A Mountain in Tibet [antikvár]

When I was four my father, Geoffrey St G. T. Allen, was appointed Assistant Political Officer on the Balipara Frontier Tract in Assam. For several years we lived in the apo's bungalow at Sadiya, on the banks of the Brahmaputra river and under the shadow of the Eastern Himalayas. Every morning there were visitors - exotic even to a child's eye -who gathered in the compound, squatting on their hunkers and smoking as they waited for the sahib to appear on the verandah. They were tribesmen from the hills, mostly Abor and Mishmi warriors, sturdy, wild-looking men in rudimentary loin cloths, with swords strapped across their shoulders. In the summer months their numbers were swelled by Tibetans, sweating, awkward giants with pigtails and flashing teeth who wore their thick, yak-hair coats rolled down to the waist to reveal pale, butter-coated skin. They had crossed the Himalayan barrier, bringing turquoise, amber and musk to trade in the plains. Later I came to England and from my grandmother heard stories about her father. Colonel St G. C. Gore, Surveyor-General of India from 1899 to 1904, who in his time had spent months and even years on lonely surveys in the Himalayas. He had known Everest, Godwin-Austen and General Walker as well as Sven Hedin and the Pundit explorers, Nain Singh and Kishen Singh Rawat. Later still I met Professor (and Colonel) Kenneth Mason, then almost ninety and probably the last of the players of the Great Game. He told me how once in his youth he had outsmarted a Russian adversary in the high Pamirs; the two men had swapped toasts all night and in the morning, while the Russian lay in a stupor in his tent. Mason had exchanged his own useless ponies for the other man's yaks and made off with them. Besides being a distinguished explorer and geographer, Kenneth Mason was also a keen historian. It was from him that I first heard the outline of the story that is told