a mile from camp. He was disappear- 
 ing one evening behind the tall grass at a 
 steady eight miles an hour, when an armed 
 road-making party were returning from the 
 Mishing road, which joined the " Rue de 
 Kebong " at the edge of the chapri. They mis- 
 took the running officer for a. fleeing Abor, and 
 
SAFETY IN DUMB-BELLS 37 
 
 two of them were at once down on their knees 
 taking aim at him. Their officers, however, 
 decided to give the poor "Abor" the benefit 
 of the doubt and restrained their men. Before 
 they reached camp the " Abor," glowing from 
 his run and with putties all awry, came pound- 
 ing back on his return journey. He overtook 
 his would-be executioners, blissfully ignorant 
 of their previous intentions towards him, till 
 their commander cheerfully enlightened him. 
 After that dumb-bells, improvised from am- 
 munition boots, had to serve this officer in 
 place of his evening run. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 The start of the two columns An eclipse of the sun " Six- 
 mile camp "A toilsome march to Pillung A windfall in 
 a thatch. 
 
 AT last we were off. The flood had subsided. 
 The road was reported to be no longer very 
 much submerged, and there was hope of camp- 
 ing above river-level. Our first halt was to be 
 at " Six-mile Camp," 1 in the middle of the 
 above-mentioned grass chapri. The Mishing 
 column, meanwhile, went off half-left to protect 
 our left flank. Our right flank was protected 
 by the river Dihong. 
 
 As we marched along the chapri there was 
 a partial eclipse of the sun. It gave us a cool 
 hour's walking across a hot spot, and the 
 Augurs, both Indian and Naga, told us it was 
 a good omen for the success of the expedition. 
 
 1 The map in Appendix I gives the relative positions of 
 
 places mentioned in the narrative. 
 
 38 
 
OMENS OF AN ECLIPSE 39 
 
 After all it was only a partial eclipse, so we 
 did not like to expect too much. We might, 
 for instance, take Kebong, but perhaps not 
 reach the Falls of the Tsangpo. " Six-mile 
 Camp," when we reached it, proved to be 
 a pleasant spot on a clearing in the tall grass. 
 Alongside it flowed a small river of clear water, 
 which gave us fish for dinner and an evening 
 bathe. 
 
 Our next march was to Pillung and took 
 much longer, for we had soon left the chapri, 
 and had to follow a winding and sodden path 
 much overrun and overhung with jungle. If 
 we had been botanists or entomologists we 
 would have been in our element. But being 
 only a long toiling column of fighting men 
 and laden followers we cared little for the 
 orchids that trailed over our heads, for the 
 giant tree-trunks that lay across our path, or 
 for the insects that got into our eyes, crawled 
 up our legs, or flaunted their gay colours in 
 our faces. Of these objects of scientific 
 
40 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 interest the most unpleasant was perhaps the 
 leech, whose insinuating behaviour will at 
 times defy the tightest-bound puttie, and 
 leave a scar on the leg that will irritate for 
 weeks after he has digested his fill of his 
 victim's blood. A pinch of salt which is 
 never handy is the best rebuff to the leech. 
 Failing this, the foul nicotine juice in an old 
 pipe an article that is more often handy 
 will send him shrivelling away. 
 
 Six miles had seemed a ridiculously short 
 distance as a march for able-bodied men, but 
 with our long column in single file it proved 
 quite enough. It was imperative, for tactical 
 reasons, that there should be no gaps in the 
 column. But every man stumbling over a 
 tree-trunk, or pausing before he jumped a 
 ditch, or pausing to balance himself before 
 he launched himself Blondin-wise on to a tree- 
 trunk bridge, caused an appreciable check. 
 For every man in front of him had to wait 
 for him, and every man behind him had not 
 
MARCHES AND MOCKING-BIRDS 41 
 
 only to wait for him, but had to make the 
 same pause subsequently on his own account. 
 A thousand or so of such checks repeated 
 for each little obstacle, meant hours and hours 
 of waiting by the way. When we halted we 
 had to look outwards into the jungle to greet 
 the Abors, who might have been about to 
 swoop down upon us. Their failure at this 
 stage of the operations to seek this oppor- 
 tunity of embarrassing us on the march was 
 not yet an established fact. The different 
 parts of the column kept in touch with one 
 another by means of a whistling code. Three 
 sharp blows on the whistle meant one thing, 
 a single long whistle another. It is said that 
 certain mocking-birds learnt our whistling 
 code, and that some of its failures to prevent 
 occasional gaps in the column was due to 
 their pranks. 
 
 The camp at Pillung was nothing but a 
 half-made clearing in the jungle and a net- 
 work of felled tree-trunks. It was therefore 
 
42 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 impossible to lay out a mathematically accu- 
 rate camp. There was little time for bdsha 
 building, for we did not arrive till late in 
 the afternoon. But the ground was soft and 
 the night was fine, and despite the dew we 
 bivouacked comfortably under our waterproof 
 sheets. 
 
 The few regimental mules that accompanied 
 us came unprovided with fodder. At the first 
 halt near the tall grass of the chapri they 
 had been quite happy, and at our next 
 camp Lokhpur they were able to get some 
 rice-straw, which friendly Abors from Balek 
 had stacked for them. But here at Pillung 
 there appeared to be nothing either growing 
 or gathered that mules would eat. A regi- 
 mental transport officer came to me anxiously 
 at a late hour in the afternoon, telling me that 
 he had tried to make his mules eat leaves 
 but without effect, and wondering what to 
 try next. Putting our heads together we 
 scanned such horizon as is laid bare by a 
 
A WINDFALL IN A THATCH 43 
 
 small clearing in a forest. Our eyes lighted 
 on two or three old bdshas that had pre- 
 sumably been built during the summer when 
 the Military Police were in sole occupation 
 of this region. 
 
 "It seems rather a forlorn hope," said one 
 of us to the other, "but we will have to try 
 that thatch." 
 
 We went to the bdshas, and pulling out a 
 handful of the thatch found that it consisted 
 of very ancient, dry, and coarse grass, but was 
 free from the mustiness that might have been 
 expected. We took one handful and offered 
 it to a mule, who ate it greedily. Therefore 
 we returned and took the thatch off all of 
 these bdshas and distributed it among all the 
 mules, who thanked us kindly. The only 
 people to suffer were some Nagas, who had 
 been so shrewd as to take possession of the 
 houses, but it was, after all, quite easy for 
 them to replace their edible roof with an 
 inedible one. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 Lokhpur and a thunderstorm The clearing of Pasighat 
 camp A hunt for a well Abors and Abor ladies. 
 
 WE reached Lokhpur the next day after 
 another six miles of hopping and skipping 
 and jumping through the damp nullahs that 
 ran at close intervals across our path. We 
 were again in a constricted clearing in the 
 forest, and had the same difficulty in convert- 
 ing it into a camp. The weather had been 
 fine so far, and I remember going to bed 
 without taking any particular precautions 
 against the weather. A waterproof sheet sus- 
 pended above me on one or two sticks as 
 a shelter from the dew, and another water- 
 proof sheet between my body and the ground, 
 seemed all that cautious man should want. 
 But I was just getting off to sleep when 
 
 44 
 
PRUDENCE AND A STORM 45 
 
 there was a distant rumble of thunder, and 
 then another, and then another. 
 
 " Shall I, being sleepy, go to sleep and 
 risk it, or shall I be fussy and turn out and 
 dig a trench around my bivouac ? " 
 
 This is what I asked myself, and what many 
 others must have asked themselves on this 
 and similar occasions. On this occasion I 
 was fussy, and was subsequently glad that I 
 had been. I turned out of my cosy kennel, 
 and with the aid of the useful dao had 
 only half made the necessary trench, and the 
 equally necessary embankment on the inside 
 of it, when the rain began. I crawled into bed 
 again a little wet but fairly happy, when 
 the work was finished. My bivouac was on 
 a slope, and the water that would have flowed 
 all over me but for the trench and the small 
 embankment, turned off on each side of me 
 and left me fairly dry. 
 
 The next day we reached Pasighat, after 
 another short march through jungle and 
 
46 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 ditches. Here again there was no natural 
 camping-ground, but we had emerged upon 
 a small chapri encumbered only with grass 
 some eight feet high. The Nagas and anyone 
 else who carried a dao or a kukri were let 
 loose to mow down the grass and prepare 
 the camping-ground. Just as an army of 
 locusts devastates an area of cultivation, so 
 did our little army devastate this chapri, and 
 in as short a time. In an hour or so the 
 grass was lying in occasional heaps, and 
 nothing but the stalks was standing. These 
 stalks had to be crushed down later. Though 
 the stalks were of mere grass, they were yet 
 half an inch thick and almost as hard as 
 wood ; and they scratched a man's knee as he 
 trampled through them in shorts. But the 
 ordinary perambulations about camp of one or 
 two thousand people soon levelled them to the 
 ground, and thus we soon felt that we were 
 at least in an open space again. A sharp 
 bluff at the edge of the camp overlooked a 
 
BAD WATER 47 
 
 stony beach that fringed the Dihong River. 
 The river water was still thick from the 
 recent rain, and was unpleasant to drink on 
 that account. At our other camping-grounds 
 we had found clear water, and at Kobo we 
 had latterly stopped drinking from the muddy 
 Brahmaputra and sunk Norton tube wells 
 at various places in the camp. Norton tube 
 wells were, however, useless at Pasighat, for 
 the ground a few feet below the surface was 
 as stony as the beach beyond the bluff. How- 
 ever hard we hammered in the tube, and 
 wherever we tried doing so, it only got its 
 nose blunted and failed to find water. 
 
 The force was to halt at Pasighat for a 
 few days while convoys from Kobo brought 
 up more rations. It was now that we first 
 saw Abors in their own environment, though 
 we had been able to examine as isolated curio- 
 sities a few Abor prisoners at Kobo. Balek, 
 the post held by Military Police throughout 
 the summer, was six miles distant from 
 
48 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 l';iM>Ji;it, !'. ' I'-fl of our lin<: of advan^:. 
 The Military I'oliYr, who WCfC st.il! tliCTC, 
 kept fending US fiin;dl f.ontrihutions of fodd<:r 
 
 for our mules on the backs of Balek Abors. 
 li was the ladies of Balek who for the most 
 
 paM p'-rformrd thi-, kind ofh'r.r. Ahor ladir/, 
 
 seen close are not, as a rule, individually 
 
 ; hut. ;i group of th'-ni in single 
 
 , i-n,. ; i f,',n, ., j,ii,;i|r p;il.li, r:;i( li in 
 
 a short red petticoat, with f.iir -.i-iin, with a 
 
 i, ' I I... ol lni :: hi I,|IM- hr.,d', round her 
 
 lird-., .,|,d .. hlllirllr , ,f hp>WII | Kldd y -',1 Til W 
 
 or green bamboo leaves on her b.-u 1<, w,is a 
 
 Ihr hil'll'-li ill-. I lollowr.l in l)i< n li.-iin, c;i( li 
 ni;iid of M-VM .unini'i', cirryin;. IMT h;ihy 
 
 brother in a basket on her back, 
 
 lint r.M h one of ihr women l.Mloor, hn* (;K e 
 
 with blue lines that twist her expression, and 
 
 <|rlr,ii I fromwh.it n, Mural hrauty shr possrssr:;. 
 
 ' ,|, i . li'. n. illy -.(|ii.in jawrd ;ind l;ir;;r moiilhrd 
 I In ,n / .'! vri y HHK li .illn I \\<- M. .11 
 
LADIES 49 
 
 golian type. She is cheery enough, and laughs 
 readily enough at the slightest pleasantry. She 
 has little modesty and strange ideas of dress. 
 It is only a wave of Indian or European 
 prudishness, or else a very cold wind, that in- 
 duces her to cover herself above the waist. 
 Her wedding-ring she wears not in metal, nor 
 on her fingers, but in the form of a spiral garter 
 made of thin twisted bark round the calf. She 
 cuts her hair short like the Naga with the 
 help of a friend's dao. Her most feminine 
 appurtenance is her boyup. This is a girdle 
 made of metal discs strung together and worn 
 . beneath the petticoat. It jingles as she moves, 
 and doubtless she takes the same feminine 
 pride in the mysteries of its shrouded noise as 
 the European lady is said to take in the frou- 
 frou of her silk petticoat. 
 
 For the rest, she is unkempt and dirty. 
 Her bare skin, of which there is much ex- 
 panse, is disfigured with skin diseases. She 
 is certainly more pleasantly conceived as one 
 
50 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 of a picturesque group in the jungle than as an 
 individual displaying herself at close quarters. 
 
 The men as a rule are almost as pale and 
 hairless as the women. Some of them are 
 tattooed on the face with a sign resembling the 
 cross, and tales are extant in some villages of 
 a missionary (presumably French or Portu- 
 guese) coming among them generations ago 
 and introducing the custom. They wear coats 
 without sleeves or buttons, the scantiest of 
 loin-cloths, and a few bead ornaments. On 
 their heads are hard bamboo hats, sometimes 
 fitted with plumes of red hair, and shaped rather 
 like the European " bowler." Daos are slung 
 across their shoulders, and hanging low on 
 their backs are the satchels in which they 
 carry their possessions. These satchels are 
 large and flat, and carefully covered with a 
 hairy skin. The faces of the men are gener- 
 ally ugly and dirty, and their bodies scabrous. 
 The expression of their faces is sometimes 
 crafty and villainous, but more often they wear 
 the typical hillman's look of good humour. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 The arrival of the boat convoy Boats, boatmen, and boating 
 on the Dihong, 
 
 ONE of the convoys that we were awaiting 
 not without twinges of anxiety was the boat 
 convoy. It had left Kobo on its maiden 
 voyage a day ahead of us and was to reach 
 Pasighat on the same day as we did. It kept 
 its appointment, and arrived in the late after- 
 noon, having given us just a few hours of mild 
 suspense concerning its fate. 
 
 It had been no small enterprise to despatch, 
 in charge of a subaltern and two warrant 
 officers, some seventy primitive boats of various 
 sorts and sizes and degrees of dilapidation, 
 laden with foodstuffs worth to us their weight 
 in gold, and manned by a polyglot crowd of 
 puny, timid men of peace into the fringe of the 
 enemy's country, up a swollen river that had 
 
52 OX THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 been little explored but was known to contain 
 several formidable rapids. It is not to be 
 wondered at that there was heard here and 
 there a sigh of relief when a fleet in very 
 irregular formation straggled slowly into sight 
 as the sun was setting. Very deliberately it 
 crawled past us along the far bank, making use 
 of a stretch of slack water there before striking 
 across the swift mid-current. Once across, 
 each boat floated comfortably into a wide bay 
 with a sloping beach a few hundred yards below 
 the camp. 
 
 First of all to arrive was the "flagship," 
 decked out as such with a common or garden 
 pocky -wipe or hanky on the end of a stray 
 stick of bamboo. In it sailed the aforesaid 
 subaltern, known upon the waters as the 
 " admiral of the fleet," or in terms of greater 
 endearment as "the pirate/' Later, his dis- 
 reputable pocket-handkerchief was replaced by 
 the proper blue and white distinguishing flag 
 of a transport officer. 
 
THE BOAT CONVOY 
 
 Tie 
 
 of the 
 
 bacly 
 
 .:i : r 
 lit briis --i i 
 siil. 
 
 Tins in a 
 
 s rajs 
 
 rr--~ri~-L I.-~ L'.~ 
 
 to do. His legs bod 
 of 
 
 m \^ m T" 
 
 ^, ^ - - * _ , 
 
 so Bier, ne negan giovmg toe 
 
 -- -:.- :. - _-v_I.-c 
 
 "- r;^:f : : s ~;_r ~trr 
 
 and baring at fast fck tfac 
 
 r : ~ 
 
54 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 a mighty meal of rice, a smoke, and a sleep, 
 they must needs be roused to lift the boats' 
 cargoes from the beach to the camp. Such 
 were often the bad turns that fate played 
 the Naga at the end of a day. But on such 
 occasions, though he often took a sporting 
 chance of evading the duty altogether, yet 
 when once past escape from it he performed 
 it manfully and, above all, cheerily. 
 
 It was raining hard that night long before 
 we had finished unloading the boats, and a 
 downpour of rain was likely to affect the level 
 of the river. This beach where the boats were 
 moored might by morning be all under water. 
 But the boatmen were undismayed by this 
 contingency. They had erected in no time 
 their little bivouacs of paulins on poles, and 
 these could be moved at shortest notice a few 
 yards up the bank, along with the moorings of 
 the boats, should they hear the water lapping too 
 near their pillows in their dreams. The perils 
 of a river in spate were nothing to them. On 
 
BOATMEN AND BOATS 
 
 - - - * - > ! J ^. ,^_,~ 
 
 QffSM iQ IDQUOC Jiii IO *^p*ii^ 
 
 farther inland and spend that night amid the 
 horrors of the Sirkar's armed camp. The 
 
 1, ..,...... , _ - -- " ^_ 
 
 -. - - :..-:5 _____ r ____ - - :.~ 
 
 cries as "Hah! hi^us dere," and Xi 
 one, ahsvel,* were a very real Inioi to 
 The boats were afl of the "dug-oul 
 
 inr_.^/_ '."."'" " r.f J. . 7. ^ .~~ -.7.2. 5T. 17'f _ T_ r 
 
 ^i::h ::" ::;e i:-r ir;.: ..5 -_c :_: :; ~^-:r 
 ' ~_ ^ r j -- ^ j 'r i 'r r ~~. ~. ~ ^ i 5 " ~ "f '. . 7 " \ ~ L ~. ~ 
 of die beam, but there was a margi 
 which this widA could be extended, 
 of wood could be wedged tighter and tigtoer 
 beiweer: ;he ^-wes antii 
 Era ~ 
 
 farther apart. Still bigger cross-pieces could 
 
 :r.er. :-: >^r^: :_:-i .r.i ir.t ^.^;5 r- 
 
 C.pe s:. .; :-;re rr;v:^t-i : f fi: - r. ; : 
 
 the whole fabric was not too great. Only the 
 
 ""-jr. J.f J^;.\:^ 1:1 : .. jir ;: 
 i". i r .-"J- f.'-jr. r. i:*..s ~..fj IT.; 
 
56 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 consisted of strips of hollowed tree-trunk joined 
 at cunningly fitted seams. Though the work- 
 manship is a little rough, this method of 
 construction is very closely allied to that of 
 the light cedar-wood " ships " in which Oxford 
 and Cambridge race each other. 
 
 Each boat, as a precaution against capsizing, 
 had a stout bamboo lashed to the outside of 
 each gunwale. This was an excellent safe- 
 guard, and doubtless saved us many a load 
 of stores in the course of many boat convoys. 
 The method of propulsion varied with the 
 direction you were going. Up-stream, for the 
 most part, you hugged the bank and punted, 
 though sometimes the bank was so sheer that 
 you could not touch bottom even at the water's 
 edge. Down-stream, for the most part, you 
 kept away from the bank, so as to get the 
 best of the current, and you then paddled 
 as in a Canadian canoe. In the course of 
 time, both at Pasighat and at Janakmukh, it 
 fell to my lot to make great use of the dug-out, 
 
OARSMEN PAST AND PRESENT 57 
 
 and in the course of my duties to act frequently 
 as ferryman. I never realised before what sal- 
 vage there might be for a misspent youth. 
 The arts of punting and " Canadian canoeing," 
 which I had learnt on summer mornings on 
 the Cherwell at Oxford, when I ought to have 
 been attending lectures, now at last stood me in 
 good stead on field-service as a humble military 
 asset. 
 
 Some of the bigger boats had one oar only, 
 which was placed near the bows. The oars- 
 man would go on rowing serenely by the hour, 
 regardless of the time of the paddlers who 
 paddled on one side or the other astern of him. 
 The sternmost paddler was, of course, also the 
 steersman, and there was some cunning re- 
 quired in keeping a strong oarsman in the 
 bows from pulling round lazy paddlers amid- 
 ships, and in keeping the head straight when 
 it was caught by a cross-current or a gust of 
 wind. 
 
 The boatmen hailed from various parts. 
 
5 8 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 Many were Assamese " Doms " or fisher-folk, 
 whose trade is for some reason despised in 
 Assam. Though despised as a class they were 
 yet sufficiently contented with their lot to need 
 much persuasion before they would join our 
 Service. Equally reluctant were the Miri 
 boatmen, and this seemed ungracious to those 
 who expected a Miri to have a working con- 
 science. For it was partly for the sake of 
 the Miris that we were fighting the Abors. 
 The Abors are the brutal, stalwart hillmen 
 who for generations have harried that softer 
 portion of the Miri race which lives upon 
 the plain. It is, for instance, from the Miris 
 of the plain that the Abors have captured 
 most of their slaves. And here we were come 
 to help the Miris, and the Miris were loth to 
 lend a hand. 
 
 But this complaint would hardly appeal to 
 a Miri, or to any unwarlike subject in like 
 case. Our more peace-loving subjects always 
 expect us to fight their battles for them, since 
 
FOLLOWERS 59 
 
 we pose as strong men that come to the rescue 
 of the weak. Meanwhile, they would hold it 
 more becoming for the weak to sit at ease. 
 
 Later on the fleet recruited some boatmen 
 from the friendly Abors. Personally, I liked 
 these the best. They were cheerier and had 
 more power in the elbow. They kept even 
 worse time in a boat than the Miris, but 
 worked with a will, possessing that great 
 quality of mountain vigour which the Miris 
 lacked. 
 
 I had later a gang of nine Abor boatmen 
 working three boats for me at Janakmukh. 
 They were interesting characters. Some were 
 veritable students, who studied hard in their 
 spare time at both English and Hindustani. 
 Very soon they could talk to me in Hindustani 
 with moderate fluency, and I wondered how 
 they had picked up what they knew, till I 
 found them fraternising at odd moments with 
 any stray follower they could buttonhole, and 
 systematically gleaning a vocabulary from 
 
60 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 him. One had a musical ear, and annoyed me 
 by it very much ; for I own the moral copy- 
 right of a very distinctive whistle-call. It is 
 a call with which my wife and I greet each 
 other on home-coming, or signal to each other 
 in a crowd : we also use it to call our dogs. 
 There are at least ten notes in it, and I had 
 always thought that my wife and I were the 
 sole masters of it. But one day one of these 
 Abors had the impertinence to call my dog 
 from me with my own particular whistle-call, 
 and the dog, I am ashamed to relate, left me 
 and went to be fondled by the Abor. 
 
 The most exciting feature of boating in 
 dug-outs on the Dihong was the shooting 
 of rapids. Going up a rapid was a dreary 
 business, and bad both for men and boat. 
 It meant hugging the bank and wading knee- 
 deep to haul the boat over an uneven bottom, 
 where it grated against each boulder that lay 
 near the surface. At the end of the haul 
 the boat would be the worse for wear, and 
 
THE RAPIDS, UP AND DOWN 61 
 
 eventually would have to be patched with 
 wads of tow and be pegged on the bottom 
 like a cracked cricket-bat. The waders also 
 who had toiled through the snow-fed water 
 would be weary and chilled to the bone. 
 
 But if instead your duty led you down the 
 rapid instead of up it, the sensation was as 
 exhilarating as one of the sixpenny nervous 
 shocks at an Earl's Court exhibition. The 
 motion was even fuller of poetry than the 
 " switchback railway" or the "water-chute." 
 As you glided along you could cheat yourself 
 out of any sensation of movement by keeping 
 your eyes on the bubbling water that ran 
 with you, but if you cast your eyes suddenly 
 upwards on to the land, you became aware 
 with a lightning shock that you were racing 
 at a terrific speed. The rough water at the 
 end of the rapid was more prosaic ; for a 
 rapid has a way of ending in a high sea 
 that makes a " dug-out " suddenly seem to be 
 a very rickety kind of vessel. I once lured 
 
62 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 an officer who was a particularly bad sailor 
 down a particularly strong rapid, and nearly 
 succeeded in making him sea-sick. He went 
 through all the stages of the complaint except 
 the final one in the few moments during which 
 we ploughed through the surf that mounted 
 round us as the current slackened. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 The friendship of certain Pa"si gdrns Political presents A 
 digression on "punitive globe-trotting" Tree-felling 
 Making and abandoning the post at Pasighat. 
 
 WHILE the main force halted at Pasighat some 
 of the Pasi gams came in and swore friend- 
 ship. These were the head-men of the villages 
 of those Pasi Abors who lived hereabouts. 
 Balek, already mentioned as the place held 
 throughout the hot weather by Military Police, 
 was one of this group of villages. By a great 
 deal of protestation and some oath-taking 
 these head-men dissociated themselves from 
 the murders of the political officer and doctor, 
 partially on whose account we were now pre- 
 sent in this country. There was then an 
 exchange of presents. 
 
 The stock political present made by the 
 Abor on such an occasion as this is an 
 
64 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 unbleached cotton counterpane of very Early 
 Victorian appearance. The Abor women 
 make this material by hand. It has a rough 
 pile, consisting of small tufts of raw cotton 
 allowed to protrude from the surface. It is 
 thick and heavy, and as a counterpane would 
 surely by the modern doctor be pronounced 
 unhygienic. The same material is used for 
 many of the men's winter coats, but its un- 
 doubted advantage as a washing material 
 is unfortunately not appreciated by them. 
 Hence, having never been to the wash, it 
 makes but a dingy coat. In passing it may 
 be mentioned that there are apparently only 
 three choices for a suit of clothes in Abor-land. 
 The white counterpane cloth is one, and the 
 other two, being woollen, are imported into 
 this sheepless land from Tibet. One of them 
 is the well-known red monastic " self-colour," 
 and the other a rather saucy thing in heather- 
 mixtures. 
 
 The present most valued by Abors was the 
 
THE BLANKET IN POLITICS 65 
 
 red blanket. Its use as the distinguishing 
 uniform of a Naga Gambora had possibly 
 drawn their attention to it, but at any rate an 
 Abor sent away from our camp with a new 
 red blanket wrapped round him was a proud 
 and happy man. It was, of course, only upon 
 the great among them that the gift could be 
 bestowed, but even so it taxed the resources 
 of the force to improvise red blankets in the 
 required number. 
 
 However, the hospitals came to the rescue, 
 for it is a convention of the British army in 
 India that whereas the sound man in barracks 
 or in the field shall lie under a brown blanket, 
 the sick man in hospital shall lie under a red 
 one. It was easy to break through this con- 
 vention to a small extent, and by providing a 
 few sick men with surplus brown blankets for 
 once in a way to release a few red ones for 
 the adornment of vain Abor gams. 
 
 When these Pasi gams had sworn friend- 
 ship they were taken for a personally con- 
 
66 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 ducted tour round the camp. Besides the 
 riflemen with fixed bayonets who guarded 
 them, they were attended by persons who 
 expounded to them something of the meaning 
 of Western armaments, with a view to instill- 
 ing into them a more wholesome awe of their 
 neighbours. The effect produced on this 
 occasion was, I believe, not very marked. 
 They went away still admiring the naked 
 Naga and his spear more than our machine- 
 guns and dynamite. 
 
 It may be, however, that this notion of 
 instilling respect for ourselves among border 
 savages by means of such tours is worthy 
 of development on a larger scale. It is cer- 
 tainly true that a great deal of the misunder- 
 standing that exists between ourselves and 
 troublesome frontier tribes is due to their 
 utter ignorance of our real strength. A 
 typical instance of the frontier tribesman's 
 attitude is told about the gam of another Abor 
 village farther up the line. I cannot vouch 
 
PUNITIVE GLOBE-TROTTING 67 
 
 for the truth of the details, for the story 
 reached me through several mouths. But it 
 appears that this gam, whose village was 
 certainly the biggest of the little group to 
 which it belonged, came to visit our General 
 in a spirit of considerable condescension. He 
 made this quite clear by remarking that since 
 he was the biggest head-man in those parts, 
 and since he had heard that the General re- 
 presented a head-man in a similar position 
 elsewhere, he considered it not unseemly that 
 they two should strike up a friendship. 
 
 The frontier tribesman, of course, always 
 sees us at our weakest, for we have to over- 
 come gigantic difficulties of road-making, trans- 
 port, and supply before we can throw out the 
 smallest feeler into his territory, and our sub- 
 sequent victory over him is sometimes there- 
 fore not of the most signal kind. But when 
 that victory, such as it is, has been achieved, 
 a little of what one might call " punitive globe- 
 trotting," imposed as one of the terms of peace, 
 
68 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 might have a great effect upon our future 
 relations. Imagine a band of hostages handed 
 over to us at the close of hostilities for a 
 couple of years, and the chance thus afforded 
 of enlarging their political outlook. A dozen 
 Abor gams would, for instance, make excellent 
 subjects for " punitive globe-trotting." We 
 would start by a little general education of an 
 elementary kind. Having thus rendered them 
 receptive of larger notions, we would proceed 
 to "trot" them round the British Empire, 
 expound to them the big physical facts upon 
 which our empire is founded, and then send 
 them back to their corner in the mountains to 
 give a salutary account of what they had learnt 
 to their fellow-tribesmen. 
 
 After a few days at Pasighat enough sup- 
 plies had been accumulated to justify the 
 advance of the main column. Our marches 
 from the start had been short ones, and even 
 through the flat terai that divided Kobo 
 from Pasighat, a road-making party had often 
 
STOCKADES 69 
 
 had to proceed ahead of the column to break 
 down obstacles. But from Pasighat onwards 
 the progress was of necessity even slower, 
 each march shorter, and each halt more 
 protracted. 
 
 I had to remain at Pasighat and watch the 
 column move out. Being left behind is never 
 a pleasant sensation, and it needs some philo- 
 sophy to assure oneself that the fun is not 
 always at the front, and that the line of 
 communications, like the proverbial onlooker, 
 sometimes sees most of the game. 
 
 Our first duty was to set our house in order 
 in other words, to build our houses and 
 fortify our post. 
 
 The garrison of pioneers had soon con- 
 structed a very formidable little post. We 
 had a trench all round us with the jungle well 
 cleared in front of it, and at opposite corners 
 of the post were two stockaded bastions. 
 These stockades consisted of upright logs 
 about twelve feet high with sharp points, up 
 
70 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 and over which the Abor was unlikely to 
 climb, while the slopes of the trenches and a 
 fringe of the ground outside them were set 
 with pdnjis. The pdnji is a bit of thin 
 stick a foot or so long, fastened in the ground 
 and pointing with a sharp point in the direc- 
 tion from which the enemy is expected. It 
 has often proved a very useful entanglement, 
 especially in the dark, and in this land of trees 
 and bamboo groves the material was ready 
 to hand. The general scenic effect of a 
 pdnjid slope is suggestive of a tipsy-cake 
 set with split almonds. 
 
 The post was, as already explained, on the 
 site of a former chapri, but even so there 
 were stray trees here and there which had 
 to come down, and great was the labour of 
 felling them. There is much fun, however, 
 to be derived from the felling of a good tall 
 tree. I do not know in which part of the 
 operation Mr. Gladstone took his chief 
 pleasure. From the pictures in ancient 
 
TREE FELLING 71 
 
 Punches it was presumably in the fierce ex- 
 ertion of wielding the axe, a somewhat grim 
 and lonely pleasure. I should have liked to 
 see him instead taking his part with a gang 
 of Naga coolies. They used no felling-axes, 
 but each his ever-handy dao. After two 
 minutes' lightning work with the dao, the 
 Naga was ready for a comrade to relieve him, 
 while he himself squatted and watched 
 progress. A dozen men quickly relieving 
 each other would soon work through several 
 feet of tree-trunk. They would all know the 
 trick, taught in engineering manuals, of making 
 two incisions, one above the other, but on 
 opposite sides of the trunk, and of getting 
 the tree to fall eventually towards the lower 
 incision by hauling at it in that direction 
 with a rope. Actual ropes, long enough for 
 the purpose, were seldom available, but this 
 mattered little, for every tree of any import- 
 ance has its attendant myrmidons of rope-like 
 tendrils clinging to it. These will often bear 
 
72 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 a strain that would snap the best Manila rope 
 of equal calibre. The climax comes when 
 the haul on the rope has snapped the trunk 
 between the two incisions. Then there is a 
 pause, while men hold their breath. First 
 imperceptibly, then more quickly, the tree 
 starts falling in the direction designed. Then, 
 after a long crowded moment, it comes with a 
 glorious bang to the ground, and the ground 
 shakes, and a small unconscious cheer, like 
 the cheer of a crowd of firework-gazers, rises 
 from the whole gang. Mr. Gladstone would 
 assuredly have joined the Nagas in their 
 cheer ! 
 
 In places (other than Pasighat camp) 
 where trees grew close together the process 
 was not such plain-sailing. Those tendrils 
 that made such excellent ropes were in this 
 case a nuisance, for when you had severed 
 your tree at the bottom it still stood upright 
 and laughed at your efforts. The tendrils 
 kept it suspended from its neighbours, and 
 
TREES CROWDED AND SINGLE 73 
 
 you had therefore to set to work to fell one 
 or more of these. It was probably not till you 
 had felled several of them that you had a 
 sufficient weight of tree-trunks suspended to 
 break through the network of tendrils. But 
 when this at last happened the effect was even 
 more sensational, for the whole mass would 
 fall together, and you would be wise to run 
 for your life ; for you could not tell on this 
 occasion in which particular direction the mass 
 would prefer to fall. 
 
 Trees that now stood alone, after being used 
 to company, were a source of danger. It was 
 well to cut the whole clump down and leave 
 none standing if they were near to a vulner- 
 able spot. Such trees suddenly isolated are 
 top-heavy, and can no longer resist the wind 
 without protection from their fellows. It was 
 one such tree that, at Kobo, fell without warn- 
 ing on the leg of a warrant officer in the 
 ordnance department, and damaged it severely; 
 a very bad piece of luck which, however, did 
 
74 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 not prevent the victim from sticking to his 
 guns and seeing the expedition through. I am 
 told that at Kobo, during a sudden tornado 
 later in the expedition, the trees that were 
 not in close formation fell about like spillikins. 
 
 Fallen tree-trunks were removed in various 
 ways. At Kobo we had had the elephants 
 to help us, but here at Pasighat elephants were 
 taboo, for they offered too large a mark to 
 Abor missiles. Fifty Nagas would sometimes 
 try to raise a tree-trunk and fail, or lift it but 
 a few yards at a time. A better way was to 
 hack it into sections with daos, and put a 
 party on to each section to roll it away like 
 a big snowball. Perhaps the best way was 
 to leave it lying and let it gradually disappear 
 as fuel. If a few hundred men became de- 
 pendent on one tree for fuel with which to 
 cook their food, it did not take many days 
 before the tree disappeared. 
 
 In these days at Pasighat we built many 
 bdshas. There was a bdsha for the officers' 
 
A POST ABANDONED 75 
 
 mess, a bdsha for the post-office, a bdsha 
 for the telegraph office. The troops and 
 followers built lines for themselves, and a 
 fairly water-tight hospital, with beautiful beds 
 on changs, was soon in position. Large 
 platforms were erected to hold stores, and 
 each unit took delight in laying out its own 
 little model village in the space allotted to it. 
 But when at last all was nearly ready, a sudden 
 order came for such are the vicissitudes of 
 war that Pasighat was to be abandoned, and 
 the advanced post and depot removed six miles 
 onward to Janakmukh. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 Jinakmukh and its wild bananas Abor paths and mule roads 
 Gradients by water and by land Problems of road- 
 making. 
 
 IN two days we had abandoned Pasighat. The 
 stockades, the snug bdshas, the tipsy-cake 
 pdnjis were all left to crumble in the sun and 
 rain, and we had moved to Janakmukh. Here 
 we inherited the quarters recently built and 
 vacated by the main column, who had now 
 advanced to Ramidambang. This last name 
 seems to need a word of apology. The press 
 correspondent, I remember, regretted at the 
 time that it was suggestive of opdra bouffe, 
 but explained to his readers that the word in 
 Abor language meant the place where sports- 
 men collected the spoils of the chase. But it is 
 with Janakmukh not Ramidambang that we 
 are now dealing. 
 
jANAKMUKH 77 
 
 " Mukh " (with the " u " pronounced like the 
 "u" in the verb to "put" in the non-golfing 
 sense, and unlike the "u" in the golfers' 
 " putting") means the mouth of a river or 
 tributary. Hence Janakmukh meant the 
 mouth of the Janak. Till our troops reached 
 the spot there was nothing to mark it except 
 the mouth of the stream, and as a matter of 
 fact it was afterwards discovered that the 
 stream in question was not the Janak at all, but 
 that the Janak was some way farther on. This 
 did not matter. We had found, without too 
 great mental effort, a fairly pronounceable name 
 for our camp, and this was all we wanted. 
 
 I shall always have pleasant recollections of 
 Janakmukh. It is one of the prettiest spots I 
 have ever seen. The view up and down and 
 across the river on a fine day was just the blend 
 of green hill and blue water that most delights 
 the eye. Above us was a rapid and then a 
 wide reach of the Dihong, and below us was a 
 two-mile reach of perfect water upon which 
 
7 8 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 races might have been rowed. Immediately 
 opposite the post the current was swifter. Our 
 camp lay at the foot of a narrow valley dividing 
 two wooded spurs which jutted sheer above 
 the Dihong. Across the Dihong rose in layer 
 upon layer the hills of the Padam Abors. The 
 water came clear down the pseudo-Janak along- 
 side our camp and was pleasant to drink, 
 though the Dihong into which it flowed was 
 still muddy. We lived within earshot of the 
 roaring rapid above us. There was a sandy 
 beach in front of the post on to which the post 
 eventually overflowed when the river had 
 settled down to its normal winter level. 
 
 The original post, just above the beach, had 
 a few days before been just a wild banana 
 grove. This had been easier even to clear 
 than a grass chapri, for a single slash from a 
 dao will cleave the soft banana trunk in two 
 with little exertion. Moreover, the foliage of 
 the felled banana trees gave good material for 
 bdsha roofs, as has already been expounded. 
 
UNCOMFORTABLE BANANAS 79 
 
 The banana tree as a jungle companion has, 
 however, a few disadvantages. Its leaves as 
 they dry give out a rather sickly smell, and 
 the stump of the felled banana is a messy 
 object. It continues sobbing for ever. It 
 invites you to sit down on it or place things 
 on it, but everything that touches it comes 
 off dripping. The tree is, moreover, of a 
 rickety nature even at the best of times, and 
 a puff of wind may send it flopping at any 
 time across a neighbouring bdsha, to the dis- 
 comfort of the inmates. It was therefore not 
 surprising that we very soon had removed 
 the banana element altogether from Janak- 
 mukh. 
 
 There was more tree-felling to be done here 
 than at Pasighat, for we soon found that what 
 the place wanted was more sun on the days 
 when the sun happened to be shining. The 
 trees fringing the southern spur alongside 
 the camp blocked the sun. They grew very 
 much in clusters, and were tied together by 
 
8o ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 parasitic tendrils, so that it was seldom that 
 any one tree would fall by itself. But in a 
 few days of judicious clearing we had in- 
 creased our possible hours of sunshine by a 
 few hundred per cent. This was good for 
 everyone, for the weather was turning quite 
 cold, and coughs and colds and fevers and 
 dysentery were increasingly prevalent. 
 
 From a mile below Janakmukh to the far 
 front, where the foremost reconnoitring 
 parties at length came upon possible yak- 
 tracks, the problems of road-finding, road- 
 aligning, road-making, and road-repairing were 
 a constant anxiety. A mile below Janakmukh 
 the hilly country began, and thence onwards 
 there was hardly a level stretch of more than a 
 few hundred yards. There was still, as in the 
 terai, a thick jungle to contend with, and the 
 surface drainage of the rainfall was constantly 
 sweeping down the hillsides and across our 
 roads, sometimes wiping great pieces of them 
 out as soon as they had been aligned and 
 
ROADS 81 
 
 made. Throughout the whole of the cam- 
 paign it was seldom that the weather kept 
 fine for more than a few days at a time. 
 
 The Abor's notions of road-making were 
 excellent as far as his own needs went. 
 Possessed of capacious lungs and stout caloes 
 and little personal baggage, and moving as a 
 rule in small parties, he was never deterred 
 by the steepest route. His tracks, therefore, 
 ran as a rule over a mountain rather than 
 along its face, up and down the spurs rather 
 than in the valleys. He knew well that the 
 line of a " divide " makes the driest road, 
 and steered his course accordingly. But we, 
 though we travelled with what to most armies 
 would have seemed amazing lightness, could 
 not afford on our line of communication the 
 time and labour involved in constantly climbing 
 the steeper gradients. For however well the 
 average Englishman or Indian may climb, the 
 pace of a body of men is the pace of the worst 
 climber. The inevitable opening out, that 
 
82 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 even on the flat is the greatest drag on a long 
 column, increases always in proportion to the 
 steepness and extent of a climb. Moreover, 
 we aspired to taking our mule transport 
 eventually into the heart of the country (and 
 in the end succeeded in doing so). 
 
 We had therefore to circumvent the hills as 
 far as possible, even though our roads must 
 run across lines of intermittent waterfalls. 
 Even so, our flattest piece of road from 
 Janakmukh onwards was a veritable switch- 
 back. On the other hand, since we never 
 strayed far from the banks of the Dihong, 
 our aggregate ascent was very gradual. 
 
 It is indeed surprising, till one works the 
 sum out in cold arithmetic, how nearly level is 
 even the swiftest river. The Brahmaputra, for 
 instance, is a swift river, and it taxes powerful 
 engines to drive a steamer up the many 
 hundred miles that are covered before Dibru- 
 garh is reached. But in all that distance the 
 rise is but three hundred feet, so that the 
 
RIVER GRADIENTS 83 
 
 gradient of the river is barely one in five 
 thousand! Even in the thirty miles from 
 Kobo to Pasighat, where boats took days to 
 toil up a succession of rapids, the rise is but 
 two hundred feet, and this gives a gradient of 
 but one in eight hundred ! But even upon the 
 most carefully surveyed of express railway 
 lines we ignore gradients of less than one in 
 one hundred ! 
 
 These dry sums in arithmetic at any rate 
 help us to realise what a very long way it 
 must be by water from the Tsangpo near 
 Lhassa to the Brahmaputra in Assam. Even 
 though the undiscovered falls of the Tsangpo 
 may drop farther at one leap than any other 
 falls in the world, and the rapids in the higher 
 reaches be ever so swift and frequent, that 
 river must yet go through many tortuous 
 windings before it accomplishes a total fall of 
 twelve thousand feet ! The fall from Pasighat 
 to Kobo is, as our boat convoy knew to its 
 cost, fairly abrupt, but this rate must on the 
 
84 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 average be quadrupled if the distance to Kobo 
 by river from the ferry near Lhassa is to be 
 counted as less than five hundred miles. This 
 is nearly double the distance as the crow flies, 
 and so would involve an average deviation of 
 nearly sixty degrees from the main direction. 
 
 It was found very hard to decide what type 
 of road to build in Abor-land. There are, 
 roughly speaking, two types of hill-road. One 
 slopes outwards from the hillside and the other 
 inwards. The former drains off the rain-water 
 automatically, but tends to wear itself away in 
 the process. The other, if it is to keep from 
 getting waterlogged, needs a good masonry 
 drain along its inner side, punctuated by good 
 stone culverts or Irish bridges. The former 
 is the less elaborate type, and in some rainy 
 countries as, for instance, in Jamaica it is 
 generally chosen, even for carriage roads. The 
 other is the more finished type better ap- 
 proved, I believe, in engineering circles and 
 is usually chosen in India. It was natural, 
 
ROAD COMBERS 85 
 
 therefore, that we should begin with this type. 
 But the drawback was the lack of solid stone 
 with which to make the necessary drains. For 
 except near the beds of rivers the ground is 
 mostly soft soil, the product of a prolific and 
 ever-rotting vegetation. The nearest approach 
 to rock in some parts was a kind of Fuller's 
 earth, which on a dry day seemed hard and 
 serviceable, but in rainy weather turned into a 
 spongy pulp. In the last stages of the expedi- 
 tion the official opinion changed, and the last 
 roads built were of the kuchcha, outward 
 sloping kind. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 The Jhum of Ramidambang Jhums in general The 
 irrepressible forest. 
 
 WHILE we sat making Janakmukh commodious, 
 and laying up stores of provisions there, the 
 main column were pushing their way steadily 
 forward. They had found something of an 
 oasis at Ramidambang ; though little except 
 " paddy-straw " and dhan that was of prac- 
 tical use to our commissariat. The camp of 
 Ramidambang was situated in the middle of 
 one of the largest jhums in the country. 
 kjhum is a cultivated clearing in the jungle. 
 On the Ramidambang jhum stood many 
 acres of dhan (rice in the husk) that should 
 already have been harvested, and but for our 
 presence would have furnished the staple 
 food for many months of several hamlets in 
 the neighbourhood. This loss of the autumn 
 
MULES AND MILLET 87 
 
 crops was perhaps the hardest part of the 
 punishment inflicted on the Abors. 
 
 Side by side with rice, and often without 
 signs of any attempt to divide the different 
 kinds of crop, would be found standing certain 
 kinds of millet that were mostly used by the 
 Abors for making their wine or beer, which 
 they called Apong. The most conspicuous 
 of these millets was " Job's tears," which 
 grew to a great height. The straw of this 
 made very good fodder. I also tried feeding 
 mules on the grain of " Job's tears," but 
 they found eating it savour too much of a 
 conjuring trick ; for the grain is light and 
 partially hollow. As soon as they got their 
 teeth in it, it would seem to disappear, so 
 that they would look round them disap- 
 pointed. 
 
 In among the rice and millet on this and 
 other jhums cotton would also be found 
 growing. One big jhum that I knew of 
 was as much a cotton plantation as anything 
 
88 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 else. But to us the most attractive feature 
 of Ramidambang was the roots. By grubbing 
 at random in among the millet, the rice, and 
 the cotton, you came upon yams and sweet 
 potatoes, and these were appreciated by many, 
 and pronounced by the medical faculty to be 
 highly anti-scorbutic. A larger kind of pump- 
 kin, very red inside, was also found in con- 
 siderable quantities. One day I found also 
 a few chillie shrubs covered with chillies still 
 mostly green. I picked a haversack-full, and 
 my babu the fire-eater to whom I presented 
 them pronounced them excellent. 
 
 Of all untidy, listless sorts of farming this 
 of the Abors seems most to merit condem- 
 nation. Not only did they throw different 
 kinds of seed at random into the ground, 
 without thought of the hopeless tangle that 
 would ensue, but they never troubled to check 
 the growth of weeds. Even in the thickest 
 plots of dhan there were probably more 
 weeds standing than stalks of dhan. When 
 
RUDE CULTIVATION 89 
 
 first they cleared \hzjkum they never troubled 
 to remove the tree-trunks or the tree-stumps. 
 The stumps in this climate seldom died, so 
 that they went on drawing wasteful nourish- 
 ment from the ground. Meanwhile, the mas- 
 sive tree-trunks lying about at all angles 
 turned the whole jhum into a gigantic jig-saw 
 puzzle. When these tree-trunks lay specially 
 thick, the best way to get from one spot 
 to another was to choose a zigzag course 
 along them, and never put foot to the ground, 
 otherwise you were constantly climbing over 
 the breast-high tree-trunks when you might 
 have been running comfortably along them. 
 
 This prodigal use of the ground was prob- 
 ably not so culpable as it seems. For this 
 was a country in which a very little scratching 
 of the ground was necessary to make things 
 grow. Clearing not ploughing, nor manur- 
 ing, nor weeding was the really important 
 process. It is usual for the Abor, after using 
 a jhum for a few years in succession, and 
 
90 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 so wearing out the soil somewhat, either to 
 make a special effort and clear a fresh jhum 
 out of virgin forest, or to resort to a still 
 oldefj&um that has been lying fallow for 
 a long time. The latter will, of course, by 
 this time be a fair specimen of " secondary 
 jungle," and need almost as much clearing 
 as the brand-new jhum. It was interesting, 
 when strolling over the hills and through the 
 jungle, to come upon places where the trees 
 were younger and less clogged with tendrils, 
 and to realise that this was just a jhum 
 temporarily abandoned a few years ago ; or 
 to come upon a nice little plantation of shrubs 
 a foot or more high growing up among tall 
 grasses, and to realise that this was the 
 jhum of a year ago. 
 
 The appearance of an abandoned jhum in 
 a distant view was very deceptive. Facing 
 us at Janakmukh was a hill that rose in 
 almost regular terraces to a height of some 
 thousand feet ten miles away. Each terrace 
 
THE IRREPRESSIBLE FOREST 91 
 
 had probably been a jhum once, for there 
 were villages nestling in the valleys around. 
 Some of these terraces appeared from this 
 distance as masses of delicate mauve. This 
 was because they had reverted, not into jungle, 
 but mainly into chapris of tall elephant 
 grass, which was then flowering with a pink 
 flower. Other terraces, again, looked in the 
 distance, by contrast with the deep green of 
 the forest-clad slopes alongside of them, as 
 if they were covered with the shortest of 
 green turf. They were really a carpet of 
 young trees at least two feet high. 
 
 The wonderful fertility of the country due, 
 I suppose, to the rain and the rank soil was 
 brought home to me rather forcibly. A forest 
 officer visited us, and he and I one day 
 travelled a march together. He told me a 
 great deal about the training for his profes- 
 sion, and of the course which he had had to 
 go through in the Black Forest under German 
 experts in forestry. 
 
92 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 "Such rot it all was," he added; "there I 
 was, year in and year out, learning to keep 
 trees alive. And here I am, stationed in a 
 part of the world where the damned things 
 won't die." 
 
 These trees have certainly a wonderful hold 
 upon life. Cut them down, and the stumps 
 will grow. " Ring" them, and they will seem 
 to have had a tonic. Leave the felled trunk 
 hanging horizontally to the stump by a few 
 shreds of bark and splinter, and the tree 
 will take to fifty years of horizontal growth 
 as to a pleasant change. 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 Sirpo River and the Rengings A discourse on Xbor warfare 
 as exemplified at Kikar Monying A few other scraps 
 "The battle of Jdnakmukh." 
 
 THE next move onwards was to Sirpo River. 
 The route first ran upwards from Ramidam- 
 bang through a chapri and thence through 
 thick forest, reaching a "col " two thousand 
 feet high. It then descended into a most 
 dismal overgrown and sodden valley, down 
 which the Sirpo, as merry as any Scotch burn, 
 ran to meet the Dihong, which now lay a few 
 miles to the right flank. This was, perhaps, 
 the wettest piece of jungle in the whole country, 
 and the worst stretch for road-making. Little 
 better was the face of the next hill, up which 
 the path wound into Renging camp three 
 miles distant. 
 
 93 
 
94 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 The name " Renging " was a little vague, 
 for not only did we use it eventually for this 
 camp, but it was the name of a village which 
 from force of circumstances was moved more 
 than once. The original Renging lay at one 
 corner of the jhum of Ramidambang, but in 
 the previous spring, shortly after the outrages 
 committed by the Abors, this village had been 
 destroyed by a flying column of Military 
 Police operating from Balek. The inhabitants 
 had then fled farther into the mountains, and 
 built themselves a temporary village not far 
 from our Renging camp. Latterly, when 
 peace was made, they were allowed to return 
 towards Ramidambang and choose a new site 
 for their village, not far from the old site, and 
 that presumably will be the Renging of the 
 future. 
 
 It was after the advance of the main force 
 from Sirpo River that the Abors began to 
 show some fight. Their prowess, however, lay 
 as a rule not in attacking in force nor in hold- 
 
WARFARE 95 
 
 ing a position, but in hiding in small parties 
 behind trees, usually in some depression of the 
 ground, and potting upwards at their enemy 
 with poisoned arrows. When they did make 
 a stand they began by lying quiet in a carefully 
 prepared stockade to watch the effect of their 
 booby-traps and stone -shoots. These will 
 have been previously erected with immense 
 labour over the route along which they ex- 
 pected the enemy to come. It should be added 
 that they seemed generally to expect him to 
 make a frontal attack. Therefore if the stone- 
 shoots were circumvented or let loose upon 
 nothing by our own flanking parties, and so 
 rendered innocuous, it seemed high time for 
 the Abors to decamp, and either to take up 
 a position elsewhere or to disperse. 
 
 It is very difficult to deal adequately with 
 this type of enemy. He does not put up a 
 good fight and let you have troops at him, 
 but he sets great store by such " back-hander " 
 casualties as he may be able to inflict. It is 
 
96 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 therefore necessary to be very watchful against 
 the traps which he may set, and the small 
 spasmodic pounces which he may make from 
 the jungle. Meanwhile, it is necessary to get 
 at him somehow, in order to make an ade- 
 quate "bag." 
 
 I am speaking very diffidently, for I was not 
 present at any of the recognised engagements ; 
 but it seems that throughout the expedition the 
 tactics pursued, and the only tactics possible, 
 were rather those of big-game hunting than of 
 human warfare. To avoid a booby-trap by 
 means of a flank attack was of course pure 
 tactics of the dignified human sort, but apart 
 from a few such human details, the main 
 objects in fighting Abors were to take care 
 that your quarry did not round on you un- 
 awares, but to stalk him yourself so closely 
 and so cunningly that you got a good shot 
 into him before he slunk away. 
 
 A typical instance was the action of Kikar 
 Monying, in which the fighting culminated 
 
A SKIRMISHING 'STALK' 97 
 
 some weeks later. 1 The quarry was located 
 in its lair in the stockade. The stalk was pre- 
 pared for the night, and was to be complete at 
 dawn. One party of stalkers crept through 
 the jungle on the steep slope to the left. 
 Another party, after achieving a crossing on 
 a laboriously constructed raft, approached the 
 position from the other side of the river. The 
 central and main party crawled forwards in 
 a direct line. Bayonets were kept fixed 
 throughout the advance, and such other pre- 
 cautions taken as seems necessary against 
 sudden isolated assaults from out the blind 
 jungle. These, though very complete, did not 
 prevent a couple of Gurkhas from being cut 
 up stealthily during the advance. Long after 
 dawn had broken, and while the three parties 
 waited in position, the stalker's ever-recurring 
 dilemma confronted our force 
 
 4 'Shall I shoot now and stand a greater 
 
 1 For a rough sketch of this action, copied from a sketch by 
 an eye-witness, vide Appendix II. 
 
 G 
 
98 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 chance of missing, or shall I creep nearer 
 and run a greater chance of the quarry 
 getting away before I can fire my shot ? " 
 
 Who ever answers this question with con- 
 fidence ? And what big-game hunter or 
 other sportsman shall say what was the 
 exactly correct moment for opening fire on 
 this occasion that is to say, the moment 
 conducive to the biggest bag ? 
 
 Suffice it to say that the moment chosen 
 resulted in a bag of Abors sufficient for the 
 purposes of punishment and persuasion. For 
 from this moment opposition practically 
 ceased, and it was not many days later that 
 the head-men of the hostile villages began 
 to come in and sue for peace. It was even 
 said that they would have come in sooner 
 had they not required an interval in which 
 to recover from the nervous breakdown re- 
 sulting from the roar of the maxims on that 
 morning. 
 
 "What a despicable kind of warfare it 
 
WAR-SNOBBERY 99 
 
 must all have been ! " may be the reader's 
 parting comment. But perhaps he should 
 remember that a heterogeneous empire can- 
 not be guarded without heterogeneous wars. 
 We who have drawn so many creeds under 
 our flag need to have a catholic taste even 
 in warfare. 
 
 There is, however, a kind of technical 
 snobbishness to be found at the back of 
 certain tacticians' minds. What they delight 
 in calling La grande giierre, as waged on 
 spacious European terrains, is the only sort 
 of war that they consider at all " high-class." 
 They are half-ashamed of our army, because 
 as a rule it is more often engaged in that 
 suburban kind of fighting, called technically 
 the " small war." But fighting the arboreal 
 savage with his bow and arrow is lower 
 down still in this social scale of warfare than 
 the suburban or " small war" against well- 
 armed frontier tribes. It savours of the very 
 limit of the East End. But, even so, it 
 
ioo ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 must be recognised as war, and as calling 
 for as many warlike qualities as does La 
 grande guerre. It has its own risks, its own 
 hardships, and its own problems. 
 
 While the Abors were active ahead of us, 
 we at Janakmukh were told to be careful. 
 The narrow jungle path recently blazed by 
 us between Janakmukh and Balek proved 
 for the time being to be a haunt for hostile 
 Abors ; and armed parties of ourselves, mov- 
 ing along these five miles, might at any time 
 be running the gauntlet of poisoned arrows 
 shot from behind trees. One small party 
 of Gurkhas thus attacked fired their rifles 
 into the jungle, thought they had missed, 
 pursued without effect, and came back to 
 Janakmukh disconsolate. But months after, 
 when relations with the Abors were peaceful, 
 a garrulous gam told us the names of the 
 Abors who had been hit that day, of the 
 
UNDISCLOSED LOSSES 101 
 
 recovery of some from their wounds, and of 
 the death of another. 
 
 It was their knack of disappearing, wounded 
 or dying, into the jungle, and leaving no trace, 
 except perhaps a little blood, that made it 
 so hard to count the casualties inflicted by 
 us on the Abors. These were probably, in the 
 best opinions, far more numerous than it would 
 have been safe to allow for in official returns. 
 It is stated that their ignorance of surgery and 
 their extremely dirty habits tended to wounds 
 originally slight becoming eventually fatal. I 
 know of a case of a man gored by a wild 
 animal whose friends doctored him by stuffing 
 parts of a fresh-killed chicken, feathers and 
 all, into the wound. A man with a .303 inch 
 bullet in him will often run a long way before 
 he drops, and it needs a very few yards of 
 Abor jungle to hide a man effectually from 
 his pursuers. If he found he was leaving a 
 trail of blood, he was known sometimes de- 
 liberately to have taken the precaution of 
 
102 ON THE TRACK OF. THE ABOR 
 
 staunching the wound as he ran with a leaf 
 or any substance handy, apparently not so 
 much in order to prevent further loss of 
 blood as to evade pursuit. 
 
 During these somewhat stirring times we 
 went to bed one night at Janakmukh in 
 normal frames of mind. The river was still 
 high, and the boat convoy had succeeded that 
 day, for the third and last time, in reaching 
 Janakmukh, instead of stopping at Pasighat. 
 By deepening a channel here and there a way 
 had been found for the boats up a back-water 
 that avoided the almost impassable rapid just 
 above Pasighat. (A week or two later our 
 deepened channels and their massive walls 
 stood high and dry to mock us.) 
 
 There were thus on that night more lives 
 to protect than usual, but the post was well 
 guarded. Sentries gazed out over pdnjis up 
 the pseudo-Janak valley, other sentries gazed 
 up the Dihong, and pickets sat on the summits 
 of a miniature range of mountains that over- 
 
A NIGHT ALARM 103 
 
 looked the rear of the camp. Those not on 
 guard were all sleeping peacefully when shots 
 began to be fired. The night alarm sounded, 
 and a maxim began to play. The noise was 
 terrific, and as is bound to happen on such 
 occasions, no one could tell what it was all 
 about. Dressed in melodramatic combina- 
 tions of pyjamas and Sam Browne belts we 
 appeared, wherever the orders for night alarms 
 required us to appear, and awaited events. 
 The officer commanding the post had got the 
 maxim and the other noises quiet at last, and 
 it was then possible to hear a friend speak, 
 and to speculate on the nature of the attack, 
 the direction whence it was being made, the 
 probable strength of the enemy, and the 
 equally interesting question whether the attack 
 was being or had been made at all. 
 
 At length the evidence for the attack was 
 reduced to a young sentry's statement that he 
 had heard a movement as of footfalls on the 
 far slope of one of our miniature mountains. 
 
104 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 He owned that the same noise might have 
 been made in many other ways. This being 
 the case, we were allowed to go grumbling 
 back to bed. 
 
 The boatmen of the boat convoy perhaps 
 felt this relief most. They had been sleeping 
 on the beach by their boats, and being, as 
 before explained, though brave boatmen yet 
 eminently men of peace, had been very much 
 shocked by this display of military violence in 
 their vicinity. They had rushed as one man 
 for their boats, and were for embarking there 
 and then for their less tumultuous homes in 
 Assam. But the " Pirate " was down on the 
 beach in his pyjamas in time to restrain them, 
 and to tuck them up again in their beds. 
 
 "The battle of Janakmukh" soon ceased 
 to be accounted of importance. The young 
 sentry's tale of footfalls on the hillside, the 
 expenditure of many rounds of ammunition 
 into the black night, and our rude disturbance 
 from our dreams had for long been but a stale 
 
A REALITY 105 
 
 laughing-stock, when the same garrulous gam 
 above mentioned told us one day that the 
 night attack, so far as it had proceeded, had 
 been a real one. The maxims with their 
 prompt answer to the first advance had cowed 
 the Abors and they had slunk ignominiously 
 away. 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 " Coolie-col " Renging to Rotung Agar Kalek and 
 Mount Bapu. 
 
 AN object-lesson on the savage alertness of the 
 Abor when in the vantage-ground of thick 
 jungle, and of the consequent need of watchful- 
 ness on our part, was taught by the fate of two 
 telegraph coolies. They left the Sirpo River 
 camp one morning against orders, intending 
 to return to Janakmukh to recover some kit. 
 Close to the " col " that divided the slopes 
 above Ramidambang from the .valley of the 
 Sirpo, they were shot at with poisoned arrows 
 and mortally wounded. 
 
 The poison in the Abor's arrows was gener- 
 ally croton, and the effects of it are very pain- 
 ful even when not fatal. Some doubt exists 
 whether aconite (the poison obtained from the 
 plant of that name and found in abundance in 
 
 106 
 
POISONED ARROWS 107 
 
 the higher altitudes near Tibet) was ever used 
 against us by the Abors. Certainly the poison 
 used in this and some other well-tested cases 
 was croton. In certain other cases the arrow 
 was found to have been poisoned by the simple 
 method of rubbing its point with a piece of 
 putrid flesh. 
 
 The doctor attending one of these coolies 
 fell ill immediately afterwards, and it was 
 thought that he had poisoned himself with 
 croton while extracting the poisoned barb from 
 his patient's leg. As his illness developed, 
 however, he was found instead to be suffering 
 from just one of the baffling and malignant 
 forms of malaria with which this country is 
 infested. 
 
 Apart from its unfortunate ending, the esca- 
 pade of these coolies was interesting to some 
 people for the part it played in the evolution 
 of a place-name. This " col " was a convenient 
 meeting- place for convoys between Janakmukh 
 and Renging. An officer, telegraphing from 
 
io8 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 our camp to the other to say where the next 
 day's convoy should meet, at first found no 
 better way of describing the spot than " Col, 
 where telegraph coolies killed." The follow- 
 ing day, to shorten the wording, the name ran : 
 "Telegraph-Coolie-col." The word "tele- 
 graph " next seemed unnecessary, and subse- 
 quently to the end of the expedition the name 
 of the spot was " Coolie-col." 
 
 As already described, the route left the Sirpo 
 River and rose another thousand feet to the 
 camp of Renging. This place, except for the 
 presence of water, was as unfitted by nature 
 for a camp as it well could be, for it lay right 
 on the side of a steep ridge. At a distance, it 
 reminded one of a collection of hamlets in 
 some other part of the Himalaya, where the 
 ground is cultivated in small terraces. For 
 terraces were made all down the slope to 
 accommodate the various bdshas. The only 
 level spots were the floors of these bdshas, and 
 these were carved out of the hillside. Any- 
 
THE ROAD TO ROTUNG 109 
 
 one whose duties compelled him to move 
 much about that camp got his meed of exer- 
 cise without leaving it. 
 
 Renging stood two thousand feet high, 
 being almost the same height as " Coolie-col." 
 From Renging to the next camp at Rotung 
 the road was still more of a switchback. You 
 climbed up five hundred feet, then followed 
 a narrow but fairly level ridge for a mile or 
 two, then dropped quickly down more than 
 a thousand feet, crossed a bubbling brook, 
 and immediately rose up another very steep 
 thousand feet to what came to be known as 
 the " Razor Edge." The first descents that 
 were made from the " Razor Edge " were down 
 an almost precipitous scarp of loose shale, but 
 afterwards the road was diverted. Having 
 dropped down this scarp you descended 
 gradually for a mile or two, then rose abruptly 
 again, but at length descended gradually into 
 the pleasantest spot in all Abor-land, the plain 
 of Rotung. 
 
no ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 The original advance to Rotung from Ren- 
 ging was not accomplished without opposition. 
 A good many stone-shoots had to be disposed 
 of ; a lot of arrows flew about, and a stockade 
 in one of the valleys the Agar valley had 
 to be taken. It was on this occasion that one 
 of the staff was clean bowled over by a boulder 
 from a shoot, that there were many hand-to- 
 hand tussles, and that the General's hand was 
 grazed by an arrow. Certain portions of the 
 force not present at the engagement sent their 
 congratulations by telegram to the general 
 staff on the success of the day's work. A 
 delightful telegram from the base, worded 
 hurriedly by a well-meaning officer, ran : 
 11 Hearty congratulations on taking of Rotung, 
 but much regret G.O.C.'s narrow escape." 
 
 The carriers on march in rear of the main 
 column must have had a very poor time on 
 the day following. They reached camp in 
 the early hours of the morning, having had 
 to start descending the above-mentioned scarp 
 
AN AMBIGUOUS TELEGRAM in 
 
 well after darkness had set in. The ordinary 
 man, more or less unencumbered, had sat 
 down and slid, and perhaps thought it rather 
 fun, but the carrier with a big weight on his 
 back impeding his movements could not let 
 himself go. The descent of that little bit of 
 hill in the dark by a thousand or so of carriers 
 therefore took many hours, and the last man 
 to arrive at Rotung had taken twenty-one 
 hours over the whole march. 
 
 Rotung was found deserted and already 
 demolished by the Abors themselves. What 
 may be called "the plain of Rotung" was 
 really one huge natural terrace on the side of 
 the hill. Above it steep jhums sloped upwards 
 for several thousand feet, and below it a steep 
 wooded slope ran down eight hundred feet 
 or so to the Dihong. Our route had not 
 touched the Dihong since it left it just above 
 Jdnakmukh. A bend of the river had thus 
 been avoided, but many zigzags up and down 
 steep khuds had been encountered instead. 
 
ii2 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 There was, however, often no choice in these 
 matters ; for, as on this occasion, the river- 
 bank might for many miles be so precipitous 
 that a detour from it was imperative. 
 
 There was no attempt here or elsewhere 
 to level the jhums into terraces. That branch 
 of the hillman's agriculture was unknown in 
 Abor-land, but rice in this country seems to 
 grow as well at an angle as on the flat. The 
 jhums extended for many miles on the hillside, 
 and there seemed to be much more cultivation 
 here than lower down the valley. Even where 
 the grain had been removed a high rice-stubble 
 had been left, which in the distance still gave 
 the appearance of a standing crop. 
 
 Up among these hilly jhums, but more to 
 the front, lay the village of Kalek, which was 
 soon abandoned by its inhabitants. It was 
 an important village, for it lay upon the upper 
 road from Assam to Rotung. This road passes 
 through Balek, rises nearly to six thousand 
 feet on the face of Mount Bapu, and then 
 
FRUITLESS STOCKADES 113 
 
 falls to Kalek and to Rotung, which is well 
 under two thousand feet. It was along this 
 road that the Abors originally expected us 
 to come, but the stockades, entanglements, and 
 booby-traps that they had erected along it had 
 never been used against us. But it seemed 
 to some officers who subsequently investigated 
 them, that they were more formidable than 
 those which the Abors erected in greater haste 
 when they realised at the eleventh hour in 
 which direction we were really coming. 
 
 Mount Bapu, six thousand and two hundred 
 feet high, lying, as the crow flies, about half- 
 way between Balek and Rotung, gives a con- 
 trasting view of Assam on the one hand and 
 the heart of the Abor country on the other. 
 I went to the top of the mountain one day, 
 quite late in the campaign. My headquarters 
 were at Pasighat at the time, so that I had 
 a long day's walk. At Balek I was provided 
 with breakfast and a fresh escort of three 
 
 Gurkha military police. It was a pleasant 
 
 H 
 
ii4 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 walk. We climbed first through a straggling 
 village on a spur above Balek (where the 
 village maidens were dancing to a pretty 
 chaunt the wedding dance in honour of one of 
 their number), then wound gradually upwards 
 through thick jungle along a mountain stream. 
 We passed the remains of first one camp of 
 bdshas and then of another. These had been 
 occupied by parties who had gone out months 
 before to clear the road. They had had not 
 only to cut down jungle, but to demolish the 
 stone shoots erected for our reception, and 
 tear away wide entanglements of tree-trunks. 
 The nearness of the two camps showed how 
 great had been the labour involved in the 
 clearing, for they were barely two miles apart. 
 Beyond the second of these two camps the 
 climb suddenly stiffened, and we went up for 
 some way literally at a gradient of one in two. 
 But either the Abor or the Sikh pioneer here 
 had made things easier for us by turning the 
 track up this steep bit into a regular staircase. 
 
MOUNT BAPU 115 
 
 Each step had a tread and a rise of equal 
 dimensions, and the edge of each tread had 
 a neat little beading of wood to keep it from 
 wearing away. Going upstairs always seems 
 such an easy way of climbing, but only because, 
 even in the case of the highest of cathedral 
 spires, we never climb more than a few hundred 
 feet at a time. When the staircase rises for 
 more than a thousand feet without a " landing," 
 the succession of flat treads ceases to be 
 luxurious. 
 
 Two of the three Gurkhas were not in great 
 fettle, and lagged behind. I told them to keep 
 together and go as they pleased, while the 
 third Gurkha and I pushed on together. 
 These were easy days of peace, and two men 
 together could look after themselves. We 
 went on and on, and yet saw nothing that 
 seemed like the top of Bapu, and at last we 
 seemed even to be going downhill. The 
 Gurkha then informed me cheerfully that he 
 really did not know the way, whereas I had 
 
n6 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 all the time been regarding him as my guide. 
 One always has a childish desire not to be 
 baulked from reaching the top of a hill, and 
 I was feeling as childish as ever in this respect. 
 But when the missing summit is only a small 
 clearing in the jungle, and cannot be seen 
 from the dense slopes beneath it, and can only 
 be guessed at by the general configuration 
 of those slopes, the search for it becomes 
 difficult. 
 
 At length we met a small party of Abors. 
 We promptly kidnapped one, and told him to 
 take us to the top. It was the Gurkha who 
 did the talking. He knew no more Abor than 
 I did, but showed real genius in making his 
 meaning clear. He first imitated the cutting 
 down of a tree with a dao by jerking his 
 hand many times horizontally in the air. He 
 then shaped his hands into imaginary field- 
 glasses, and holding them earnestly to his 
 eyes scanned the horizon. The Abor laughed, 
 grunted, and proceeded to lead us to the top. 
 
A GUIDE TO THE TOP 117 
 
 He took us up from the path and backwards 
 through the jungle. We had a good mile of 
 struggling through thorn bushes and creepers 
 before we came suddenly upon the clearing. 
 There, in the middle of it, stood a cairn, not 
 of stones but of logs, with a sort of Christian 
 cross erected in the middle of it, and decorated 
 with branches at the top. There were old 
 bully-beef tins lying about, suggestive of the 
 ordinary tripper's picnic-resort, and other relics 
 of the survey party who had spent many 
 days there, connecting by "triangulation" and 
 such methods the known points in Assam with 
 the unknown points in all other directions. 
 The other two Gurkhas, who had left the 
 Kalek road at the right point and followed 
 a small pagdandi cut by our troops to the 
 top, had arrived there five minutes before us, 
 and were grinning hugely at having stolen a 
 march upon us after all. 
 
 It was a dull day, but the clouds were high 
 enough for us to see the hills of Eastern Assam 
 
n8 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 and the snow-peaks of Southern China, and, 
 veering round in the opposite direction, to 
 trace the Dihong upwards towards Tibet, as 
 bits of it, like bits of green ribbon, showed 
 clear between the folds of the hills. One could 
 see where it took the long bend to the east 
 that had hitherto been unsuspected, and had 
 put out our calculations as to its length a 
 hundred miles or so. It seemed a very little 
 way from the top of Mount Bapu to the valleys 
 where our reconnoitring parties, after many 
 days' march from our foremost post, were still 
 toiling after the unknown. 
 
 A run down the hill and a tramp down the 
 valley soon brought me back to Balek, where 
 a friendly garrison fed me with a gorgeous 
 tea, and sent me on my way through the 
 five miles of sultry jungle that stretched to 
 Pasighat. I was of course called up on the 
 telephone before I had finished my bath, and 
 the strenuous evening's work of a post com- 
 mandant on the line of communication soon 
 
A COMMANDANTS DUTIES 119 
 
 began : So many troops and so much baggage 
 for to-morrow's convoy A much -needed 
 package gone wrong here, and an urgent 
 demand for life's necessaries there A breach 
 in the road so many miles away A delinquent 
 waiting patiently in the quarterguard to be 
 flogged A report for signature showing the 
 week's percentage of local sick to two places 
 of decimals. 
 
CHAPTER XIII 
 
 Kikar Monying and some uses of telegraphy Puak and 
 Babuk Junction with the Ledum column Taking of 
 Kebong Peace-making at Yambung. 
 
 I MENTIONED the action of Kikar Monying 
 some pages back, thus breaking through the 
 proper order of events so that I might quote 
 what seemed the most typical example of Abor 
 warfare. It was some time after the taking 
 of Rotung that this action took place, and Kikar 
 Monying itself, where the Abors erected their 
 big stockade and made their last stand, was 
 some miles beyond Rotung, on the way to 
 Kebong. It was a well-chosen position, being 
 at the head of a defile, with overhanging pre- 
 cipices on one side and the Dihong on the 
 other ; a place which but for modern firearms 
 might have been circumvented but hardly 
 rushed ; a grand place for a second Marathon 
 
A BATTLEFIELD 121 
 
 and dogged resistance against odds, but rather 
 wasted on the slim Abor. 
 
 This is not a military text-book, and no one 
 will ever use these pages in order to "get up " 
 the campaign, therefore I will be forgiven for 
 not elaborating the brief account of the action 
 already given, more especially as I did not 
 take personal part in it, and only visited the 
 spot for the first time a few weeks later. 
 Kikar Monying was then of course shorn 
 of most of its glory, the site of the stockade 
 appearing then but as a narrow stone embank- 
 ment, and all (< booby-traps " and such-like 
 machinations having vanished. My com- 
 panion and I did, however, find in the sand 
 in front of the former stockade a few neat 
 little Abor pdnjis. They were very sharp 
 indeed, and were set in holes to catch the 
 enemy as he advanced by night. I have 
 kept one or two of these particular pdnjis 
 among my curios. 
 
 As a matter of fact, during the last phase 
 
122 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 of the fight a most minute and detailed 
 description of it was reaching me continuously. 
 I was at Janakmukh at the time. We were 
 doing little that day, and into our mess in 
 the course of the morning there came at in- 
 tervals a telegraph-sergeant with the latest 
 pieces of information. A field-telephone had 
 been extended from Rotung to the scene of 
 action, with a sergeant in charge of it at 
 the business end. The latter kept sending his 
 friends down the line the latest bits of news 
 news that thrilled us through and through, 
 even at Janakmukh. Armageddon was no- 
 where. The Abors lay dead in their thou- 
 sands, and the Maxims were still dealing death 
 into their huddled masses as they lay in their 
 stockade penned in and bombarded from all 
 directions. After a little legitimate gloating, 
 we even began to feel a little sorry for the 
 Abors. Very sheepish and shamefaced was 
 our telegraph - sergeant when, some hours 
 later, he came to the post commandant with 
 
TELEGRAPHY AT PLAY 123 
 
 the official report of the engagement's results, 
 and told us how all that morning he had been 
 having his leg vilely pulled by his pal up the 
 line. 
 
 Much cheery wit scintillated from time to 
 time up and down that telegraph line. When 
 the operators were not busy with official work, 
 the telephone was for ever humming between 
 post and post, " Rotung " jeering at " Pasi," 
 "Janak" calling up Kobo in military terms 
 of endearment. 
 
 An officer once told me how he went one 
 day to ring up someone, and taking up the 
 receiver in a hurry surprised a concert. The 
 song was something rousing and with a 
 rattling chorus. The soloist, some twenty 
 miles away, was singing of love or war at 
 the top of his voice. When the verse was 
 over the chorus joined in, both base and front 
 and all the posts between contributing their 
 shares of noise along these many miles of 
 hard-worked wire. 
 
i2 4 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 The night after the taking of Kikar Mony- 
 ing must have been spent in great discomfort 
 by the troops engaged. The place where they 
 bivouacked damp, constricted, and 6tts&a-less 
 looked very uninviting when I saw it later. 
 They soon, however, advanced to Puak, where 
 a good camp was made, and the force halted 
 awhile. Not far from Puak was the village 
 of Babuk, high up on a spur, with sloping 
 jhums above it. The village was deserted ; 
 and deserted too was the village leper, who 
 lived in a hut by himself at a distance from 
 the village. He was not the first derelict 
 that the Abors had thrown in our way. A 
 toothless old hag, picked up near Rotung, 
 lived for many weeks in the quarterguard 
 at Rotung at our expense. She had been 
 abandoned by her own people, and so thrown 
 upon our mercy. She throve in the Rotung 
 quarterguard on Indian rations, and grew hale 
 and garrulous. 
 
 The flanking column that had left Kobo for 
 
THE FLANKING COLUMN 125 
 
 Ledum at the same time that the main column 
 left for Pasighat now joined the latter at 
 Rotung. It had operated all this time upon 
 the left flank, and latterly had concentrated in 
 a place called Mishing. Here it left a tempo- 
 rary garrison of military police, who stayed 
 there for some months longer, not so much to 
 continue protecting our flank as to keep the 
 villages round Mishing at peace with one 
 another, and protect the more peaceful from 
 the more truculent. The doings of this flank- 
 ing column are of course " another story," and 
 no attempt can be made to tell it adequately 
 here. They had, it seems, on the whole a 
 very rough time. The ground that they first 
 went through was very swampy, and their 
 weather perhaps even worse than our own, 
 and they suffered very much for a time 
 from fever and dysentery. A very fine officer 
 of theirs died from pneumonia. This was 
 the most regretted casualty in the whole 
 expedition. 
 
126 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 In one particular camp they encountered 
 a particular germ which gave many of them 
 a kind of fever never known before to medical 
 science. It claimed no kinship to the germs 
 either of malaria, typhoid, or para-typhoid. 
 The only thing ascertained definitely about it 
 was that it was more virulent than the equally 
 elusive germs of the "ten days' fever" and 
 "three days' fever" so common in India. 
 The victims had therefore all to be returned 
 officially as suffering from "pyrexia of uncertain 
 origin." 
 
 This name was repeated in the reports made 
 to the War Office at home for the benefit of 
 some of the patients' relations. The parent 
 of one patient was, I am told, very angry 
 at the insinuation which he considered the 
 diagnosis to convey. 
 
 "It sounds," he is said to have told the War 
 Office, "as if my boy had been up to mischief 
 somewhere. But it is fever that he has been 
 having, and not pyrexia or anything else. 
 
FEVER AND TERMINOLOGY 127 
 
 And if you want to know the origin, I can tell 
 you, for he has been on the Abor expedition 
 the whole time." 
 
 The Ledum-Mishing column had its fair 
 share of fighting as well as fever. In fact 
 they drew first blood, and had had their scraps 
 with the enemy, and rushed stockades, while 
 the main column were still finding their enemy 
 hopelessly elusive. A considerable portion 
 of the total bag of Abor casualties belongs 
 to the Ledum column. 
 
 After the Mishing and main columns had 
 joined forces and Kikar Monying had been 
 taken, the main objective of Kebong still 
 remained intact. This village lay six miles 
 beyond Puak, up in the hills above the river. 
 Its capture, however, must have seemed some- 
 what of an anticlimax, for when our troops 
 arrived the village was found deserted. 
 
 I once met an American who talked proudly 
 to me of his indigenous skunk, and described 
 its stench as the animal's " main weapon of 
 
128 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 offence." Something of the same power might, 
 from all accounts, have been claimed for the 
 village of Kebong, for when our troops came and 
 saw and conquered it, they yet found the place 
 stank so horribly, that they fled down the hill 
 and took up their quarters out of nose-shot at 
 Yambung, near the banks of the Dihong. 
 
 Thus Yambung became the foremost post 
 of the line of communications. It was hence- 
 forward the headquarters of the force, and it 
 was here that negotiations for peace were 
 made. It was from here also that most of 
 the exploring parties set out. The camp was 
 terraced, though not so steeply as Renging. 
 It was roughly divided into two levels, of 
 which the lower was occupied by the Naga 
 carriers. A rope-ferry was soon in working 
 order across the river, so that connection was 
 quickly established with the other bank, which 
 had still, on the whole, maintained its reputa- 
 tion for friendliness. Here, side by side, by 
 aid of pulley and "traveller," plied the raft 
 
PUNISHMENT 129 
 
 of the Sirkar a thing of air and bags of air- 
 tight canvas, and the raft of the Abors a 
 tangle of bamboos. Many a stout mithan, 
 thrown and lashed as though for slaughter, 
 crossed the river placidly on the latter. 
 
 Warfare continued for some time longer, 
 small parties of Abors being here and there 
 surprised. But as it appeared that, for the 
 most part, they were thoroughly cowed, it 
 was decided to give them a breathing-space 
 for reflection. After some reflection they 
 came in, village after village, to sue for 
 peace. (A few weeks before they had told 
 us that they intended to hold out for two 
 whole years, whereupon we had retorted that 
 our arrangements were complete for ten.) 
 
 The Abors had already been punished 
 severely. They had had more casualties than 
 in the annals of their slim warfare could be 
 remembered. They had lost their home- 
 steads, for, as a rule, presumably to spite us, 
 they had themselves burnt them before aban- 
 
130 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 donment. They had also lost much of their 
 crops. But these were the prices already paid 
 for fighting, and they had now to pay a further, 
 though not exorbitant, price for peace. Natu- 
 rally they had to give back as much as re- 
 mained to them of the property which had 
 been stolen from the murdered sahibs, and in 
 addition they had fines imposed upon them. 
 
 In a land where coin is little used, the fines 
 had to be in kind. Therefore the arrow, the 
 dao, the pig, and the mithan were tabulated 
 into a rough scale of currency, and the villagers 
 fined accordingly. 
 
 Of the mithan I have as yet barely 
 spoken. He is the half-tame bison, allowed 
 to graze at will, on foliage and tall grass, 
 around each village, within the limits of a 
 tall mithan fence, and coming at will, but with 
 condescension, into the village to lick the 
 villagers' rock-salt. The Abor does not milk 
 the female, and it- had been said that we 
 should never succeed in milking her. But one 
 
< MITHAN '-MILKING 131 
 
 stout female, kept captive in Rotung camp, 
 after knocking a few rash Gurkhas over, at 
 length began to give milk in the ordinary 
 domesticated way, and continued to do so. 
 The Divisional General when he visited us 
 took some mithan away with him, and I am 
 told they now are to be found roaming happily 
 in the park in Lucknow. 
 
 The mithan easily headed the list of those 
 articles of value in which fines were paid. For 
 it is held to be as valuable as a female slave, 
 and nearer Assam a good mithan might be 
 sold for sixty rupees. It is a little difficult at 
 first to see in what to the Abor the great 
 value of the animal lies, for it is not milked 
 by him, nor used for either draught or pack- 
 work, and is not even sacred. It is, however, 
 eaten on great occasions, and will yield many 
 hundred pounds of rare tough meat. It is 
 therefore, I suppose, a suitable investment for 
 spare savings which the Abor may not wish 
 to turn over too frequently, but which are, 
 
132 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 nevertheless, readily realisable as occasion 
 requires. 
 
 I was told of an Abor who boasted before 
 the expedition began, that for every coolie he 
 killed he would slay and eat a goat, for every 
 sepoy a pig, and for every white sahib a 
 mithan. 
 
CHAPTER XIV 
 
 A ceremony at Komsing A cairn in the jungle A Gurkhali 
 in durance Frank confessions. 
 
 A PARTY went out at length to Komsing, which 
 is the village where a political officer had been 
 murdered in the previous spring. They built 
 a cairn to commemorate him, and placed on 
 it a suitable inscription. The villagers were 
 then solemnly warned that it was their duty to 
 preserve the cairn with all reverence for ever. 
 
 I have seen a photograph that was taken on 
 this occasion, and wish the film was my own. 
 The cairn stands in one corner, an imposing 
 mass. Beside it is a group of Gurkha soldiers 
 in strict formation, who are guarding a senior 
 officer. He has come to the village specially 
 upon this visit of grave ceremony. He is 
 supported by some junior officers, and a koteki 
 or interpreter stands close to his side. Facing 
 
 133 
 
134 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 the group, at a distance of several paces, 
 stands all alone the chief gam of the village 
 in his primitive garments. He is being ad- 
 dressed by the senior officer through the 
 koteki on the import of the occasion. His 
 eyes are cast down, his whole demeanour is 
 very meek, and he seems to be listening atten- 
 tively. Around and about, equally submissive, 
 stand groups of villagers. Let us hope that 
 this ceremony will remain imprinted as clearly 
 upon their minds as upon the film of that 
 photograph. 
 
 Elsewhere, in a lonely clearing away from 
 villages, stands another cairn, which our troops 
 have erected in memory of the European 
 doctor, who was also murdered by the Abors. 
 But it was in this secluded spot and not in a 
 crowded village that the latter was slain. The 
 two sahibs had started together, but the doctor 
 had halted awhile in the jungle on entomology 
 bent, while the political officer pushed forward 
 on his friendly tour among the villages. The 
 
THE ABOR MURDERS 135 
 
 murders were doubtless the result of the same 
 plot, though committed at a distance from each 
 other, and not precisely at the same time. 
 
 Very interesting, though sad, were the tales 
 of the survivors, who succeeded at the time 
 in making their escape to Assam, after nights 
 and days of hiding in the jungle, or desperate 
 plunges on crazy rafts down the worst of the 
 Dihong's rapids. But strangest of all must 
 have been the adventures of the Gurkhali 
 bearer, who was eventually befriended by a 
 certain Abor village and kept in it till, nearly 
 a year later, we came into its vicinity. Then, 
 dressed as an Abor, and with his hair grown 
 and cut like one, this Nepalese servant came 
 creeping diffidently towards our camp. Hos- 
 tilities were in full swing at the time, and he 
 was met by a small party -of Gurkhas under 
 a havildar. There was an awkward moment, 
 it is said, in which the bearer was too be- 
 wildered to hold up a white handkerchief, and 
 in which the havildar was preparing to open 
 
136 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 fire upon him. But all at once the havildar, 
 in the king's uniform, and the bearer, in the 
 garb of the Abor, recognised each other. The 
 bearer, though somewhat undersized, was in 
 other respects of the same type that is enlisted 
 in Gurkha regiments, and two years ago this 
 havildar, while engaged on a recruiting tour, 
 had met him, and measured him, and found 
 him wanting. The incident recurred to them 
 both at the right moment, and the bearer was 
 brought into camp in safety. It is said that 
 at first his nerves appeared very much shaken, 
 that his memory for his own tongue had tem- 
 porarily failed him, and that it was not till 
 some days had passed that he talked intelli- 
 gently about his experiences of the previous 
 year. When, however, at last his memory 
 and his tongue were in working order, he 
 gave very useful and interesting information. 
 It appeared that he himself had been well 
 treated, and even been offered the daughter 
 of a gam in marriage. It was natural that in 
 
A PRISONER RESTORED 137 
 
 our camp also he should become something 
 of a hero. He was feted and made much of, 
 and I know of certain Gurkha riflemen who 
 showered gifts upon him. When, however, 
 his brains had been sucked and there was no 
 more use for him, he was sent back to Assam, 
 and I remember catching sight of him on the 
 slopes of Ramidambang as he came stalking 
 along near the head of a downward convoy. 
 He was dressed, not in the ordinary khaki of 
 soldiers and followers, but in an assortment 
 of sahib's mufti gathered from mysterious 
 sources. An ancient flowing frockcoat and 
 a Homburg hat were the main items. He 
 carried a long khud stick, and walked with 
 an inimitable swagger. In the distance it was 
 hard to see whether he was black or white. I 
 and the friend I was with asked each other who 
 on earth was our new General Staff Officer, 
 what price he could have paid for Abor-land, 
 and with what obeisances we had best approach 
 him, when it transpired that this was the 
 
138 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 Gurkhali exile, erstwhile bearer, erstwhile 
 Abor bondsman. 
 
 Though adequate collective punishment of 
 the military kind had been duly administered 
 upon the offending villages, the individual 
 murderers were still at large, and had yet 
 to be brought before a civil tribunal. Fines 
 of mithan, pigs, and arrows were not enough 
 to atone for those treacherous murders, and 
 it was deemed right to capture and try in a 
 court of law at any rate a representative pro- 
 portion of the men actually engaged in the 
 crimes. These miscreants soon came to know 
 that they were " wanted," and flitted from 
 village to village. But not unnaturally the 
 villages, now at peace with us, were unwilling 
 to harbour them, and at length six of the men 
 who had joined in murdering the political 
 officer were caught and fast bound. They 
 were sent eventually to Pasighat to be 
 tried. 
 
 Their trial was held by the assistant political 
 
THE ABOR MURDERERS 139 
 
 officer of the force just before we demobilised. 
 I was walking about the Pasighat camp on 
 the afternoon before the trial, when the officer 
 detailed as prosecutor spied me. He was 
 looking out for some idler who might be em- 
 ployed in taking down from the prisoners the 
 confessions with which they appeared to be 
 brimming over. He assured me it would only 
 take an hour, and that the only qualification I 
 required was that of a person to whom the 
 prisoners might confess without consideration 
 of either fear or favour. This seemed an 
 easy enough role to play, so I consented, and 
 let my other work slide meanwhile. It took 
 four hours, not one, but was an interesting, 
 though rather gruesome, experience. 
 
 I armed myself with two kotekis who 
 talked fair Hindustani as well as Assamese 
 and the Abor language, and then proceeded to 
 turn my bdsha into a confessional. It was built 
 to hold one man and a dog, so that with the 
 addition of two kotekis, and one prisoner after 
 
ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 another, held fast from his handcuffs by a 
 double sentry, we were a tight fit. It was 
 hard to write the confessions legibly as I sat 
 doubled up on a corner of my camp-bed. 
 
 Since the moment when they had ap- 
 parently first made up their minds to confess 
 they had had no chance of collusion, so that 
 the agreement between their several versions 
 of the tale was particularly striking. More 
 striking still was the extreme frankness of 
 their confessions. This has been set down 
 by some critics to a wicked bravado, and a 
 tendency to glory in their misdeeds. This, 
 I think, is a mistake. They certainly showed 
 no abject remorse and no desire to throw 
 themselves upon their captors' mercy. But, 
 on the other hand, they showed no defiance, 
 no swashbuckling swagger. They told their 
 tales in the most matter-of-fact way. One 
 man would name that part of his victim's body 
 that he himself had succeeded in striking, and 
 would then proceed to name the parts where 
 
THEIR CONFESSIONS 141 
 
 others had inflicted their blows ; and this with- 
 out any apparent thought either of giving a 
 comrade away or, on the other hand, of giving 
 him his due. It was not my business to try 
 to extract their motives, but the impression 
 left on me by their bare confessions was that 
 their minds were morally a blank. Their 
 deeds had been neither deeds of shame nor 
 deeds of glory, but simply matters of course. 
 The fear of punishment seemed also absent 
 from their minds at the time. They were in 
 the legal sense ideal confessors, for no thought 
 of "fear or favour" seemed to influence them. 
 One only out of the whole number added any 
 argument to his confession, and this he did 
 as an afterthought. He was an old man, 
 probably the biggest rogue of the lot, and 
 a ringleader, so that his argument was hardly 
 to the point. But when his confession had 
 .been taken, and translated back to him 
 through the kotekis, and assented to by 
 him, he pointed dramatically to the sentries 
 
142 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 on either side of him, and gabbled some Abor. 
 This, when interpreted, amounted to the 
 following : 
 
 " You see these sepoys. They are your 
 servants. If you order them to slay me as 
 I sit here, they will slay me, and you will 
 commend them for carrying out your orders. 
 It was thus that I too carried out orders 
 when I slew the political sahib." 
 
 This man was, as I have said, a ringleader, 
 and had helped to give rather than received 
 the orders, so that from these remarks alone 
 he may have deserved a hanging. But they 
 were quite out of keeping with the rest of his 
 own and the whole of the other men's con- 
 fessions. I was glad, therefore, when I heard 
 late next day that transportation for life was 
 the worst punishment inflicted. One of the 
 men was actually acquitted. 
 
 Still later two of the doctor's murderers 
 were captured, and they have since been tried. 
 Their sentences are, I believe, still pending. 
 
CHAPTER XV 
 
 Abor villages near Ja"nakmukh Navigation of the Dihong 
 near Jdnakmukh Crossing the river on the way to 
 Ayang. 
 
 I WAS destined from the start of the expedition 
 to spend most of my time half-way up the 
 line of communication. Janakmukh thus 
 became for many months my headquarters, 
 and it was only an occasional turn of fortune 
 that sent me on a short visit to the posts 
 beyond, and to the headquarters at Yambung. 
 It was, therefore, mainly through Janakmukh 
 spectacles that I saw Abor life, but I am told 
 that the Abors thereabouts are fairly typical 
 of the whole race. They trade, of course, 
 more with Assam than do the villages farther 
 up the Dihong, and only trade indirectly with 
 Tibet. But the villages of Ayang and Balek, 
 both near Janakmukh, are by no means 
 
144 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 Indianised, and even there one sees Tibetan 
 charm -boxes worn as lockets, and coats of 
 dull red cloth beloved of the lama. Photo- 
 graphs that I have seen of the further villages 
 and their inhabitants show the same types of 
 face and dress, the same kinds of building and 
 house arrangement as seen in Ayang and 
 Balek. 
 
 I greatly hope that someone who went to 
 the farthest limit of our explorations will soon 
 tell his tale in print. Each such exploration 
 party might well provide material for a whole 
 book about itself. Only a few tales of their 
 doings reached me in the gossip of our camp 
 mess, where we took in and fed occasional 
 travellers from beyond. And these were 
 mainly such small matters of interest as the 
 rapture with which the wild Abor first listened 
 to a cheap accordion ; his chariness in one 
 village of parting with his hens, but his readi- 
 ness to exchange two fat ones, not for rupees, 
 but for an empty whisky-bottle : how else- 
 
TO AYANG 145 
 
 where in his naive vanity he admired himself 
 in a sahib's shaving-glass, and then looked 
 behind it, like an intelligent monkey, to see 
 what mechanism had propelled his own visage 
 into his view ; how elsewhere he took huge 
 delight in wearing the paper caps from a 
 packet of Tom Smith's Christmas crackers. 1 
 
 Not all such naivete was to be met with 
 in Ayang, but the village was interesting and 
 picturesque. I will therefore attempt to de- 
 scribe it, and the manners and customs of the 
 inhabitants. But getting there, on the first 
 occasion, had its difficulties, and I will describe 
 these first. 
 
 The position of the village was at first not 
 accurately known to us at Janakmukh, but we 
 had heard that it lay some miles off the far 
 bank of the Dihong, across the flat country 
 nestling under the hills. We had heard, too, 
 that it was rich in dhan and other good things, 
 
 1 For a very brief summary of the surveying and reconnais- 
 sances, vide Appendices III and IV. 
 
 K 
 
146 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 and being a friendly village we hoped it 
 would be open to a deal. So one day I got 
 an escort of twenty Gurkha Rifles and pro- 
 ceeded to explore it. 
 
 The crossing of the river was the main 
 difficulty. At that time we kept no dug-outs 
 at Janakmukh, and our only means of cross- 
 ing was two Berthon boats. These had been 
 brought up on the chance of proving useful, 
 but were still lying packed piecemeal in 
 coolie loads under a pile of engineer's stores. 
 We got them into working order the day 
 before, and gave them a trial trip. There 
 was an officer in the post who had rowed 
 for Bedford, whereas I had once rowed for 
 Shrewsbury, so that we saw a chance of 
 continuing our old school rivalries as the 
 ferrymen of Janakmukh. A little preliminary 
 navigation was necessary before we found the 
 best crossing. The current, except near the 
 banks, was very swift, and it was almost 
 impossible to make headway against it in 
 
CROSSING THE RIVER 147 
 
 midstream. But a bend of the river just 
 above the camp ended in a sharp promon- 
 tory, which somehow brought into existence a 
 convenient back current some way from the 
 bank. Therefore, putting out from a certain 
 shingly beach, we could soon get into the 
 back current, and while making some way 
 across could at the same time be carried 
 pleasantly upwards for fifty yards or so. The 
 process of crossing from the back current into 
 the main current was not such plain-sailing ; 
 for at the junction of the two currents eddies 
 formed, and these had to be avoided. Mean- 
 while, the sudden change of current tended to 
 slew the boat's head round abruptly, and we 
 had to row hard with one oar and hold-water 
 with the other to retain our course. From 
 that point we had a race across the main 
 current with the object of being carried no 
 farther down by it than the back current had 
 carried us upwards. The bow and the stern 
 thwarts in a Berthon boat are so far apart 
 
148 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 in relation to the rest of the build that we 
 found "bow" always pulled "stroke" round, 
 and so we very soon took to sculling. 
 
 The next morning we had to cross twenty 
 riflemen, their Gurkha officer, a spare Naga 
 carrying odds and ends, and a koteki t who 
 came with us to guide us as well as 
 to interpret. The Bedford oarsman and I 
 each took charge of one boat. Five men 
 with their rifles and accoutrements made a 
 full load for one boat, and the two that sat 
 on the stern seat had to arrange their legs 
 very neatly to keep clear of the sculler's 
 hands as he swung forward. One of the 
 thole-pins had been found missing from my 
 boat when we unpacked it, and I had to 
 replace it by a loop of telegraph wire com- 
 mandeered from the telegraph office. 
 
 While I was on the far side with a boat- 
 load, a telegraph sergeant out for an airing 
 came to see the fun, and proclaiming himself 
 a great oarsman, persuaded my Bedford friend 
 
DUG-OUTS AND BERTHONS 149 
 
 to let him relieve him for a spell. The 
 sergeant in crossing from one current to 
 the other let the boat be caught in one of 
 the eddies, and with horror I saw it from 
 the other side spinning round and round like 
 a top. The Bedford oarsman, who had luckily 
 taken the place of one of the passengers, had 
 to change places with the sergeant, not only 
 in mid-stream, but in mid-eddy, but suc- 
 ceeded with much skill in getting safely to 
 land. 
 
 It is astonishing how much more suited to 
 this river were the " dug-out" boats of the 
 country than these Berthon boats of an 
 English pattern. The Assamese "dug-out," 
 often narrow and wobbly to a degree, would 
 yet with its great length glide clean through 
 the eddies and the change of currents with 
 barely a swerve, if the man in the stern 
 steered fairly skilfully and had his crew in 
 hand. 
 
 More astonishing still on this occasion was 
 
150 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 the placid behaviour of the Gurkha riflemen. 
 The Gurkha is not a swimmer, and even if 
 he were he would have little chance of saving 
 his life in an eddy or strong current with 
 his body weighed down with ammunition, 
 and his legs with ammunition boots. Their 
 behaviour on this occasion reminded me of 
 an old yarn told about the very regiment to 
 which these men belonged. In the stormy 
 days of Beaconsfield and Bismarck they were 
 brought suddenly from India to Malta to 
 strengthen the hands of British diplomacy. 
 A day or so after their arrival a bathing 
 parade was ordered for the garrison, and 
 some of this regiment under Gurkha officers 
 were sent to take part in it. On the word 
 "march" or "dive," or whatever was the 
 prescribed signal, they took their headers into 
 the sea as smartly as their British comrades 
 alongside. It was only when they had dived 
 that the question arose whether any of them 
 could swim, and this was only answered by 
 
GURKHAS AFLOAT 151 
 
 the sputtering and life-saving that had to 
 ensue. It was this same stoicism that their 
 descendants in the regiment displayed when 
 twirling round this eddy of the Dihong under 
 the pilotage of a tyro. 
 
CHAPTER XVI 
 
 The road to Ayang Thej&um The village The granary 
 The dwellings The occupations and sports The manners 
 and customs Forms of hospitality and funerals. 
 
 IN an hour or so I had got my little party 
 ready on the far bank, while the Bedford 
 oarsman returned to other duties. The 
 koteki began by taking us for four miles 
 in a direction at right angles to that in 
 which we knew the village lay. It was hard, 
 therefore, to keep on believing in him as he 
 led us mile after mile down along the heavy 
 sand of the river's edge instead of taking 
 us where we wanted to go. But he really 
 showed sound sense, and had avoided a wide 
 belt of jungle through which at that time 
 no path ran into our vicinity. The reason 
 of our long detour was suddenly made appa- 
 
THE 'JHUM' OF AYANG 153 
 
 rent by his taking us at last away from the 
 river bed and up a thickly wooded slope. 
 At the top of this, after only a few minutes' 
 climbing, we abruptly found ourselves on the 
 edge of the finest jhum in lower Abor-land, 
 the jhum of Ayang. It was three miles 
 long, a mile wide, and had bays extending 
 in all directions. It was a full mile beyond 
 the very far end of the jhum that the still 
 unseen village lay. 
 
 Thisj&um itself was as untidy and in as much 
 of a tangle of crops as any other, and tree- 
 trunks lay all about, and tree-stumps protruded. 
 Adam and Eve's first efforts at tillage could 
 hardly have been less methodical. But the 
 ground was undoubtedly rich and the crops 
 abundant. A little dhan was still standing, 
 flanked here and there by " Job's tears," but 
 most of the grain was already harvested, and 
 lay about in heaps of a few hundredweight. 
 Each heap was sheltered by a small rough 
 bdsha, and some hundreds of these bdshas 
 
154 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 were dotted everywhere about the jhum. It 
 was in them, or just outside them, that 
 the dhan was sifted before being taken into 
 the village, and dirty heaps of siftings lay 
 here and there. 
 
 The jhum, however, seemed at first to be 
 quite deserted. We passed many of these 
 small bdshas before we saw a sign of human 
 life. It was only in a few of those nearer 
 the village that work was going on, and the 
 work was mainly being done by very old 
 women, who were apparently slaves. They 
 were stripped to the waist, and very hideous 
 and dirty, but seemed charmed to see us. 
 Their dogs small animals, like indifferent 
 fox-terriers were not so charmed, and barked 
 furiously. 
 
 At length we had trudged to the far end 
 of the jhum, and were led up a wide, well- 
 beaten path that in parts seemed almost fit 
 for wheeled traffic. We went on and on. 
 The path got worse, not better, and I had 
 
A TIME SIGNAL 155 
 
 promised to be back by a certain time. The 
 hours were slipping by, there was no sign 
 of the village, the men were tired and hot, 
 and the koteki had already lied palpably 
 that day on more than one occasion concern- 
 ing minor particulars of the distance. We 
 now made him ask a stray Abor what the 
 remaining distance really was. The Abor 
 pointed to the sun and then pointed half- 
 right away from it. This meant, in Abor 
 reckonings, that it would take as long to 
 walk to Ayang as for the sun to move forty- 
 five degrees across the sky. This also was 
 clearly a lie, but was nevertheless discon- 
 certing. As I began to wonder regretfully 
 whether I ought not to return with Ayang still 
 unsighted, we came upon a giant mithan 
 fence, and this gave us new hope. For this 
 was undoubtedly the mithan fence that ringed 
 Ayang. There was a very fine bamboo stile 
 by which to cross it, and pushing on we 
 reached the village a few minutes later. We 
 
156 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 could not see much of it that day, but on 
 other occasions explored it thoroughly. 
 
 Ayang is built upon a slope. It stretches 
 for about a mile from end to end, and contains 
 several hundred houses. The lower quarter 
 is not residential at all. It is the village 
 granary. Before entering the residential part, 
 on my first visit, I looked inside one of these 
 grain-houses and found it contained lots of 
 dhan and also some Indian corn. The presence 
 of the latter was interesting, as none grew in 
 the near neighbourhood. The grain-houses 
 seemed to be very numerous in proportion 
 to the dwelling-houses, and hope arose in 
 my mind of finding the villagers with a large 
 surplus stock to sell. But these hopes were 
 never realised, except to a very small extent. 
 
 Perhaps they themselves had greater personal 
 capacity for rice and other grains than we ima- 
 gined possible. Perhaps it was not deemed 
 inconsistent with their friendship for us to do 
 a little friendly warehousing for other Abors 
 
UNATTAINABLE PLENTY 157 
 
 at present otherwise engaged. Perhaps, on 
 the other hand, they were merely financiers, 
 making a " corner " in the grain that our 
 expedition was making so scarce in other 
 quarters. Certain it is, however, that very 
 little of the grain in all those grain-houses 
 could be purchased by ourselves. I coaxed 
 them to sell it in every way I could think 
 of, but with little avail. Instead of asking 
 for a reduction on taking a quantity, I 
 promised them an increase of price on their 
 letting me have a larger quantity at a time. 
 But even this inversion of ordinary trading 
 principles left them cold, and they held on 
 obdurately to their dhan. 
 
 Each house, whether a granary or a 
 dwelling, stood on a chang, or platform on 
 stilts, to keep it clear of damp and ground 
 vermin. Each stilt under a grain-house had 
 a wooden flange at its top that is to say, 
 just below the floor of the house itself. This 
 flange was a successful barrier against rats. 
 
158 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 In grain-houses built by ourselves, with a 
 view to the country's occupation during the 
 summer, we copied this idea of the rat-proof 
 flange to some extent. But instead of carving 
 it laboriously out of wood, we found that a 
 disc with a hole in it, made from the ubiqui- 
 tous kerosene oil-tin, would serve the purpose 
 equally well. 
 
 The houses are fairly massive. The frame- 
 work is of wood, and the walls are of bamboo 
 and matting made of bamboo bark. It is 
 perhaps the thatch on each house that chiefly 
 gives it its picturesque appearance. This 
 thatch is very thick, and overhangs the house 
 with long eaves. The top layer of it is made 
 of a coarse many-leafed weed, and the leaves 
 are carefully made to point downwards. This 
 arrangement is said to make the rain drain 
 off more quickly from the ridge-pole to the 
 eaves. Each house has a square veranda at 
 one end, and this is the official front of the 
 house. It, like the covered portion behind 
 
GRANARIES AND HOUSES 159 
 
 it, is on the chang, and it is here that 
 you will be asked to squat and be enter- 
 tained. Something soft will be brought for 
 you to sit upon. It may be some home- woven 
 garment, but I have known it to be one of 
 our own gunny bags with the Government 
 mark upon it, obviously pilfered, but unblush- 
 ingly proffered. Apong will be brought 
 to you a dirty-looking fluid in a vessel 
 made from a hollow piece of bamboo. Some 
 will be poured into a drinking-cup, made also 
 of bamboo, and you will feel bound at any 
 rate to put it to your lips. If you drink 
 too much of it, it will, like other intoxicants, 
 make you drunk. Near some of the houses 
 may be found neat little garden plots, well 
 fenced in, where poppies grow. But they 
 are not there really for aesthetic effect : it is 
 from them that the village draws a scanty 
 stock of opium. 
 
 The main living and sleeping room lies 
 behind the veranda, and stretches nearly the 
 
160 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 whole length of the building, though room is 
 left for a kind of cupboard at the far end. 
 There are convenient shelves in the roof and 
 on the walls, and here bows and quivers and 
 other treasures will be found lying about. 
 A stone fireplace, with a small grate in the 
 middle, stands in the centre of the room. 
 Here food is cooked and the inmates warm 
 themselves. The grate is small in proportion 
 to the rest of the fireplace, so that those 
 sitting round it are kept clear to some extent 
 from the wood smoke. This escapes, not 
 through a chimney, but as best it can. This 
 "best" is not such a very bad one, for the 
 whole house is very draughty. Under the 
 chang beneath the house are more " godowns," 
 and here in coops and pens live the poultry 
 and the pigs. 
 
 There being only one room for living and 
 sleeping, decency is observed to some extent 
 by herding all the bachelors of the village 
 at night into one large building called the 
 
TRAPS 161 
 
 Moshup. It is a long barrack, a hundred 
 feet or so from end to end. In the day-time 
 it is clear of furniture, but at night each young 
 blood brings his blanket and dosses down there 
 away from his family. In the day-time, how- 
 ever, he seems very domestic. Whenever I 
 visited the village it seemed to be full of 
 young men who were sitting at home and 
 doing nothing. 
 
 The lowest in the social scale seem, as was 
 hinted above, to be those who work in a jhum. 
 The better-class women seem to stay at home 
 and weave or spin, while the better-class men 
 either stay at home to idle, or engage in field- 
 sports of various kinds. The bow and arrow 
 are of course largely used in hunting, but the 
 Abor is also a great artist in snares of all 
 kinds. You may, for instance, see in the 
 jungle a long shed three feet high heavily 
 roofed with stones. A bait will be placed 
 within it, and some beast, either by touching 
 the bait, or merely by entering the shed, lets 
 
162 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 go the roofs support and brings a ton of stones 
 upon his head. 
 
 Elsewhere a bird - catching trap may be 
 found in a tree, a contrivance by which the 
 bird, with ever so slight a brush with its 
 feathers, will release a stout bamboo-spring, 
 and, as quick as lightning, draw a tight noose 
 round its own neck. This contrivance is most 
 ingenious. It is quite a lesson in engineering 
 to follow the various but almost instantaneous 
 processes that end in the bird's death, and the 
 whole machine with its curves and angles and 
 straight-drawn strings looks like a very compli- 
 cated proposition in a book of Euclid. Another 
 such proposition (I think from the third book) 
 is to be found writ large in some of the bamboo 
 river - bridges that, with circles and curves 
 touching and intersecting, are so constructed 
 that men can travel rocking but safe over the 
 torrents beneath them. 
 
 The bamboo-spring and the booby-trap are, 
 as already recounted, used also for the destruc- 
 
AUTOMATIC ARTILLERY 163 
 
 tion of an enemy, but they take a few more 
 military forms than have hitherto been de- 
 scribed. . Perhaps the most fascinating is a 
 big bow, which is fitted with a whole sheaf of 
 arrows, and will loose off the whole sheaf at 
 the touch of an unsuspecting foot. Not less 
 murderous is a felled tree hanging over a 
 precipice, and joined to its stump on the crest 
 of the precipice by a few splinters. It remains 
 there ready to fall on its victims below at one 
 gentle, well-timed push. But these devices 
 belong to war, and it is of the Abor at peace 
 that we are now speaking. 
 
 Fishing is another of the Abor's occupations. 
 He does not fish with rod and line, but he uses 
 nets by night, and both by night and day he 
 uses fish-traps. The fish-trap is a piece of 
 basket-work shaped like the basket that holds 
 a coach-horn. It is laid between the stones 
 in a rapid with mouth upstream. The fish, 
 forced by the stream into the blind narrow end, 
 is held fast, his movements cramped, and the 
 
1 64 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 current still pressing him down. The fisher- 
 man (save the mark !) has but to come along 
 and pull out the fish-trap with the fish inside 
 it. Oh ! shades of Izaak Walton. 1 
 
 They dry most of their fish to feed on when 
 other foods are scarce. I was once offered a 
 dried fish as a present, but refused it. It was 
 black with age, and had never been cleaned or 
 opened out. I dare say it was good eating, 
 but it did not appeal to me. 
 
 Jack-fruit, when rice is scarce, becomes also 
 an important food. It is said that if you 
 recover from the smell of the fruit you enjoy 
 the taste, but here again, though never averse 
 to the doughtiest cheese, I proved faint-hearted, 
 and never faced this preliminary process. 
 
 Among Abor sportsmen the beetle-catcher 
 must not be forgotten. We met one one day 
 as we returned from Ayang. He was return- 
 
 1 What would Izaak Walton have said to a basket of fifteen 
 hundred pounds of mahser and boka caught by one rod in 
 ten days in the rivers of Aborland ! 
 
A BEETLE-CATCHER 165 
 
 ing to Ayang from a beetle-hunt on the banks 
 of the Dihong. He was a ferocious-looking 
 person, armed to the teeth, and we thought 
 fit to overhaul him and see what other engines 
 of destruction he might be carrying besides 
 bow and quiver and a very murderous dao. 
 In his hand he held a long cylindrical bamboo 
 box, and into this we peeped. Out of it, as 
 the lid came off, began hopping the day's bag 
 of beetles that he had picked up from under 
 the stones by the river-side. He grinned and 
 demonstrated their use by eating one. It 
 seemed pleasant to the taste to judge by the 
 expression of his face, but the succulent por- 
 tions within it stained his lips a dirty crimson. 
 On this occasion, too, an invitation to join in 
 the repast was weakly refused. 
 
 On the whole, the people of Ayang seemed 
 to enjoy our visits, and always plied us not 
 only with apong, but with other small presents. 
 As you sat chatting on the verandah of a gams 
 house, surrounded by loafing men, screaming 
 
1 66 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 children, and grunting pigs, someone would 
 be very busy close by plaiting thin strips of 
 white peeled bark into a small oval basket. 
 Into the oval, when nearly complete, he would 
 fit a hen's egg. Having closed up that oval, 
 he would continue the plaiting till another oval 
 section was ready for another egg. At last 
 a whole row of some six eggs, each in its 
 basket partition, would be ready to be pre- 
 sented to you, the loose ends of basket-work 
 having been wound into a dainty handle by 
 which the whole could be carried. Similarly, 
 complaining hens would be sometimes thrust 
 into improvised baskets and pressed upon you. 
 This village, like others, had several gams. 
 The chief one was a lean but fine-looking man. 
 His face was as naturally beardless as that of 
 any of his fellows, but its features were sugges- 
 tive of the ascetic lama rather than the typical 
 bucolic Abor. Though his face was hairless, 
 he yet, when dressed for some great occasion, 
 such as a visit to the Inspector of Communica- 
 
FASHIONS AND FUNERALS 167 
 
 tions, would be wearing a pair of artificial 
 whiskers. They were just a strip of mithan 
 calf-skin with short hair upon it, that passed 
 under the chin and extended from ear to ear. 
 It appeared to be only men of importance who 
 adopted this fashion. This head-man's wife 
 was as nice as he was. Old, shrivelled and 
 ugly, and shockingly cticolletee, she yet had 
 charming manners, and was a cheery hostess. 
 She too used to tramp the eight miles with 
 her husband to Janakmukh when he came to 
 pay us return visits, and she always brought 
 me a pumpkin as a present in the capacious 
 basket which she wore as a bustle. 
 
 One day we visited Ayang while a funeral 
 was in progress. The Abor has little religion, 
 and probably most of what he does possess 
 centres round his ceremonies in honour of the 
 dead. He is probably more of an ancestor- 
 worshipper than anything else. There is 
 certainly a great show made by him of 
 making his dead comfortable. Over each 
 
1 68 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 grave a tiny baby bdsha is built, where pre- 
 sumably the departed spirit gets shelter from 
 the rain. A funeral offering, on a scale far 
 more magnificent than sufficed to carry a 
 Roman spirit across the Styx, was on this 
 occasion being carried behind the corpse to 
 the grave. The offering took the form of 
 ten pigs. Each pig was carried slung on a 
 pole, and they were all neatly arranged 
 according to size, the biggest pig in front 
 and the smallest in rear. When the funeral 
 was over the procession returned cheerfully 
 to the village. We were made just as much 
 at home as usual, and not allowed to feel 
 that we had come calling at the wrong time. 
 
CHAPTER XVII 
 
 What we were fed on, and how our food was brought to us. 
 
 To whatever picture of the Abor I have 
 succeeded in imprinting on the reader's mind, 
 will he please add a goitre, and that a large 
 one? Most of the men and even more of 
 the women have goitres on their necks. One 
 doctor at Janakmukh did his best to treat 
 them. As was natural, it was specially the 
 younger maidens, with beauty of a sort to 
 redeem, who trooped to the left bank of the 
 Dihong, where our doctor, with his pot of 
 goitre-paint, having crossed in a " dug-out," 
 would apply the remedy to many bulging 
 necks. 
 
 It was to the attractions of the goitre-treat- 
 ment that we perhaps owed most of the scanty 
 supplies that the Ayang people brought us. 
 The men and maidens coming to be treated 
 
170 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 would carry small loads of dhan on their 
 backs to sell to us. It was wrapped in 
 fresh banana leaves and then enclosed in 
 loosely plaited baskets. Each dab of goitre- 
 paint would thus result in the purchase of a 
 day's food for a few mules. Of course pay- 
 ment was made in cash as well as goitre- 
 paint, the latter being mainly " thrown in"; 
 but even so, the sum total of dhan thus 
 obtained went a very little way towards 
 supplying our needs. 
 
 This brings us to the matter-of-fact subject 
 of the feeding of the Abor Expeditionary 
 Force. It needed careful feeding, for the 
 difficulty of getting the right food into the 
 right mouths at the right moments was greater 
 on this than upon many expeditions. 
 
 The amount of food that the country gave 
 us was negligible. The few hundred bags of 
 dhan that were sold to us, the few hundred 
 that were found here and there in abandoned 
 villages, the stray mithan that were captured, 
 
LOCAL SUPPLIES 171 
 
 and the mithan that were brought in as fines, 
 constituted the whole of our official pickings 
 from the Abor larder. Hence practically 
 everything that man or beast required had 
 to be sent up to us. It had to come, not 
 merely from Kobo, the base, which was a 
 barren spot, but from markets still farther 
 away. Our base was divided from these 
 markets by thirty miles of river that, for the 
 first five months of the expedition, grew 
 steadily less navigable. These difficulties 
 were increased by the tendency of foodstuffs 
 in general, and live stock in particular, to 
 perish en route in the miserable weather. 
 
 Feeding a force in a barren country, un- 
 relieved by oases of any kind, becomes of 
 course more difficult the farther the force 
 advances. It is interesting, sometimes, to 
 follow the progression of these difficulties 
 by simple arithmetic, It can be shown, for 
 instance, by means of quite plausible figures, 
 that after a given number of marches the net 
 
172 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 carrying power of every animal or other 
 carrier is a minus quantity ! This may sug- 
 gest Lewis Carroll in a playful mood, but 
 it is a solemn fact. Let us put the carrier's 
 gross load at sixty pounds, as it was on the 
 Abor expedition. Let us put him eleven 
 marches from the base, where it was often 
 his lot to be when at work with a reconnoi- 
 tring party. Let him eat three pounds a day, 
 which he did with avidity, being generally a 
 Naga. His three pounds' ration for this parti- 
 cular day has been carried for him over eleven 
 marches, so that thirty-three pounds of daily 
 carrying power have been expended over it. 
 But the same amount has also been expended, 
 or rather inevitably wasted, by the carriers 
 engaged in the service having all to return 
 empty into position, so as to be ready for 
 a similar service another day. Hence the 
 total in daily carrying power expended is 
 sixty-six pounds, not thirty-three. Each 
 ration, therefore, that the hungry Naga, 
 
LIMITS OF PORTERAGE 173 
 
 eleven marches from the base, so unhesitat- 
 ingly consumes, is not merely three pounds 
 of luscious rice, tea, and tobacco, it is also 
 a debit balance of sixty-six pounds of daily 
 carrying power. In the day's work with which 
 he earned these good things, the weight he 
 carried was only sixty pounds. Therefore his 
 net carrying power for the day is minus six 
 pounds ! This is really the same as saying 
 that you cannot go far up a barren line of 
 communication before each mule, man, or 
 other carrier needs more than one other of 
 the same class solely for the purpose of 
 ministering to his own wants. 
 
 When at work, the coolie or human carrier 
 does not eat away his own carrying power 
 as fast as do some other forms of transport, 
 but when he goes sick the "debit balance" 
 goes up against him very quickly. When 
 sick he is from the cruel transport official's 
 standpoint a much worse patient than any 
 animal ; for he needs heavy hospitals kept 
 
174 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 ready for him and carried about for him, 
 and when his illness proves tedious, so that 
 he is no longer worth his keep, he yet may 
 not be shot ! 
 
 The Nagas could not stay with us till the 
 bitter end. A pardonable homesickness at 
 length came over them, and a reasonable 
 desire to be back in time for their spring 
 sowings. We would have broken the terms 
 of our contract with them if we had detained 
 them against their will beyond a certain date, 
 and therefore they were allowed to go. But 
 by this time not only had we a whole mule 
 corps in this country, but first one and then 
 another Gurkhali carrier corps had been raised. 
 
 The Gurkhali is better known in the annals 
 of frontier warfare than the Naga. He is 
 not a savage, and wears more clothes and 
 fewer ornaments than the Naga, so that he 
 is hardly tinged with the same romance. But 
 he has the same Mongolian cheerfulness and 
 the same zeal for work, and will carry a 
 
CARRIERS AND MULES 175 
 
 heavy load up any altitude. However, he 
 sang no martial chaunt as he climbed a hill, 
 and carried no spear. Hence he was ac- 
 counted by many, the Abors included, as 
 less of a warrior. 
 
 Of the mules, many were Burmans, scarcely 
 thirteen hands high, war-worn and long since 
 into their teens. But these were the best of 
 the bunch. They took to the wet jungle 
 paths and the damp climate as ducks to 
 water, and would plough gaily uphill and 
 through fetlock-deep mud with full loads on 
 their backs, while their larger and younger 
 comrades from Africa or the Argentine stopped 
 to flounder and gasp. The mule road eventu- 
 ally reached Yambung, and sometimes mules 
 were taken as far as there, but most of their 
 work was naturally done on the lower part 
 of the line, where the hill-man carriers' special 
 qualities would have been wasted. 
 
 But for one dismal fortnight, when it 
 rained almost incessantly, some of the mules 
 
176 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 had to suffer more than they could bear. I 
 spoke just now of mud reaching the fetlock, 
 but during the fortnight, in the ever-dripping 
 valley of the Sirpo, between Coolie-col and 
 Renging, the mud on the mule track not 
 then superseded by the new and drier road 
 reached to the knees and hocks. Progress 
 through it was necessarily of the slowest, 
 for not only did the mud clog, but just here 
 the gradients were of the steepest. The 
 mules during that fortnight often reached 
 camp after dark, to the natural detriment 
 of the evening's grooming. A hundred or 
 so within a few days went dead lame with 
 what appeared to be the same mud fever that 
 may be met with in wet hunting counties in 
 England. The whole hoof became spongy and 
 porous, and was tender all over the surface ; 
 the legs swelled, and eventually the hair came 
 off them. The disease seemed to some also 
 to resemble the sufferings of human feet from 
 the Kobo or Balek mud in the worst of the 
 
MUD-FEVER 177 
 
 rainy season. Men, after a day's march in 
 such mud, though wearing stout boots, would 
 come home sometimes with their feet all 
 flabby and tender, and their legs all 
 swollen. 
 
 The feeding of the mules was of course a 
 difficulty. Soon baled hay and baled bhoosa 
 from mobilisation depots more than a thousand 
 miles away came pouring in to supplement the 
 local grass. This grass, as before explained, 
 was tall and coarse, but the mules liked it. 
 The coarser it was the more it looked like 
 sugar - cane, and the more sugar it did in 
 fact contain. Hence the mule with the sweet 
 tooth liked the coarsest best. The difficulty 
 was to spare the men, mules, and time for 
 cutting and lifting it, for the chapris where it 
 grew generally lay off the line of route, and it 
 could not, therefore, be brought in by mules 
 returning from the day's ordinary work. 
 Diversions through the jungle to the ckapris 
 
 were therefore often necessary, and this in- 
 
 M 
 
i;8 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 volved detaching valuable carrying-power from 
 the primary duty of carrying loads. 
 
 Both at Janakmukh and also at Pasighat, 
 where my depot was eventually withdrawn, 
 before the final demobilisation, the river 
 banks were filled with narrow chapris. Here, 
 therefore, a few " dug-outs," usually manned 
 by friendly Abors from Balek or Ayang, 
 brought in grass up to the very lines of the 
 mules. To find men to cut the grass was 
 sometimes a difficulty, but at last I got a 
 windfall of grasscutters which lasted me for 
 a long time. I owed the windfall to mumps, 
 which though it had been with us since the 
 beginning of the expedition, was now very 
 prevalent in one of the Gurkhali carrier corps. 
 The mump cases, together with the "con- 
 tacts " who had been sharing their bdshas, 
 were therefore segregated on the other side 
 of the river by the doctor's order. But when 
 they were not actually bulging with mumps 
 they were all allowed to cut grass for me, and, 
 
MUMPS AND MULE-FEED 179 
 
 with the aid of the boats, did as much for 
 the force as if they had been carrying bales 
 of pressed fodder all the time up from the 
 base. 
 
 The grain eaten by the mules was chiefly 
 dhan or unhusked rice, for this was the com- 
 monest grain for many hundreds of miles 
 around. It was a relief to have no fastidious 
 animals with us who needed coaxing into a 
 diet of dhan, and it was fortunate that we 
 had few horses to feed in addition to the 
 mules. With the mule corps itself had 
 come a few riding-ponies, who were very 
 useful for special purposes for instance, when 
 they carried the Divisional General and his 
 staff most of the way on his flying visit to 
 Yambung. But we all of us had had to 
 leave our own chargers to eat their heads 
 off in snug stables in India, while we re- 
 learnt some of us with much discomfort 
 the simple art of marching many miles in 
 the day on two flat feet. It was extraordinary 
 
i8o ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 how good it was for us, and how briskly many, 
 even elderly men, began to skip about. It was 
 interesting, too, to see our notions of distances 
 passing through several phases. What in an 
 unmapped jungle had seemed at first to be a 
 long march, got docked off mile after mile, 
 as we got fitter, till at last the more hale and 
 hearty even began to underestimate instead of 
 exaggerating their achievements. 
 
 The feeding of men was as difficult as the 
 feeding of the animals. We were almost as 
 omnivorous as we were polyglot, needing 
 almost as many different diets as we spoke 
 languages. The Sahib had his special ration. 
 So had the Naga, while even the Gurkha and 
 the Sikh do not feed quite alike. It might be 
 said, as a rough generalisation, that the farther 
 to the east was your home, the more rice you 
 wanted and the less flour or ata. None of 
 these things keep well if they have once got 
 wet, and, despite the waterproof bags that 
 covered the inner sacks, a load that had come 
 
A PROCESSION OF GEESE 181 
 
 up from the base by road during one of our 
 periodical deluges, or had floated from Kobo 
 to Pasighat in the bilge of a " dug-out," was 
 often no longer dry inside. It might hide in a 
 stack unnoticed for a week or two, and then 
 betray itself to the critical nose of a watchful 
 storekeeper. Even then it was not to be 
 wasted, for the ducks and geese, dirty feeders 
 as they are and clearly not teetotalers, would 
 like their rice all the better for its being highly 
 fermented. 
 
 Ducks and geese seem out of place on a 
 military expedition. They suggest peaceful 
 homesteads and surroundings of unwarlike 
 luxury. But they, along with goats, formed 
 usually our only possible substitute for other- 
 wise eternal "bully-beef" or "bully-mutton." 
 A special contingent of geese was ordered up 
 for Christmas, and I never heard such a cackling 
 and complaining as they made when they 
 landed from the boat convoy at Pasighat, and 
 had to be carried up the same evening to 
 
i82 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 Janakmukh. They made awkward carrier-loads, 
 for they were too quarrelsome to share the 
 same carrier's basket. So each carrier placed 
 a single goose in his basket, and letting only 
 his head and neck protrude proceeded on his 
 way. This procession of carriers marching 
 with their geese from Pasighat to Janakmukh 
 was one long and continuous cackle. They 
 continued cackling in the house which I had 
 made specially for them at Janakmukh until 
 a late hour in the night, and one wit at dinner 
 with a knowledge of the classics and a more 
 recent recollection of " The battle of Janak- 
 mukh," remarked that we should be quite safe 
 that night with the geese to give the alarm. 
 We kept our own share to fatten for Christmas, 
 but sent the rest of them next day cackling 
 onwards to the front. 
 
 Ducks travelled less like first-class passengers, 
 and were huddled in crates. Each crate was 
 in three tiers, and there were four ducks in 
 each tier, so that twelve could go on the back 
 
GOATS FOR MUTTON 183 
 
 of one carrier. The weather in Aborland was of 
 course to the proverbial liking of the ducks, and 
 they enjoyed themselves immensely in the duck- 
 docks which we built for them on the banks of 
 the Dihong. The balmy rain suited them, and 
 they fattened till we ate them. Fowls did not 
 take to the climate nearly so well, and we soon 
 gave up sending for them. The local fowl, how- 
 ever, presented by or bought in small numbers 
 from the Abor villagers, were of sterner stuff. 
 
 Sheep were as unsatisfactory as fowls. They 
 died in great numbers from exposure, and, not 
 being leaf eaters, were hard to feed in the 
 jungle. Goats quickly took their place in the 
 European as well as the Indian ration. Most 
 people, even those who have eaten goat with- 
 out knowing it, think that this is only an 
 animal to be eaten as a hardship ; they seem 
 to me quite wrong. A very few days of the 
 conscious eating of goat made it seem to me 
 not only as good as, but just the same as 
 mutton. When I returned to the land of 
 
1 84 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 sheep I found it needed some days' training to 
 recover my lost sense of distinction between 
 the two. 
 
 Even goats needed care to keep them well 
 in this country. They had to be herded in 
 well-covered pens built on changs to keep 
 them off the wet ground, and their marching 
 powers were not great. A day's halt between 
 each march was desirable, and, when they 
 marched, the men detailed as goatherds had 
 to be sufficiently numerous to pick up and 
 carry a good proportion of stragglers. The 
 mule, who could not bear quacking ducks on 
 his back, was kinder to goats. I have seen 
 many a mule coming into camp with a goat on 
 each side of his back, the latter peeping out 
 and bleating from gunny bags with holes in 
 the top. 
 
 Onions were an important part of our diet, 
 for they are the hardiest travellers in the class 
 of " anti-scorbutics." Their drawback, however, 
 is their tendency to sprout quickly in a damp 
 
ONIONS OR ORCHIDS 185 
 
 climate and, as they sprout, to emit a stronger 
 smell than usual. The smell of the onion was 
 often the pervading smell of a whole camp ; 
 and if I smell an onion to-day I think of 
 Abor-land. I sent a large consignment one 
 day to a depot several marches ahead. The 
 officer in charge wired back to me indignantly, 
 when the consignment arrived, that he had 
 asked for onions and not for orchids. I told 
 him in reply that when they left me they were 
 still onions, and that since the government 
 botanist had recently left for the front, their 
 strange behaviour seemed eminently a case 
 for the latter to deal with. A still more 
 pressing telegram then reached me, telling 
 me that the government botanist had not yet 
 arrived, but that the " orchids " were now 
 developing into "water-lilies"! 
 
 I have told how the geese came to give us 
 some Christmas cheer, but have not mentioned 
 the parcels' post and the tons of parcels from 
 fond relations that poured in upon us at 
 
i86 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 Christmas - time, containing plum - puddings, 
 mince pies, and the like. The post, as men- 
 tioned earlier, came to Kobo not up-stream 
 from Dibrugarh, but down-stream in " dug- 
 outs " from Saikhowa Ghat. One " dug-out," 
 bearing more Christmas letters and parcels 
 than it could conveniently hold, was swamped 
 en route. Great of course was the grief among 
 the sufferers, and many were the dainties that 
 never reached their destination. But on sand- 
 banks here, and by dredging and diving there, 
 the post office recovered some of the missing 
 articles in varying degrees of dampness. 
 
 I, among others, was to some extent a 
 sufferer. One day, after all hope had been 
 abandoned, the Christmas cake sent me all 
 the way from Rawulpindi at last arrived. I 
 had heard by letter of its making and baking, 
 and of its many rich ingredients. But though 
 at last it had come, it was not the cake it 
 had been. Though encased in tin, the waters 
 
A LUCKLESS CAKE 187 
 
 of the Brahmaputra had yet succeeded in 
 invading it, and it swam in its tin. But with 
 the water that swamped it was mixed all the 
 brandy that had been put into it (whether to 
 add to its rich flavour or to make it digestive). 
 If I had been content to drink the surrounding 
 fluid I should at any rate have had a good 
 drink. But I had to do my best for the cake 
 itself, so sent it straightway to the camp bakery 
 and had it baked for several hours in the oven. 
 The result was not satisfactory. Though the 
 crust was harder, yet a cautious incision re- 
 vealed nothing but a mass of pure stodginess. 
 I next tried boiling. I had it boiled twice 
 for several hours at a time, and then we began 
 to eat it, not as a cake but as a pudding. It 
 was quite satisfactory as a pudding, but there 
 still seemed hope for the remainder of it as 
 a cake. So I sent it once more to be baked 
 for many hours, and at last it fulfilled its 
 original function and proved an excellent cake. 
 
i88 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 It was, however, unfortunate to the end. For 
 that evening my ex-golf-caddie (elsewhere 
 mentioned) left it unheeded on the low bamboo 
 sideboard in our mess bdsha, and by morning 
 the rats had eaten most of what was left. 
 
CHAPTER XVIII 
 
 The end of the expedition An attempt to summarise. 
 
 WHEN a certain degree of latitude had been 
 reached by the survey - parties, when many 
 prisoners had been captured and were awaiting 
 trial, when the weather was each day growing 
 mistier, and spate after spate of rain had made 
 the ground more water-logged, when the winter 
 snow was melting fast in the heights and rais- 
 ing the Dihong towards its summer level, the 
 orders came from Simla that we were to de- 
 mobilise. This took some time. For survey- 
 parties had to be withdrawn, and down a long 
 line of communications a considerable force 
 had to be despatched in driblets that were 
 small enough to fit into the smallest camping 
 ground en route. The prisoners had also to 
 
 be tried, and, though the permanent post at 
 
 189 
 
190 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 Rotung was completely built and stocked with 
 provisions, there were yet some finishing 
 touches to be put to the subsidiary posts of 
 Balek and Pasighat. But at length all these 
 undertakings were completed, and one evening 
 as I sat bored at Pasighat I was sent for on 
 the telephone and told to return to Kobo ; and 
 so floated there in a " dug-out " the next day. 
 At Kobo I heard that an order had been pub- 
 lished authorising all unimportant details of 
 my service to return to India. Having little 
 difficulty in identifying myself with these de- 
 tails, and having in fact no more work to do, 
 I got leave to flit, and flitted. A procession of 
 steamers soon took away the major portion of 
 the force. But a few troops and some trans- 
 port had to remain for some weeks longer to 
 remove the reserve of stores from Rotung. 
 For at the last moment the order came that no 
 garrison was to be left there. Garrisons at 
 Balek and Pasighat were held to be sufficient. 
 
RESULTS OF THE EXPEDITION 191 
 
 People are asking what the expedition has 
 accomplished, and perhaps even this irrespon- 
 sible record would be incomplete without its 
 irresponsible version of the answer. 
 
 No sane man will blame us for not killing 
 more Abors when we had killed enough, nor 
 yet for losing so few of ourselves in action 
 when it was the Abors and not ourselves whom 
 we were out to punish. It cannot, I think, be 
 doubted that the military operations were a 
 complete success, however low it may be 
 necessary to class jungle tactics in the aca- 
 demic scale of modern warfare, or however 
 poor reading our achievements may have pro- 
 vided at the civilian's breakfast. It is surely 
 enough that the Abors were thoroughly cowed 
 and humiliated by the losses which they suffered, 
 and that they received an adequate punishment, 
 both personal and collective, for the crimes that 
 we were sent to avenge. 
 
 That this result was achieved with so little 
 loss to ourselves is more than ordinarily a 
 
192 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 matter for satisfaction. For this was a country 
 into which we had never yet entered without 
 either failing to achieve our object, or achieving 
 it at the cost of some disaster. Such disasters 
 must, in the minds of these people, have always 
 blurred the moral effect of our achievements, 
 and doubtless been celebrated after our depar- 
 ture with holocausts of mithan and pigs. Thus 
 our previous disasters really had left a more 
 lasting impression than our temporary and not 
 very signal achievements. It was chiefly for 
 this very reason that the Abor was now "above 
 himself." It was good therefore for once to 
 go into the country, harry it, and come out 
 almost scatheless. 
 
 The scientists who joined us evidently tell 
 varying tales of their achievements. Some 
 seem contented, others disappointed. Even at 
 Janakmukh we had seen visions of enriching 
 ourselves by starting coal-mines and pegging 
 out our personal claims there and then. Coal 
 peeped at us from rocks in many directions, 
 
ABORLAND PRODUCTS 193 
 
 and many a stream that rose in the nearer hills 
 was dark as soot and turned the mud in its bed 
 into the semblance of the best boot-blacking. 
 But the coal itself when found was pronounced 
 by the geologist to be execrable. Gold also 
 was to be had, but in non-paying quantities, 
 but here and there there were possibly more 
 hopeful traces of oil. At Janakmukh, besides 
 our coal we had our rubber. For, eight 
 hundred feet above the camp, on "Piquet 
 Hill," was a solitary rubber tree. It was 
 already hacked all over by the daos of Abors, 
 who understand the value of the white juice 
 beneath the bark and sent it on sale to Assam. 
 But there was plenty of the white juice still left 
 in that tree, and it became a sort of Sunday 
 afternoon amusement to take a friend to the 
 top of " Piquet Hill " and make him hack for 
 rubber. But perhaps it was not the best 
 para, for neither this nor any other rubber 
 tree, nor, for that matter, any of the many kinds 
 of tree in their great forests, seemed to find 
 
 N 
 
i 9 4 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 much favour with the experts. As in the case 
 of the gold, they could not exactly see the way 
 to make them pay. 
 
 The botanists and entomologists, on the 
 other hand, seemed very happy, and I believe 
 that the new specimens of bugs, beetles, 
 reptiles, weeds, and flowers discovered in Abor 
 jungles are an important contribution to science. 
 You did not ask one of these scientists whether 
 he thought it was a fine evening. You asked 
 him how many new specimens he had dis- 
 covered that day. I did, however, once hear 
 a botanist complain that we had inadvertently 
 arranged to fight the Abors at a season when 
 it was impossible for him to see many of the 
 flowers in bloom ! 
 
 Concerning topographical exploration, let 
 me first quote from the general's dispatch : 
 " An accurate series of triangulation emanating 
 from the Assam longitudinal series of the 
 great trigonometrical survey has been carried 
 over the outlying ranges to the latitude of 
 
THE SURVEY 195 
 
 Kebang, terminating in the base at Sadup. 
 This will prove of the greatest assistance to 
 future surveyors or explorers. From this 
 series, and at the extension of reconnaissance- 
 triangulation to the latitude of Simong, several 
 large snowy peaks have been fixed on what 
 appears to be the main Himalayan Divide, 
 including one very fine peak over 25,000 feet 
 high. Many more snow peaks have also been 
 fixed on the watershed between the Dihong 
 and Subansiri Rivers, which seems to be a 
 very prominent part of the main Divide. It 
 has only been possible to obtain a mere 
 approximation of the topography of these 
 snowy ranges ; but the results are in them- 
 selves of great value. About 3500 square 
 miles have been more or less rigorously 
 mapped on a scale of 4 miles to i inch, in- 
 cluding the whole of the Yamne and Shimang 
 Valleys, a portion of the Siyom River, and 
 the whole of the Dihong Valley as far north 
 as Singging." 
 
196 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 This extract will make clear, even to those 
 unversed in topographical terms, that our 
 Farthest North in Abor-land was reached by 
 filling up many gaps in the world's knowledge. 
 That there should remain gaps as yet unfilled 
 is not surprising, even though the result is 
 somewhat tantalising. It is tantalising, for 
 instance, to hear how the name Dihong 
 changes by imperceptible degrees, as village 
 after village is passed, till it bears a strong- 
 resemblance to the Tsang in Tsangpo, but 
 still remains as definitely divided from it in 
 sound as we were in space. It is tantalising 
 too that the famous Falls of the Tsangpo, 
 about which much has been heard in the 
 past and more still was heard on the expedi- 
 tion itself, were not actually sighted. It was 
 also tantalising to hear of but not see the 
 people who live near the falls, who are said 
 to be pygmies with no necks, whose heads 
 grow abruptly from their chests, and who 
 cannot look upwards. 
 
COURSE OF THE TSANGPO 197 
 
 After all, perhaps a little too much fuss has 
 been made about these falls. Though they 
 may drop farther at one leap than any other 
 falls in the world, the river must still wind 
 many hundreds of miles before the descent 
 of twelve thousand feet from Chaksam Ferry, 
 near Lhassa, is at length completed. Though 
 they be as awe-inspiring as Niagara, it will 
 be long before Mr. Cook can take his yearly 
 influx of American ladies through Abor-land 
 to view them. 
 
 More worthy of speculation, to my mind, 
 was the question whether the Tsangpo of 
 Tibet did really send the whole of its waters 
 into the Dihong in Abor-land. Many of us 
 had seen the Tsangpo at Chaksam F"erry, 
 and come away with a picture in our minds 
 of a swift river with steep banks and a 
 breadth not far short of that of the Dihong. 
 We formed two schools ; one school, more 
 approved than the other by the expert sur- 
 veyors, argued that we had only seen the 
 
198 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 Tsangpo at its high summer level ; that it 
 was probably not even then as big as we 
 had come to think it after this lapse of years ; 
 that at the time we had never measured its 
 average depth ; that the Dihong in winter, 
 thirty miles above Kobo, had an average 
 depth of forty-five feet, a breadth of fully 
 two hundred yards, and its third dimension 
 represented by a very swift current ; that 
 even these measurements gave no idea of 
 the mighty volume of water that to judge 
 from the high-level marks upon the banks 
 must have been pouring down the Dihong 
 while we were spanning the Tsangpo with 
 a rope ferry. 
 
 The other school, to which I confess I belong, 
 still remained impressed by the size of the 
 Tsangpo. They wondered how such a river, 
 after traversing many hundreds of miles of the 
 wettest country in the world, with tributaries 
 flowing into it from every fold in a thousand 
 hills, could emerge as nothing bigger than our 
 
A SHRUNKEN STREAM? 199 
 
 winter Dihong. They remembered, too, that 
 the crossing of the Tsangpo on the way to 
 Lhassa was effected before the full summer 
 height of the river was reached, and how the 
 river was not recrossed till the dry though 
 early autumn had begun, and that on neither 
 occasion had the river seemed insignificant in 
 comparison with the Dihong. 
 
 Distributaries are unfortunately seldom found 
 in the mountains ; otherwise it would have been 
 easy to imagine the surplus water being drawn 
 off by them at intervals, and the main channel 
 thus prevented from growing. There are 
 rumours, however, that the Tsangpo at one 
 point falls into a big lake, and that some of 
 the water of this lake disappears underground. 
 There are tales too, current among Miris, 
 of one or more of the western tributaries of 
 the Brahmaputra rising suddenly in great 
 volume from the ground instead of starting 
 from the usual diminutive sources. It is 
 therefore possible that these springs, if they 
 
200 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 exist, come underground from this lake, and 
 so form hidden distributaries of the Tsangpo. 
 That in this country even rivers apart from 
 lakes do sometimes disappear underground 
 is, at any rate on a smaller scale, an estab- 
 lished fact. For instance, there is a stream 
 that, even in dry weather, rushes by Balek 
 in considerable force and size. But, as it 
 flows downwards, it gradually grows smaller, 
 and the channel, where the latter meets the 
 Dihong, is, at the same time of the year, 
 completely dried up. 
 
 We have not yet solved these problems of 
 evasive waterfalls, mysterious lakes, and sub- 
 terraneous channels, but we have paved the 
 way for others to do so. With the knowledge 
 that we have acquired of the lower half of the 
 country, with the roads which we have made, 
 with the friendly relations and wholesome fear 
 of ourselves that we have established, we have, 
 it would seem, made it possible for a force of 
 one-quarter of our strength to get twice as 
 
POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS 201 
 
 far as we did in half the time. When the sun 
 shines again in Abor-land and there is more 
 government money to burn, let us hope that 
 these mysteries will be solved. 
 
 The Tibet and the Abor expeditions not 
 only explored portions of the same river, but 
 have another and perhaps more striking point 
 of resemblance. Each expedition, though 
 primarily punitive, was also prompted by wider 
 political considerations which in the course of 
 the expedition lost a great deal of their weight. 
 But in each case they did so from causes with 
 which the expedition had nothing to do. When 
 we went to Tibet we were nervous of Russian 
 interference in Lhassa, but before we had 
 arrived there the Russians had had their 
 attention drawn far from Lhassa, and were 
 in the throes of war with Japan. Similarly 
 when we invaded and explored the Abor 
 country and sent missions simultaneously into 
 the countries of the Mishmis and the hill Miris, 
 we were wondering how far the Chinese had 
 
202 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 been encroaching upon our spheres of influence. 
 But while we were thus occupied China, 
 cramped by revolution, had been concentrating 
 upon herself. 
 
 These double coincidences seem to point 
 either to our ill-luck or to our good luck. It 
 seems either that it is our fate to make political 
 demonstrations that eventually, for unforeseen 
 reasons, lose half their point, or else that we 
 have the happy knack of looking to our spheres 
 of influence just when our important neigh- 
 bours are about to be busy elsewhere. 
 
 It was a disappointment to many of us to 
 hear that the post of Rotung was to be given 
 up, and only Balek and Pasighat maintained. 
 Much labour had been lavished on the Rotung 
 post. The situation was healthy and pleasant, 
 and the idea of hot weather to be spent there 
 had appealed to those who had expected to 
 remain. Moreover, Rotung was very close to 
 those villages that were least likely to remain 
 tractable, and so seemed the best centre from 
 
THE MAN ON THE SPOT 203 
 
 which to maintain law and order. But these 
 were, I suppose, parochial not imperial views. 
 Having been in Abor-land we felt naturally 
 that we had been the " men on the spot," and 
 so knew best. But the argument of " the man 
 on the spot" the argumentum ad hominem in 
 loco is after all, as the expression betrays, 
 only a parochial argument. When the argu- 
 ment is imperial the " spot " that matters is 
 not a ten-acre clearing in a valley of a Dihong, 
 but a secretariat in Simla, or an office in Down- 
 ing Street. For the men sitting there are 
 sitting in the imperial centres and so in the 
 places that matter, and are therefore the " men 
 on the spot." 
 
APPENDIX I 
 
 LOWER ABOR-LAND 
 
15 Mil? 
 
 ASS AH 
 
 LOWER ABOR-LAND 
 
NOTE 
 
 THIS is a rough map made from memory with a friend's 
 aid. The details in it are not intended to be exhaustive, 
 but merely to enable the reader to distinguish the places 
 mentioned in my own narrative. 
 
APPENDIX II 
 
 ROUGH SKETCH OF THE ACTION AT KIKAR 
 MONYING 
 
o 
 
 S o\ 
 
 < "^ 
 
 * 8 
 
 K/* ^Q 
 
 ^ s 
 
 z Q 
 
 2 a 
 
 H 
 
 ^ si 
 
 t, < 
 
 o o 
 
 X C 
 
 .2 
 
 .t! 
 
 C/2 g 
 
 s i 
 c 
 
 I 
 
APPENDIX III 
 
 THE FAN OF RECONNAISSANCE 
 
Tolluk Lck'pesig /b/rf//r.\ 
 
 5 O 5 10 15ilile520 
 
 THE FAN OF RECONNAISSANCE 
 
NOTE 
 
 MY friend above mentioned has furnished me with a map, 
 of which I have made this copy on a small scale. His 
 map was made from memory and did not aim at complete 
 accuracy, but his own personal knowledge of a large part 
 of the country covered by it is a great safeguard from 
 serious errors. As this is not an official publication I 
 forbore from reproducing any map that was the property 
 of the Government, and have therefore restricted myself to 
 giving such information as is public property. 
 
 It will be seen that the map omits what in the previous 
 appendix I have called " Lower Abor-land." It is based, 
 therefore, upon the line of which the road from Rotung to 
 Yambung forms the central portion. I have called this 
 map " The Fan of Reconaissance," because, as will be 
 seen from the dotted lines representing paths, the recon- 
 naissances for the most part spread upwards like a fan from 
 Rotung and Yambung. The important reconnaissance to 
 Damroh was, however, an exception to this rule, for it left 
 the main line of communication at Janakmukh by crossing 
 the Dihong at that place. Its first few marches are there- 
 fore not shown on this map, but its return journey to 
 Rotung can here be traced. The contours drawn in 
 irregular circles are not based on any exact perpendicular 
 scale. 
 
 It is open to doubt whether any useful purpose is served 
 213 O 2 
 
214 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 by producing in such profusion the names of the villages 
 visited but it seemed that this collection of crisp Mon- 
 golian dissyllables, many with a strong family likeness, 
 might prove interesting, and give some notion of the sound 
 of the Abor language. Their very profusion also helps to 
 indicate the extent to which this country was scoured. 
 
 The names produced in thick type belong to villages 
 which the Indian traveller Kintop records as having been 
 visited by himself. It was he who, many years ago, 
 attempted to reach Assam from Tibet down the valley of 
 the Tsangpo. When, however, he reached the neighbour- 
 hood of Damroh he records that he was held up by un- 
 friendly Abors and forbidden to proceed. He therefore 
 was obliged to retrace his steps. It is interesting that so 
 many of the villages of which he mentioned the names have 
 been verified upon the recent expedition. 
 
APPENDIX IV 
 
 THE OLD AND NEW VIEWS OF THE COURSES 
 OF THE TSANGPO AND DIHONG 
 
B 
 
 a g 
 
NOTE 
 
 WITH my friend's help I have also compiled this very 
 rough skeleton map. All details of curve, contour, and 
 name not bearing upon the point which it was desired to 
 illustrate have been omitted. It is hoped that the map 
 will thus gain in clearness what it undoubtedly loses in 
 artistic effect. 
 
 Such modern atlases as have hitherto ventured to trace 
 the courses of the Tsangpo and Dihong will be found to 
 follow more or less the black line shown here. It is said 
 that their view is based on investigations made by a survey 
 officer in India in 1880. The great loop to the north is 
 said to have been discovered not by himself but by one 
 of his Indian assistants, who marched down-stream from 
 Tibet, counting his paces as he went. This Indian was 
 short of stature and, according to the story, his officer 
 refused to believe that in measuring in this way he had 
 taken due account of the shortness of his own paces. The 
 officer, therefore in his official report, reduced his assistant's 
 estimate of his distance eastward to the apex of the great 
 loop by about one hundred miles. It seems, therefore, 
 that had he trusted his short-statured assistant more com- 
 pletely he would have brought the apex of the loop into 
 much the same place as it is now supposed to occupy. It 
 seems, also, that having placed the apex too far to the west 
 he was obliged to conclude that the river flowed thence 
 
218 ON THE TRACK OF THE ABOR 
 
 downwards as far as the Yambung comer in a south-easterly 
 direction instead of, as it is now known to do, in a southerly 
 or south-western direction. It is perhaps to this ancient 
 error that the great astonishment of our surveyors was due 
 the other day when they found that the Dihong immedi- 
 ately above Yambung, in its upward course, took a bend to 
 the north-east instead of continuing in a westerly direction. 
 
 The discovery that a snow range continues without a 
 break as far to the north-east as 76 S. J. Peak, now makes it 
 probable that the river goes right round this peak before it 
 moves southwards. There are indications that the neces- 
 sary break does exist just beyond this peak, and that near 
 here may be the real position of the falls. It is also found 
 from general observation that a compensating dip in a ridge 
 is often found near to an exceptionally high peak. 
 
 The arguments and opinions here expressed are not 
 official, nor do they carry any scientific weight. They are 
 merely the fragments that two pure laymen have carried 
 away in their minds after occasional sittings at the feet of 
 the learned round a drowsy camp-fire. 
 
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