I felt that it was useless to persist. Having seen the two drunken creatures laid flat under a shed, and well covered with blankets, I therefore returned to Garbyang, with the intention of making a fresh start shortly before sunrise, when the drunkards would probably be fit to walk by themselves, and found shelter under the ever hospitable roof of Dr. Wilson.
CHAPTER XIX
A dangerous track—Perilous passage—A curious bridge over a precipice—Pathetic Shoka custom—Small misadventures—A grand reception—Tea for all tastes.
At 4 a.m., before the sun rose, I made a fresh and hurried start. I proceeded quickly to the spot where I had left the two drunken men. They had gone ahead.
Indeed the track was a bad and dangerous one, overhanging precipices, and hardly wide enough to give standing room upon it. We came to a spot where the narrow path stopped. There was before us a perpendicular rock descending straight as a wall to the Kali River. The corrosive action of dripping water and melting snow, of which last there seemed to be a thick layer higher above on the summit of the cliff, had worn the face of the rock quite smooth. The distance across this vertical wall-like ravine was not more than forty or fifty feet. On the other side of it the narrow track began again.
Owing to this and other dangerous places, this route is but very seldom used by the natives or by any one else. The road generally taken is on the opposite side of the Kali River, in Nepal territory. Nevertheless, a few Shokas possess bits of land on this bank of the stream, and it was by them that, in order to surmount the obstacle before which I now stood, the following expedient was devised in former years.
By letting down a man from above with ropes they succeeded in making two rows of small hollows in the rock, along two parallel horizontal lines, the higher of which was about six feet or so above the lower. The holes were dug at intervals of three or four feet along each line, the upper ones to be caught on by one's hands, the lower ones to
