Heavy Loads.
There are those famous weight-carriers, known to all travellers, the Swiss mountain women, who walk up the steepest slopes with pack baskets of manure on their backs, and the porters of Constantinople, one of whom will hike a small piano on the curious saddle he wears. Now Mr. Perceval Landon, London Times correspondent in Thibet, speaks of hill-country carrying that is most extraordinary.
On the Indian plains porters carry eighty to one hundred pounds, but hill men when working by the job take three times as much up frightfully bad paths. “I have myself seen a man carry into camp three telegraph poles on his back,” writes Mr. Landon, “each weighing a trifle under ninety pounds.” Further East the tea porters of Sechuan are notorious, and loads of 350 pounds are not unknown. Setting aside the story of a Bhutia lady who carried a piano on her head up from the plains to Darjeeling as too well known to be likely to be exact, the record seems to be held by a certain Chinese coolie, who undertook in his own time to transport a certain casting, needed for heavy machinery, inland to its owner. The casting weighed 570 pounds, and the carriage was slowly but successfully accomplished.
“An English bricklayer,” adds Mr. Landon, “is forbidden by the rules of his union to carry more than fourteen pounds.” And in New York the carrying of a few schoolbooks by children without knapsacks is said to make them lopsided.