Here, indeed, I felt was the chance of my life. I was once more alive. The thrill of adventure again ran through my veins. And I wasted little time in rounding up my business, packing my things, and starting off for Simla.
There I was handed over all the papers in the Foreign Office to digest while the final instructions of the Secretary of State were still awaited. And one afternoon I was asked to lunch with Lord Curzon and Lord Kitchener, at a gymkhana down at Annandale, where, after lunch, sitting under the shade of the glorious pine-trees, Lord Curzon explained to me all his intentions, ideas, and difficulties. Men and ladies performed every feat of equestrian skill and equestrian nonsense, and the place was crowded with all the beauty and gaiety of Simla in the height of the season. But the Viceroy and I sat apart, and talked over the various difficulties I should meet with in Tibet, and the best means by which they could be overcome.
One thing he made perfectly clear to me from the start—that he meant to see the thing through; that he intended the mission to be a success, and would provide me with every means within his power to make it so. Fortunately, we knew each other well—ever since his first appointment as Under-Secretary of State for India. We had travelled together nine years previously round Chitral and Gilgit; we had corresponded for years; and when he came to India he, with a kindness of heart for which he is ordinarily given very little credit, had asked me to regard him, not as Viceroy, but as an old friend and fellow-traveller. No better initiator and supporter of such an enterprise as a mission to Tibet could be imagined. He had his whole heart and soul in the undertaking, and I do not think it took long for me to put my whole heart into it, too.
I had in previous years been despatched from Simla on two political missions—in 1889 to explore the unknown passes on the northern frontier of Kashmir, and to put down the raids from Hunza, and in 1890 to the Pamirs and Chinese Turkestan—so I had some general idea of what to expect on the present occasion; and as I had also spent three months in the Legation at Peking, besides travelling from one end to the other of the Chinese Empire, I knew enough about the Chinese to know that I should never be able to deal successfully with them without the assistance of someone who had had a life-training in the work. I therefore, in the first place, asked for an officer of the China Consular Service to act as adviser and interpreter. Next, as regards dealing with the Tibetans, it was most necessary to have an officer who could speak the Tibetan language, and it was fortunate for the success of the mission that Government were able to send with it, first as Intelligence Officer and afterwards as Secretary, Captain O’Connor, an artillery officer, who, when stationed with his mountain battery at Darjiling, had learned the Tibetan language and studied the history and customs of the Tibetans, and who, I afterwards found, was never so happy as when he was surrounded by begrimed Tibetans, with whom he would spend hour after hour in apparently futile conversation.