The Tinker Pass, Nepal-Tibet
The Tibetans, having lived for so many generations at such great altitudes, suffer a great deal [[123]]when they travel to lower elevations, and they experience a feeling of suffocation and heaviness which makes them very ill and frequently causes their death. This is not so much the case with natives of the Sikkim district and of Lhassa, which are at a much lower elevation; but I am talking principally of the natives of S.W. Tibet, few of whom live at an elevation of less than 15,000 feet.
“Then,” say other wise folks, “if you maintain that next to nothing grows in Tibet, that the people are not farmers, how do they manage to live?”
The answer is simple. The Tibetans import all their food from India, Nepal, Cashmere, and China during the summer months, while the snow-passes are open, and they store it in sufficient quantities to last them all through the winter. Wheat, rice, tsamba (a kind of oatmeal), ghur (sweet paste), sugar are bartered in large quantities in exchange for borax, salt, sheep, and yak wool.
Another question that seems to puzzle most people is why polyandry exists legally in Tibet instead of our marriage customs or polygamy, and in the next chapter I will endeavour to explain the reason, as well as why women are so much less numerous than men. [[124]]
CHAPTER XII
The first two things that strike an observant traveller on entering a Tibetan encampment are that the number of children in the population is so small, and that the majority of Tibetans appear, to European eyes, middle-aged, or even old and decrepit. The second remark is more easily explained than the first, and many are the reasons which cause Tibetan men and women to look well on in years long before they have attained a really advanced age. I have seen a man with hands and face so wrinkled that he might easily pass for an octogenarian, yet he was no more than three-and-forty.
Flying Prayers and a Mani Wall