by Jules Stewart
2006
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Chapter 7: The Holy Spy
With Chandra Das's cover effectively blown, the duty of carrying on exploration work in Tibet fell to his natural successor, Ugyen Gyatso. The jolly lama entered the Survey's secret files as agent UG and was sent to join Colonel H.C.B. Tanner's workshop to be trained in the finer points of undercover surveying. This entailed learning to use a few simple and easily concealed instruments, before the lama could be sent to Tibet 'on special duty'. Ugyen Gyatso had obviously picked up some basic skills during the months spent on the trail with his travelling companion, Chandra Das. After a week's basic training, Tanner was satisfied with the monk's ability to use a prismatic compass and determine his altitude by the hypsometer. Colonel Sir Thomas Holdich, a Survey officer who had been attached to the Russo-Afghan Border Commission, mentions in his report on Ugyen Gyatso's journey that the lama had been briefed on the methods of collecting specimens for the Calcutta Botanical Society. Whether this was a genuine spin-off from the surveying assignment or a cover-up activity is anybody's guess. Holdich adds, tantalisingly, that the monk had also been 'fully instructed by Mr Macaulay, the Secretary to the Bengal Government, as to the information which it was desirable to collect'. For a government that was desperate to gain topographical knowledge of a country into which it would soon dispatch an invasion force, the British showed themselves astonishingly parsimonious when it came to outfitting their spies. As was the case with Chandra Das's expeditions, Ugyen Gyatso's third voyage to Tibet was to be a labour of love. 'He [the lama] made his own arrangement for the purchase of cloth, needles, tobacco, &c., to be carried as merchandise, and took care to be well provided with medicines and funds for his journey.'1
In the midst of one of the torrential cloudbursts that relentlessly lash Darjeeling in the monsoon season, on 9 June 1883 Ugyen Gyatso gathered his travel kitbag, along with his wife and brother-in-law, and started off on the first leg of his journey to Tibet. As he strolled up the town's cobbled streets through the Main promenade, he stopped to inform 'certain inquisitive neighbours' that he was travelling on a visit to his home at Yangong in Sikkim, three days' march to the north. The Pundit lama and his family did indeed stop at the Yangong monastery, where he picked up a party of coolies to shoulder their loads for the demanding trek that lay ahead across the mountains. Ugyen Gyatso, or, one should say, the Survey, could not have picked a worse time to start off on a journey through this part of India. Hardly a day passes without the monsoon hitting Bengal and its northern neighbour Sikkim with an unbelievable fury, unleashing massive landslides onto the roads and sweeping away bridges across the swollen rivers. The latter almost proved to be the lama's undoing. A few hours from Yangong, he and his party were first forced to spend a morning constructing a flimsy bamboo bridge across the River Rungum, and several marches ahead they needed to employ three full days in repairing what was left of the slatted bridge over the Teesta, which roared in full flood a few inches below their terrified footsteps. So thankful was Ugyen Gyatso for his safe crossing of these torrents that, upon reaching the hamlet of Ringim, in north Sikkim, he purchased a pig, half of which he gave to his Lepcha coolies, and the other half of which he dried and carried with him as a gift for the people of Lachung, one of the last villages below the high passes into Tibet, which he reached in a few days' time.
Lachung lies along one of the main trade routes for yak caravans passing between Darjeeling and Tibet. The Lhasa government had therefore stationed an official in the village to keep a watchful eye on travellers entering the Land of Snow. It took the Pundit several days of stubborn negotiations to convince the Tibetan agent that he was but an innocent pilgrim desirous of prostrating himself before the holy shrines of Buddhism. In this he met with success, thanks, in Ugyen Gyatso's opinion, to the presence of his wife, for one could hardly conceive of a spy taking his spouse along on an espionage mission. 'The presence of his wife in his camp', writes Holdich, 'seemed to have a reassuring effect -- it was a sort of guarantee that he was a bona fide pilgrim.' 2
By early July preparations had been finalised for the crossing into Tibet. Yaks and ponies had been hired for transporting the party 's baggage on the week-long slog through rain-soaked grassland and deep mud to the 18,100-foot Donkhya La Pass. There is a widely held belief that anyone endowed with a pair of Tibetan lungs enjoys a kind of genetic immunity to altitude sickness. The fact is that Sherpas, Bhotias and other people of Tibetan stock are as vulnerable to the effects of oxygen starvation as any European, Ugyen Gyatso being no exception to this biological reality. The lama was hit by a crippling bout of altitude sickness on the summit of the pass, suffering from the usual symptoms of shortness of breath. spasms of nausea and migraine. Nevertheless, this is where his masters at the Survey had instructed him to begin his surveying work, so, steeling himself to the task, the Pundit assembled his various pieces of equipment and set about taking the relevant bearings of the River Teesta, a dark thread snaking its way across the grey rocky landscape thousands of feet below.
Two months out of Darjeeling, Ugyen Gyatso found himself standing on the summit of Pongong La, the 16,500-foot pass, where, at the distant head of the valley, he could make out the silhouette of the bustling Tibetan commercial and administrative centre of Gyantse. The Pundit received word through the grapevine that several Sikkimese traders, personal acquaintances of his from Darjeeling, were conducting their business affairs in Gyangtse. It would have been too risky to take a chance on being recognised deep within Tibetan territory, so Ugyen Gyatso and his party set up camp in a secluded spot on the south bank of the river to wait for the all-clear signal before hustling his little caravan into the city. Three days later, the Pundit entered the gates of Gyantse, where his clandestine survey work in and around the city was to prove extremely valuable to the British forces of the Younghusband expedition, who advanced on Gyantse with the aid of reliable maps in the first stage of the 1903 Tibet invasion, a campaign that garnered official support from almost all quarters, from King Edward VII to the Government of India and The Times of London.
Early August found the Pundit and his companions travelling across a far more agreeable landscape of farming villages, gardens and barley fields, lying roughly along the course of the swift-flowing Nyang Chhu river. They were now in rain shadow territory and little troubled by the torrential deluge of the summer monsoon. Ugyen Gyatso's reports to Survey headquarters on Tibetan village and religious life left few doubts in the minds of British officialdom as to the uncivilised nature of these alien tribes north of the great Himalayan divide. At Shalu monastery, a famous centre of Tantric practices, Ugyen Gyatso describes a magic rite in which an anchorite is introduced into a cave large enough for one man, where he remains for twelve years engaged in deep meditation on certain esoteric mysteries. At the end of this period, the hermit signals his readiness to return to civilisation by blowing on a trumpet made from a human thigh bone. The mystic emerges through a small hole in the ground, cross-legged in the Buddha lotus posture. He is then subjected to various tests, such as sitting on a heap of barley without displacing a single grain, to determine if he has indeed acquired esoteric powers. If the aspirant passes the test, he becomes a guru lama; if not, he is simply left to take up the routine of his previous worldly existence. Reports like this, and others depicting the oddities of Tibetan customs, were greeted with derision by Survey officers. 'Such grotesque superstitions point to a more degraded condition of the national religion of Tibet in the heart of the country than the admirers of the Light of Asia would care to credit.’3
The Pundit was now wending his way toward familiar terrain, with Shigatse and its sprawling monastery complex of Tashilunpo in his sights, 50 miles north-west of Gyantse. It must be remembered that Ugyen Gyatso, surveyor, explorer, botanist, was also a Buddhist monk ordained at Pemayangtse, one of the holiest lamaseries in the Tibetan religious hierarchy. His quest for spiritual attainment was fired by the sacred site of Shigatse, and he spent a good deal of his time visiting the city's most venerated shrines. On one of these occasions a high lama persuaded him to take a vow to repeat certain forms of prayer to the god Idam 3,000 times a day. Albeit having the best of intentions, the Pundit found this performance 'quite incompatible with his secular duties', that is, his surveying tasks, so he revisited the lama and begged to be released from his oath. To his relief, Ugyen Gyatso was let off with 1,000 incantations a day and 'as many more as he could manage'.
Sleep and Dream in the Vedas
Among the paradoxes of life, one of the greatest is the paradox of sleep: human beings cannot live without sleep; it renews life, but in sleep, vitality, activity, and all that is characteristic of life, diminish and fade away as in death. Reat notes that in the Vedas, the derivatives of the verb root Vjiv (life) not only meant life as opposed to death, but activity as opposed to sleep. The vital faculties are all associated with wakefulness and activity.24 The Vedic mind was preoccupied with augmenting life, strength, and vitality; sleep was regarded as a dangerous phenomenon associated with evils such as death and destruction. The following passage gives a good idea of the general Vedic view of the nature of sleep:We know thy place of birth (janitra), O sleep; thou art son of seizure (grahi),25 agent of Yama (the Lord of Death); ender art thou, death art thou; so, O sleep, do we comprehend thee here; do thou, O sleep, protect us from evil dreaming. 2. We know thy place of birth, O sleep; thou art son of perdition … 3 … son of ill-success … 4. … son of extermination … 5. … son of calamity … 6. We know thy place of birth, O sleep; thou art son of the wives (sisters) of the gods, agent of Yama; ender art thou, death art thou; so, O sleep, do we comprehend thee here; do thou, O sleep, protect us from evil-dreaming.26
Here Sleep is regarded as a powerful deity associated with death and destruction. Sleep is called upon to protect one from evil dreams as well as to bring the forces of destruction and calamity upon one's enemies. The following passage uses words associated with the nature of sleep to curse the enemy:[W]ith ill-success I pierce him; with extermination I pierce him; with calamity I pierce him; with seizure I pierce him; with darkness I pierce him.
Now (idam) do I wipe off evil-dreaming on him of such-and-such lineage,27 son of such-and-such a mother.28
-- Dreamworlds of Shamanism and Tibetan Buddhism: The Third Place, by Angela Sumegi
The blithesome, rotund lama seemed to have a knack for blundering into awkward situations - evoking an image of a Peter Ustinov character swathed in a crimson robe. Yet there was nothing frivolous about the information of commercial and military value that he contrived to gather on his journey across Tibet, at a critical time in British India's relations with its northern neighbour. From Shigatse, whose height the Pundit fixed at 12,350 feet above sea level, he set a course eastward along the southern bank of the Tsangpo, following Chandra Das's route toward the great lake complex of Yamdo Tso. Ugyen Gyatso discovered that the river is navigable by ferry service for 50 miles east of Shigatse. Below this point begin the lesser-known reaches of the Tibetan waterway, where it takes a bend southward and becomes 'rough and rapid ', quite impracticable for the hide-built coracles of the country. After a difficult crossing of the Tsangpo, depicted in his report as 'a black, turbid flood', the Pundit and his wife marched ahead to the system of lakes that he spent several days exploring and surveying in great detail -- in spite of the frequent rain and thick mists that enveloped the nearby mountains. The terrain in this region was more reminiscent of the drizzly Sikkim he had left behind than of the arid Tibetan plateau.
The Pundit ran into 'serious difficulty' a few days after completing his survey of the Yamdrock Tso network of lakes. Ugyen Gyatso had climbed a rocky eminence near the small village of Lha-khang to admire the rugged grandeur of the surrounding countryside. On his return to the house in which he had been offered lodgings, he found his wife and brother-in-law in a state of great distress. In their sleeping quarters stood several burly Tibetans whose scowling faces left little to the imagination of an undercover surveyor. The men had been sent by the local Jongpen, or district official, to examine the Pundit's belongings. Ugyen Gyatso's wife had concealed most of the surveying instruments, but there was enough evidence around to convince the Tibetans that they had captured a high-ranking spy. The Tibetan officials were in no mood for excuses. The Pundit, his wife and brother-in-law were arrested and kept in confinement for several days, until they were summoned before two Jongpens, one a lay official and the other a priest, who were to decide how to deal with the interloper. The Pundit could expect little mercy from his judges, who were clearly not amused by the pile of instruments, maps, botanical specimens and books before them. The decision was immediate and chilling: this was a most grievous case, warranting the involvement of the central government in Lhasa, to where all these artefacts were to be sent as evidence of a clear breach of the orders that had recently been issued, strictly forbidding anyone to draw up maps of the country. Ugyen Gyatso knew that he had to act swiftly or risk the same fate that had been dealt to other explorers found guilty of spying, namely a public beheading. Whatever funds he had on his person were judiciously slipped to his host and a few of the junior officials, who were thus persuaded to intercede on his behalf. Some of the bribe money undoubtedly found its way into the Jongpens' pockets, for during the ensuing cross-examination their hearts suddenly softened. The Pundit was let off with a stem warning and, what is more astonishing, with the return of all his property, except for his notebook, which the Tibetans took pains to destroy, lest they were to find themselves compromised by it later falling into the hands of higher officials. Ugyen Gyatso was forced to give an undertaking not to set foot in Lhasa or mention a word to anyone about his detention in Lha-khang. The day after his release, the Pundit stole out of the vilIage at daybreak and casually resumed his surveying work of the Tsanpo valley, while setting a course northward on the road to Lhasa.
The stone-covered expanses along this stage of the journey were infested with robbers 'with blackened faces' who preyed upon small, unarmed parties travelling to Lhasa. Ugyen Gyatso came across a lonely hut, called a jikkyop, standing forlorn in the middle of the plain, where he took shelter for the night. It was like stepping back several centuries in time, for the hut was kept by a 'half-savage old couple' whose bare survival seemed to depend on providing passing travellers with animal dung for fuel, in exchange for food. The Pundit, who had spent many a night shivering in caves or in open fields, was repulsed by this wretched place, which he hurriedly abandoned the following morning. The closer Ugyen Gyatso drew to the villages and vast monastery complexes on the approach to Lhasa, the more care he needed to take with his pilgrim guise in order to avoid being unmasked. At one point, the party crossed paths with a royal procession led by the Regent of Tibet -- the temporal ruler as opposed to the spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama -- who was on a periodic tour of his domains. This proved very inconvenient for Ugyen Gyatso, as he was unable to restrain himself from engaging in cheerful banter with the royal retainers about his adventures on the road. As the chatter rambled on, a few of the king's bodyguards began to take a keener interest in the Pundit's travels, suspecting a possible hidden motive behind his journey to Lhasa. Ugyen Gyatso only escaped being handed over to the authorities at the last minute by dispensing liberal bribes to his inquisitive companions.
On 9 October, four months to the day after his departure from Darjeeling, the Pundit surmounted a low pass, from which the lights of the holy city of Lhasa could be spotted in the distance. He took the precaution of crossing the Ki Chhu river, which he measured as 500 paces across, by moonlight, in a ferry piloted by several hopelessly drunk boatmen. The Pundit refers in passing to being almost 'torn to pieces' by savage Tibetan mastiffs when he alighted on the north bank of the river. Ugyen Gyatso had been forewarned about these ferocious beasts and took pains to supply himself with a sack stuffed with bones and scraps of meat 'with which he beguiled the dogs as they disputed his way'. By two o'clock in the morning the Pundit, not to mention his long-suffering wife, sat down under a tree to catch their breath, unsuspecting of the tribulations that lay ahead. His first task was to devise a plan to conceal his instruments and notes. Lhasa was no place to risk having these incriminating instruments exposed to the authorities, who were unlikely to be bought off so easily as a provincial Jongpen. He hit upon the idea of sealing all his surveying equipment and records in a bag, which he would leave in the care of a fellow monk at the nearby Daphung monastery, a short walk along the road to Lhasa. With this problem resolved, the Pundit settled in for a few hours' rest, only to be abruptly roused from his sleep at dawn by a group of angry villagers, who told him that the tree under which he had chosen to bed down was a place of holy veneration, and that he had only to lay a finger on a twig to be guilty of offending the guardian deities. To make matters worse, he found out that he was lucky still to be drawing breath, for this was also a meeting spot for local robbers and freebooters of every stripe, who took advantage of the neighbourhood's seclusion to plan their evil doings.
When Ugyen Gyatso reached Daphung, a short distance south of Lhasa, he explained his predicament to his friend over a cup of buttered tea. The Pundit's possessions were duly secreted behind locked doors and he went out to have a look around the great city and find a place for his party to spend the night. His first encounter was with a Chinese army sergeant who kept a tidy guesthouse near the monastery. This seemed an ideal place to spend the night. Most importantly, there was no danger of his Chinese landlord demanding to examine his baggage, as might easily have been the case in a Tibetan household. Once again, Ugyen Gyatso's proclivity for loose chatter nearly brought about his demise. Relaxing by the fire, the Pundit happened to make some indiscreet enquiries about the status of the Nepalese Resident in Lhasa, an unfortunate subject to bring up at a time when relations between Tibet and Nepal were strained to breaking point. His Chinese host's mood suddenly turned sullen. Just why, he wanted to know, was this alleged religious pilgrim taking such an avid interest in the country's political affairs? The conversation quickly turned into a cross-examination, and, fearing that he had let a spy into his midst, the Chinese officer let loose a torrent of abuse and unceremoniously turned the Pundit and his party out of his house.
Ugyen Gyatso, with his wife and brother-in-law in tow, spent the rest of the day roaming the streets of Lhasa in search of new lodgings. He eventually came across some long-lost Nepalese friends living in town, who could put him up in a spare room, in which the Pundit gratefully dropped his bags for a night's well-earned rest. However, his fame had gone before him, and it was not long before the police, who had been tipped off by the Chinese sergeant, came knocking at the door, demanding to have a look at his baggage. They left no stone unturned in their search, but fortunately failed to find any possessions of an incriminating nature, all of them having been safely stashed away at Daphung monastery. In view of the prevailing tensions between the authorities and the local Nepalese community, the Pundit's new hosts were equally indisposed to having a suspect, talkative monk from Sikkim under their roof. But they had a plan that might help him out of his predicament: Ugyen Gyatso's monastery, Pemayangtse, had a close historical kinship with the Buddhist red-hat sect of Nepal. A discreet message sent across town procured the Pundit an invitation from the Resident himself, who was only too happy to welcome a pilgrim from Pemayangtse into his house, a four-storey building that stood close to the home of his Chinese counterpart. The Nepalese Resident found the garrulous monk from Sikkim an engaging house guest, to the extent that Ugyen Gyatso's position in Lhasa was 'secured', meaning he could move freely about the city to carry out the real duties that had brought him to the Tibetan capital.
One week after arriving in Lhasa the Pundit commenced his survey of the Tibetan capital, using as his cover, quite literally, an umbrella under which he concealed the equipment that had been retrieved from its hiding place in Daphung monastery. He seemed to thrive in this environment of high intrigue, for he knew that to sit under an umbrella in full public view of Lhasa's paranoid officialdom was an open flirtation with danger. Yet he was also aware that he was engaged in trail-blazing work that, on his return, was certain to earn him the kudos of the exalted Survey of India. So for two days on end, thinking himself beyond reach of recognition, Ugyen Gyatso walked, observed and measured, painstakingly putting into practice the skills learnt in Darjeeling, so that he was able to calculate, for example, that it took exactly 9,500 paces to do a full circuit of the city.
The Pundit also found it necessary to discourage his wife from forming too close a friendship with the Resident's spouse, although, after the months of swashbuckling along the road to Lhasa, the poor woman must have been bored to distraction, spending her days confined within the four walls of the Residency. The fear was that the lama's wife might carelessly reveal the truth behind her husband's fondness for strolling about town under his umbrella. At the same time, Ugyen Gyatso took advantage of every spare moment to pump the Resident for information about the Tibetan government, its structure, its leadership and how it exercised its powers, most of which served to confirm the information that had been gathered by Chandra Das on his expedition to Lhasa.
The Pundit's luck ran out less than a week into his fieldwork. Within the pantheon of Tibetan liturgy there is a ceremony called the sky burial, in which a corpse is borne by ragapas, literally 'carriers of the dead', to a spot, usually a hilltop, where the body is dismembered by these men and fed to vultures that hover restlessly overhead, waiting to pounce on their gruesome meal. The ragapas are outcasts from society, the Tibetan equivalent of Indian untouchables, who have in most cases been branded pariahs because of past criminal offences. ‘They are only permitted to live in houses or huts made of horns, no matter what their present wealth or former position may have been. These ragapas appear to be the pests of Lhasa. Hardened by crime, and deadened by their occupation to all sense of humanity, they band together in a turbulent and unruly crowd, and endeavour to extort blackmail from all strangers and travellers.'4 It was Ugyen Gyatso's misfortune to have fallen foul of these wretched creatures, who prowled the streets like pariah dogs. The reason behind the ragapas' attack was never made clear, but the lama's eccentric appearance was undoubtedly enough to set their teeth gnashing. The upshot was that one morning a band of these snarling ragapas surrounded Ugyen Gyatso while at his work and proceeded to chase him into one of the city's central squares. They hurled abuse at the terrified lama, and then began chorusing the words he least wanted to hear: 'British spy! British spy!' It was something other than sheer chance that had led them to denounce what was really happening beneath that umbrella. To his alarm, one of this gang turned out to be a native of Darjeeling who claimed to recognise the Pundit. His plight was now alarming enough for Ugyen Gyatso to send in haste for his Nepalese friends. They came rushing to the scene, along with a friendly Tibetan official. The way out of this predicament was quite straightforward: once again the Pundit was obliged to dig into his pocket to buy his tormentors' silence, at least long enough to allow him to make a safe getaway from Lhasa.
Ugyen Gyatso's main dilemma was that by now, having liberally dispensed bribes to all and sundry to buy his way out of trouble, his funds were starting to run dangerously low. This, however, did not present an insurmountable problem for the resourceful Pundit. He first needed to purchase ponies and saddles for the long journey home. Fortunately, the wife of one of the Nepalese residents in Lhasa happened to be visiting Darjeeling at that time, so by pleading his case to these acquaintances he succeeded in issuing what he called a 'promissory note' for 125 rupees, sufficient to start him on his voyage in comfort.
Ugyen Gyatso had hardly stirred from his house for days, fearful of being spotted by one of the ragapas or, even worse, the Chinese officials who by now had collected enough circumstantial evidence to order the lama's arrest on suspicion of spying. At dawn on 19 October he gathered his belongings and slipped out of Lhasa, not failing to take his final observations -- always under cover of his umbrella -- even before he was clear of town. Nearly a month later Ugyen Gyatso closed his extensive survey while crossing the Cho La Pass, moving southward over well-trodden ground toward Pemayangtse monastery. Once at his spiritual home, the Pundit entertained his brother lamas with the remainder of the funds he had obtained from Darjeeling, while leaving a small sum on deposit for one monk to turn the monastery's huge mani or prayer-wheel day and night. He received the blessings of the head lama of Pemayangtse, and not a moment too soon as it turned out, for when he reached Darjeeling a month later he was told that the old monk had died almost immediately after Ugyen Gyatso's departure.
Holdich, summing up the achievements of this remarkable Pundit's six-month odyssey, hailed it as 'one of the best records of Tibetan travels that has yet been achieved by any agent of the Survey of India'.5 In a later report, published in 1889, on the work of the Pundits, the Surveyor General of India, Colonel H.R. Thuillier, lavished praise on the plucky monk from Pemayangtse, whom he credited for filling in a crucial gap of the Great Trigonometrical Survey's North-East Trans-Frontier map single-handed, on a mission that took him only slightly longer than six months. Thuillier waxed enthusiastic about Ugyen Gyatso's work at Yamdrok Tso lake, 'the curious double peninsula which he [the Pundit] has completely mapped'. Ugyen Gyatso was also the first to map the upper course of the River Lhobrak that flows eastward to meet the Manas in Assam. He surveyed and mapped areas of north-east Tibet 'over country till then absolutely unknown to us'. Thuillier concludes: 'The valuable geographical information which he has thus collected is interspersed with references to the social and religious customs of the Tibetans, which will doubtless prove very acceptable to the general reader.’6
The Pundit Ugyen Gyatso retired from active service with the Survey of India to spend his post-exploration years as Sub-Inspector of Schools in Darjeeling. On certain occasions, as one of the monks on the monastery's roll, he travelled through the valleys of his native Sikkim to attend high religious ceremonies at Pemayangtse. From time to time he would be coaxed into emerging from his retirement, when the Survey officers had need of his expertise in a liaison role to help guide their work in trans-Himalayan exploration. Ugyen Gyatso was called upon to translate the exploits of a Mongolian monk, Serap Gyatso (no relation), who turned up in Darjeeling with a tale of his travels through the lower Tsangpo valley undertaken nearly thirty years before. The monk's narrative was confined chiefly to a list of names of monasteries, sacred places and villages, with an occasional digression into history and descriptions of wild beasts, throwing little light on the geography of the Tsangpo, according to Ugyen Gyatso's account. The Mongolian lama's account was drawn from memory and, as the Survey report states, must be accepted with caution. His recollection proved surprisingly accurate, as was later confirmed in a debriefing by the explorer Kinrup, although the information he brought back proved to be of minor value to the Survey's objectives of the day. 'Nevertheless, from the information, such as it is, combined with the account of K.P. [the explorer Kintup] ... Colonel Tanner was able to compile a sketch map of the course of the Lower Tsangpo and thus furnish the first contribution to the geography of that unknown tract. '7 Every scrap of information was of value to the Survey's data-gathering mission regarding the people and terrain that lay between British India and that uncharted land beyond the Himalaya, where lurked the Russian enemy. If nothing else, Serap Gyatso's findings helped 'in cross-checking many of the routes of which the authorities in the Survey Department had only heard'.8