Strangely, your letter came by the same post as the November R.G.S. journal –
where I saw your comments on Kingdon Ward and his show around Shinden
Gompa. This, again, just after I had finished reading Kaulback’s book on his part of
K.W.'s journey which included your hot springs in the Dipluck La and the takin.
Kaulback was very readable – a plain unvarnished account by a man who, K.W.
says, will be one of the great travellers of the near future. They seem to think a lot of
each other, those two. But Kaulback, from his book, struck me as having been
unnecessarily “un-bundobust” about his show. I don't think you or I would, from sheer
carelessness, have been caught short of both boots and bare food, though you were
compelled to live on the forced diet(?) you had 4 weeks down the Lohit in 1911. I
think it was Nordenskjold who said that “adventures” were a sign of bad bundobust,
and that hardships need not happen. However, he was always on the side of the
angels.
Well, of course, K.W. has the great pull over men who are compelled by time,
finance, or political considerations to take a direct line and carry straight through, in
that his arrangements – and his finances that cover them – provide for an early start,
where he can see his flowers and shrubs in their first spring or early summer bloom:
then he has a considerable gap, and then does turn
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round once more to collect seed pods. It seems that in the “middle gap” he has time
to put in, and some time to do these treks round, thoroughly covering all the area in
which he is working – hence his scramble down the Tsangpo Gorge and his rambles
round the Shinden Gompa – Sangachu Dyong valley and glaciers. And provided a
man has the necessary instruments and knowledge, and has used quiet times here
at home in working up every scrap of knowledge accumulated by previous travellers,
there is no reason why he shouldn't have a very useful skeleton of his chosen area
worked out already on squared paper before he gets there. By none of which do I
desire in the slightest to minimise what he does and has done. I think you and I
would have considered him an acquisition at any time on the N.E. frontier, but what I
do think is that the peculiar conditions of his very specialised job give him
opportunities denied to anyone but a professional botanist.
I was particularly interested in what he worked out about the North East head
waters of the Dibang. That tangle of country always puzzled me, and now he seems
to have got it into some kind of understandable sequence. His description of the
almost dwarfish, perfectly flat-faced and monkey like Behijiyas fits exactly a small
parcel of otherwise unclassifiable strangers whom we ran into on the Dibang just
before we had to turn back in 1911. You, of course, went much further up than that
later, but you may remember the lot I mean. I've a snapshot of them somewhere,
which I'll show you when you're here. K.W. says they’re the same as the DARUS of
Upper Burma. I suppose all those Mishmis you and I knew that year were Chulikattis,
and I still believe there's more difference between the two tribes then will allow of
their being classified as nothing but branches of the same clan.
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