On arriving at our destination each night, we all crowded round the fire and consumed our tsamba, while our hostess exercised a pair of muscular arms in vigorously stirring up our tea and butter in a big wooden churn,[180] whence she ladled it out into a big pot, from which each of us poured what he wanted into his own bowl. Tibetan tea—made of the twigs of the tea-plant, and its coarsest leaves—has been much maligned: I always found it drinkable if one added plenty of butter and forgot it was meant to be tea. If as tea it is horrible, as a soup it is almost agreeable. The yak-butter, taken by itself, is insipid and unpleasant; but the Tibetans can make a kind of cream-cheese out of it, and I found this fairly good when I could get nothing better. Conversation with my kind hosts was apt to be stilted, even with the assistance of my semi-Tibetan boy. Fortunately my bull-terrier formed a topic of never-failing interest. His three simple tricks had delighted the genial monks of Mount Omei and the village children of central Ssuch'uan, and indeed his mere appearance—so different from that of Chinese dogs—had filled them with wonder; but when the simple herdsmen of the Yalung valley saw the strange foreign beast lying down at the word of command, or sitting on his hind legs and balancing a lump of tsamba on the end of his nose, the prevailing feeling seemed to be something not very far removed from religious awe.
Every valley seemed to have a dialect of its own, and occasionally my servant found it hard to make himself understood. As none of my hosts appeared to have heard of England, it was difficult to satisfy their curiosity about myself, and I fear they often failed to understand what I meant by saying that my country was outside the Chinese empire, and that it had an emperor all to itself. On the whole, I was far less troubled by the inquisitiveness and curiosity of the people than in China proper: and, indeed, I was glad to find that the three soldiers who formed my Chinese escort were often regarded with greater curiosity than I was myself. The children appeared to look upon us as a new kind of wild beast, and I fear we often unwittingly brought tears to their eyes. Our mules were changed, under the rules of the ula system, at nearly every village. A riding-mule was generally procurable for myself, though as a rule I performed at least half the day's journey on foot. When mules were unobtainable we employed yaks, and if yaks were not to be had my baggage was carried by Tibetan men, and still more frequently by women. This last circumstance was a source of great gratification to my three soldiers, who hardly knew more Tibetan than I did myself, but were never at a loss in exchanging lively banter with the damsels who accompanied us. Once or twice I was seized with the unworthy suspicion that the village patriarchs were careful to entrust us with only the least attractive of their women-folk: otherwise, I was at a loss to account for the circumstance that whereas every Tibetan village possessed several good-looking girls, the women who carried our baggage were almost invariably plain.
THE PEOPLE
The people of eastern Tibet are totally unlike the Chinese in appearance, though the extraordinary mixture of races produces a large variety of types. As a rule, the men are tall, very well made, with well-marked features, noses of European shape, and eyelids that are often quite free from the peculiarity which produces in many Eastern races the well-known appearance of an obliquity of the eyes. As specimens of vigorous, stalwart manhood they are much more noteworthy than the people of Lhasa and Central Tibet. They are born mountaineers and have healthy, well-bronzed faces. Sometimes, indeed, they are as dark in complexion as the Burmese.[181] They wear goat-skin or yak-skin clothes, and well-lined leather boots, reaching nearly to their knees, that protect their feet from snow and frost-bite. Most of them are attired in a garment that might be regarded as the prototype of the Scots kilt. The women wear skirts, and, as their feet are of course unbound, they do not walk with the mincing gait of the lily-footed lady of China. I have been told by persons who take an interest in the human form that the average woman of Chinese Tibet is decidedly handsome. It is unfortunate that she does not often wash her face. She is certainly more genial and vivacious than the quiet and timid Chinese woman. She climbs mountains as nimbly as her husband, and the loads she carries are just as heavy; nor does she hesitate to join in amiable conversation with her husband's male friends when she meets them on the road.
Marco Polo, who only touched the fringe of the Tibetan countries, describes in his naïve way some of the peculiar social customs of the people of those lands "as a good story to tell, and to show what a fine country that is for young fellows to go to";[182] and a much later traveller—Cooper—amusingly describes how he unexpectedly found that he had gone through a ceremony of marriage with a Tibetan damsel when he innocently thought that he was merely having a picnic under a grove of walnut trees.[183] No such hymeneal experience fell to my lot, though walnut trees were common enough in the deep valleys. Nor am I able to endorse Marco Polo's somewhat hasty criticism that the Tibetans are "an evil generation, holding it no sin to rob and maltreat: in fact they are the greatest brigands on earth." I took no special care of my money and baggage, yet I never met a robber, and never—so far as I am aware—lost even a handful of tsamba. "These people of Tibet are an ill-conditioned race. They have mastiff dogs as big as donkeys." This further remark of Messer Marco's is nearer the truth if we take "ill-conditioned" to mean "unclean," and allow for a considerable exaggeration about the size of the dogs. No Tibetan household is complete without one or two of those uncouth animals. The breed has changed since Marco's day, for the dogs are not mastiffs (though these are still well known throughout Tibet proper), but a large long-haired dog that somewhat resembles a collie. They are exceedingly savage towards strangers and of great value as watch-dogs. Their physical strength is enormous. The usual custom is to allow them to go loose at night and to chain them up in the yard or in front of the house during the day, the theory apparently being that any one who wanders out of doors after nightfall must be a knave, and deserves any ill-fate that may befall him. Their bark is most peculiar: not sharp and crisp like that of most European dogs, but with a sepulchral and "far-away" sound as if each dog kept his own ghost in his stomach and it was only the ghost that barked.
MOUNTAIN FLORA
The villages are surrounded by fields which—considering the great elevation of even the deepest valleys—are wonderfully productive. In many cases, where the valleys are very narrow, the cultivated land has all been reclaimed from virgin forest. Up to 10,000 feet, and in some places at greater elevations, there is a good deal of wheat and maize; in sheltered valleys, buckwheat, oats, beans, peas and barley are cultivated with considerable success up to over 13,000 feet. The mountain flora surprised me immensely by its richness and variety. Wild-flowers—many of them quite unknown to England and perhaps to Europe—grew luxuriantly in the deep ravines into which we dipped between the parallel ranges, and the mountain slopes up to 14,000 feet at least were generally covered with immense primeval forests of pine and fir. In the great forests the pine was the first to die out on the higher levels; the fir asserted itself to 2,000 or 3,000 feet higher, and the hardiest of all was the tree-rhododendron, which I have seen growing at a greater height than 16,000 feet. There is some variation in the line of perpetual snow on the different ranges and even on the two sides of the same range; on an average it was not below 16,500 feet, though there were several passes at a lower elevation on which I was told the snow only disappeared for two or three months in the summer.[184] Next to the pines and firs the commonest trees are other coniferæ such as the spruce and juniper, and evergreens such as the yew and cypress. Among deciduous trees the poplar,[185] horse-chestnut and wild cherry are common at heights varying from 8,000 to 12,000 feet. The Chinese oak (quercus sinensis), which has evergreen leaves, is also to be met with very frequently. Besides the rhododendron there are many hardy shrubs to be found at elevations almost as great, such as brambles, aucuba, the viburnum, artemisia, a kind of hydrangea, the clematis, and wild-gooseberry. The wild-flowers are naturally not numerous on the summits of the lofty ranges, but in the neighbourhood of the banks of the Yalung and other rivers and in the warmer valleys I found innumerable flowering plants to which, had I been a botanical expert, I should have been glad to put names, but which were, after all, quite as beautiful nameless. The familiar plants included wild roses, edelweiss, gentian, spiræa, and several varieties—some almost certainly unknown to botanists—of the primula.
BIG GAME
Had my principal object in visiting these remote mountains been to study their fauna or to shoot big game, I should no doubt have been amply rewarded for my toil; but, as it was, I cannot say much of the country from a sportsman's point of view, for I carried no rifle, and shot only to supply the needs of my frugal table. Most of the wild animals kept well out of my way, and I did not go in search of them. The musk-deer and horned stags are common denizens of the mountains, and there are also the wolf, fox, antelope, bear, panther,[186] wild ass, wild goat and wild sheep. Sometimes, when camping in the forest—which we had to do several times after crossing the Yalung—my followers insisted upon keeping up a big fire all night, and begged me to discharge my gun once at least to frighten away the beasts of prey. This precaution was judged necessary on account of the mules, which on such occasions were turned loose to find their own fodder. Instinct apparently prevented them from wandering far from the camp, for we never had the least difficulty about catching them in the morning.
The heights of the passes which we crossed varied between 12,000 and 17,500 feet, and some of them were above the line of perpetual snow. The climbing was sometimes very steep work, but it never became really difficult except on the few occasions when we experienced high winds and snow-storms. The cold was then so intense that the thickest furs did not afford adequate protection. The rarefied air made rapid motion impossible, and prevented one from getting warm through exercise. The mules stopped to recover breath at intervals of a hundred yards, and though I never suffered from the least trace of mountain-sickness I often found walking strangely laborious. We made slow progress, of course, sometimes not more than 10 or 12 miles in a day, but nearly every stage took us from dawn to sunset to accomplish. The tops of the passes were generally sharp ridges, in some cases culminating in a sheer wall of frozen snow and ice through which my men had to dig out a path for the mules and for ourselves. Stone cairns (lab ch'a) surmounted by sticks and rags crown the summit of every pass; they were always greeted by my men with shouts of joy, and sometimes they added a stone to the cairn or tied an extra bit of rag to one of the protruding sticks.[187] But the steep descents were sometimes quite as arduous and dangerous as the upward climbs, especially when it was necessary—owing to the excessive steepness—to descend in zig-zags, or when a miniature avalanche tore down in our direction bringing stones and boulders in its frozen clutches.