The night had closed in rain, and rolling clouds blotted out the lights of the villages in the valley.  Forty miles away, untouched by cloud or storm, the white shoulder of Donga Pa—­the Mountain of the Council of the Gods—­upheld the Evening Star.  The monkeys sang sorrowfully to each other as they hunted for dry roosts in the fern-wreathed trees, and the last puff of the day-wind brought from the unseen villages the scent of damp wood-smoke, hot cakes, dripping undergrowth, and rotting pine-cones.  That is the true smell of the Himalayas, and if once it creeps into the blood of a man, that man will at the last, forgetting all else, return to the hills to die.  The clouds closed and the smell went away, and there remained nothing in all the world except chilling white mist and the boom of the Sutlej river racing through the valley below.  A fat-tailed sheep, who did not want to die, bleated piteously at my tent door.  He was scuffling with the Prime Minister and the Director-General of Public Education, and he was a royal gift to me and my camp servants.  I expressed my thanks suitably, and asked if I might have audience of the King.  The Prime Minister readjusted his turban, which had fallen off in the struggle, and assured me that the King would be very pleased to see me.  Therefore I despatched two bottles as a foretaste, and when the sheep had entered upon another incarnation went to the King’s Palace through the wet.  He had sent his army to escort me, but the army stayed to talk with my cook.  Soldiers are very much alike all the world over.

The Palace was a four-roomed and whitewashed mud and timber house, the finest in all the hills for a day’s journey.  The King was dressed in a purple velvet jacket, white muslin trousers, and a saffron-yellow turban of price.  He gave me audience in a little carpeted room opening off the palace courtyard which was occupied by the Elephant of State.  The great beast was sheeted and anchored from trunk to tail, and the curve of his back stood out grandly against the mist.

The Prime Minister and the Director-General of Public Education were present to introduce me, but all the court had been dismissed, lest the two bottles aforesaid should corrupt their morals.  The King cast a wreath of heavy-scented flowers round my neck as I bowed, and inquired how my honoured presence had the felicity to be.  I said that through seeing his auspicious countenance the mists of the night had turned into sunshine, and that by reason of his beneficent sheep his good deeds would be remembered by the Gods.  He said that since I had set my magnificent foot in his Kingdom the crops would probably yield seventy per cent more than the average.  I said that the fame of the King had reached to the four corners of the earth, and that the nations gnashed their teeth when they heard daily of the glories of his realm and the wisdom of his moon-like Prime Minister and lotus-like Director-General of Public Education.