“I do not believe that he can be your baby, for he has a smooth skin and yours is rough and wrinkled. Were he your child he would have a skin like yours.”
The woman, half-amused, half-astonished, called witnesses to testify that the baby was really hers, and after assumed reluctance I acknowledged that there existed some resemblance between mother and son, in the lack of nose.
“Why,” I asked her, “did you not have the child sooner, so that he might now be a help and comfort to you in your old age?”
She said she had had two other children, but they had died, one when only “a few moons” old, the other when about four years of age.
With the exception of the few larger towns, Tibet is peopled by small, semi-nomadic tribes. A [[132]]large tribe may number a hundred tents, but the average is from ten to fifty tents. Each tent is inhabited by one family, although investigation generally brings out the fact that nearly all members of a tribe are related to one another owing to the constant intermarriage among themselves.
This constant intermarriage also contributes to a great extent to the decadence of the race generally, and to the diminution of the population with each generation.
Tibetan Lady
I had several opportunities of noticing the difference which existed when either the wife or husband had come from a distant tribe. There were generally more children to the union, and they were invariably stronger, both physically and mentally. The Tibetans are well aware of this, and when a tribe is likely to die out from the causes I have stated, fresh blood is imported into it by the advice of the Lamas in order to revive it.
I found that the cleverer men I met in the country were generally born from parents of different tribes, and not infrequently of widely separated social positions.