SIKHIM AND BHUTAN
up the Pa-chhu the fort of Dug-gye dominates the route to Phari, and takes its name from a notable defeat of Tibetan invaders. Soon we came upon the monastery of Gorina, which a former Shabdung Rimpochi used to make his summer retreat. The chapel was clean, and gaily decorated with fresco paintings in good taste, while the hangings round the altar were overlaid with wrought brass open-work superior to anything that I had seen in Lhasa, but in sharp contrast the side altars were adorned with four gaudy green porcelain parrots. The chuten was a very fine one, and on the face was a figure of Buddha embossed on a large brass plate. There was also a subsidiary gompa, but we did not go inside. On the ridge below we were greeted with salvos of artillery, fired from iron tubes bound with leather; and I wondered whether these could be the leather cannon of which we heard so much in the Chinese-Gurkha war. The Paro Penlop’s band was also waiting, with three richly caparisoned mules in attendance, and we slowly descended a clayey slope which must be absolutely impassable in wet weather, and thence rode along the plain, past the fort and its bridge, through a quadruple avenue of willows, to our destination that day, Paro, where our camp was pitched on a large level maidan. A large square had been marked off by a strong lattice fence of split bamboo, and at the entrance a new Swiss cottage tent was pitched, and in it I found waiting to receive me the Penlop’s small son and the Paro Donyer, who offered us tea, oranges, and fruit for our refreshment. The Donyer was particular in reminding Paul that he had formed one of the Penlop's party some sixteen years before, and had then been photographed, and was very pleased when I promised to take him again that afternoon. I was particularly struck on the day’s march by the total absence of rhododendrons, which always love a peaty soil, and the change from gneiss to crystalline limestone, sandstone, and dark shales, then to heavy red clay deeply impregnated with iron, and again to bluish-grey limestone.
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