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Alcesti de Righi Diary Entry Sunday, 13 August 1905
I am up by 5, and by 6 o'clock, I have all the coolies on their way. By 7 all have gone and Tenduk, my faithful servant, had breakfast ready. Thus done justice to I stroll off to see the sights, which, consist of a large pokeri or waterhole. A terrible tale is told of this lakelet. Sometime or other there was a great fight near by, and two thousand corpses were thrown into it, when it burst into flames and since then nothing will float on its surface. Even a leaf is either engulfed or driven ashore.
By 11 o'clock we are again on the march. The road now is a good mountain path. Waddell in "Among the Himalayas" describes it as a terrible path of knife edges, which cut all his boots and lamed some of the men. A few of its rocks are pretty sharp, but on the whole we do not find it very bad. The rocks are mostly gneiss, full of mica; all around us are jungles of the ever present rhododendron. As we mount it is raining cats and dogs, and, waterproof or no waterproof, the rain percolates to the skin. This is the state one wants to be in to be able to describe scenery! We are wrapped in clouds and but little is to be seen. On enquiry the Tamany shepherds, who live at Chambanjan tell us of a good camping place about three miles on, so to make sure not to miss it we ask him to come along with us with a promise of payment, but he is very unwilling. We use a little persuasion (French for ice axe), and he is simply dying to come along. I start off in advance, and on reaching the summit of this hill I find the place only about a mile away from Chambanjan, and no good drinking water, so after resting a little I decide on going down to another pokeri lower down, where a larger naidan will better accommodate our porters, besides having some good, clear, through stagnant, rain water. I have some trouble in getting the coolies to follow. They grumble and say we have no tents for them, and that we want to kill them. It is no good my explaining that we have shelter for them in the shape of tarpaulins and all they have to do is to put them up, so, failing this, ridicule brings them round. I simply tell them thought we had engaged men, not women. This raises a laugh, and I have no further trouble with them. Wet and weary we at last reach this camping ground, which, being unable to find a native name for it, I will call Valley Camp No. 1. All gradually come in and soon we have a little busti set up, each crowd of coolies with their little fires burning and men running about everywhere, some carrying water, others cutting wood some building their shelters with a tarpaulin roof and branches of rhododendron for walls. Leeches abound, mostly the yellow striped variety, the most voracious and the largest of all I believe. The men with their naked feet, all bleeding from their bites, suffer the most. I thought I had escaped, but on taking my putties, boots, and stockings off I find four bites, so boots, etc., are no safeguard. We found these pests of the jungle at Jorepokry a small kind but very lively. At Many Banjan we rid some cows of a good many of them. I think Hooker gives a detailed description of this, the pest of Sikkim, but only mentions having found it from 3,000 feet to 10,000 feet, but we found them here at 13,000 feet. Whether they have been brought up by our coolies I cannot say but there were numbers of them.
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