Note 3 — Chapter XI

“On the 6th instant I called on him, and found him feverish, with foul tongue, dry skin, and headache. I urged him to take some medicine, but in vain. He said he had suffered often from fever and other ailments, from which he had recovered without physic; that rhubarb was the only thing of the sort he had ever used, except tartar emetic. The former had been recommended to him by Moorcroft, and the latter by a Persian doctor. He took out of his box a small bit of decayed rhubarb and a phial of tartar emetic, and said, with apparent distrust in their virtues, ‘As you wish it, I will take some to-morrow, if I am not better; it is too late to-day, the sun is going down.’ I sent him some weak soup, and returned to see him on the 7th. He was then much better, got off his pallet, entered into conversation, chatted animatedly with me for an hour on his favourite subjects of thought and inquiry. For the first time since I had seen him, he this day showed how sensitive he was to the applause of the world as a reward to his labours and privations. He went over the whole of his travels in Tibet with fluent rapidity; and in noticing each stage of the results of his studies, he mentioned the distinguished notice that had been accorded in Europe and India to the facts and doctrines brought to light by him. He seemed especially gratified with an editorial article by Prof. Wilson in the supplement to the ‘Government Gazette’ of 9th July 1829, which he produced, and bid me read; it related to the extreme hardships he had undergone while at the monastery of Zanskar, where, with the thermometer below zero, for more than four months he was precluded by the severity of the weather from stirring out of a room nine feet square; yet in this situation he read from morning till evening without a fire, the ground forming his bed, and the walls of the building his protection against the rigours of the climate, and still he collected and arranged forty thousand words of the language of Tibet, and nearly completed his Dictionary and Grammar.3 Passing from this subject, he said, in a playful mood, ‘I will show you something very curious,’ and he produced another number of Wilson’s paper of September 10, 1827, and pointing to one editorial paragraph, desired me to read it first, and then hear the explanation.4 It runs thus (after noticing some communications to the Asiatic Society from Mr Hodgson): ‘In connection with the literature and religion of Tibet, and indeed of the whole of the Bhoti countries, we are happy to learn that the patronage of the Government has enabled the Hungarian traveller, Csoma de Körös, to proceed to Upper Besarh to prosecute his Tibetan studies for three years, in which period he engages to prepare a comprehensive Grammar and Vocabulary of the language, with an account of the history and literature of the country.