[187] Customs of this kind seem to exist or to have existed all over the world. For Tibet, see Sarat Chandra Das's Journey to Lhasa and Central Tibet, and several recent works. Frazer, in the Golden Bough (2nd edn. vol. iii. pp. 4-6), has an interesting note in which he mentions the same or similar customs in the Solomon and Banks Islands, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Central and South Africa, Bolivia, Burma and Korea. He says: "The act is not a religious rite, for the thing thrown on the heap is not an offering to spiritual powers, and the words which accompany the act are not a prayer. It is nothing but a magical ceremony for getting rid of fatigue, which the simple savage fancies he can embody in a stick, leaf, or stone, and so cast it from him." Gipsies have a custom of leaving heaps of stones and bits of stick at cross-roads, to guide members of their band who have fallen behind. I do not propose to argue from this fact that the gipsy race was originally a Tibetan tribe, in spite of the facts that both gipsies and Tibetans love a wandering life, and that the gipsies of Persia and the Tibetans use almost the same word for "tent," which is guri in Persia and gur (གུར་) in Tibet.
[188] River of Golden Sand, vol. ii. p. 136.
[189] Royal Geographical Society's Supplementary Papers, vol. i. p. 96.
[190] Sometimes, however, the door is several feet above the level of the ground, so that ladders of some kind must have been used for entrance and exit.
[191] The word Drung or Dr'ong (གྲོང་) is the Tibetan word for Village.
[192] La is the Tibetan word for a Mountain Pass. Ri, which often occurs in the names of villages and passes, means Mountain, and Rong Valley.
[193] See above, p. 143.
[194] See above, p. 145.
[195] Many of the villages between Tachienlu and Yung-ning have been given Chinese names by the Yunnanese, who occasionally send merchandise by this route. The Chinese name, as a rule, has no connection with the Tibetan or Man-tzŭ name. Wu Chia-tzŭ, for instance, means a "Village of Five Families"; San Chia-tzŭ a "Village of Three Families."
[196] See illustration of this tower, which is a fair sample of the rest, to face p. 171.