From this yard we entered a half-dark room, with a floor of mud, and two openings in the roof, through which the smoke escapes and the daylight enters. The roof consists of beams overlaid with a thatch of brushwood, which is covered all over with soil and flat stones—it must be nice and dry when it rains. There sat an elderly woman telling off her manis on a rosary of porcelain beads.
The next room is the kitchen, the general living-room and the principal apartment of the house. At a projecting wall stands the stone cooking-range with round black-edged holes for saucepans and teapots of baked clay. A large earthen pot, standing on the fire, contains barley, which is eaten parched; a stick with a stiff piece of leather at the end is twirled round in the barley between the palms so that it may be roasted equally. It tastes delicious.
I went about, turned over all the household utensils and made an inventory, and not in Swedish only, but also in Tibetan. There were many different vessels of iron, clay, and wood for all kinds of purposes, a large wooden ladle, a tea sieve of sheet-iron, an iron spoon, an ash shovel, iron fire-tongs, and a thing called a thagma, an iron blade fitted into a piece of wood, something like a closed pocket-knife, and used to dress newly woven material. A large clay jug was filled with chang. A small cubical vessel divided into four by small cross pieces of wood is used to measure corn. Brick-tea is pulverized with a stone shaped like a cucumber in a deep wooden cup. A knife-blade with a haft at either end is used in preparing and tawing hides. Under one of the smoke vents stood a small hearth for an open fire with an iron tripod. A large leathern sack was filled with tsamba, and two sheep’s stomachs held fat and butter. On a rack a quantity of sheep’s trotters, dusty and dirty, were arranged; when they are several months old they are used to make soup, which is thickened with tsamba. Tea, salt, and tobacco are kept in large and small bags.
We saw likewise all kinds of religious objects, votive bowls, joss-sticks, and small image cases; also bales of home-woven textiles, coloured ribands for sewing on skin coats and boots, knives, hatchets, sabres and spears, which, we were told, are for fighting thieves and robbers; a pair of bellows, two sacks of dry dung for fuel, baskets, hand-mills for grinding barley, consisting of two round flat stones with a handle on the upper one; lastly, an oil-lamp and an oil-can, and a cylindrical tub with iron hoops full of water. In a corner lay heaps of skins and garments, and against the wall were two sleeping-places still in disorder.
In another store-room there were provisions in sacks, barley, green fodder, peas, and great joints of meat. Here three young women and a troop of children had taken refuge; we left them room to escape, and they ran away screaming loudly as if all the knives in the house were at their throats. In the room were balances for weighing, consisting of a rounded staff with a stone weight at one end and a dried yak hide at the other. Behind a partition straw was kept. There are high inconvenient thresholds between the rooms, and the usual bundles of rods on the roof to protect the house from evil spirits.
After this expedition we inspected the tents of our escort, where a fire was burning in a broken clay pot, and a skillet stood over it on a tripod. The smoke escapes through the long slit between the two halves of which the tent is composed. The owners of the tent were writing their report to the authorities in Shigatse, informing them that we were on the right road. At the same time they were eating their dinner of mutton, a year old, dry and hard; it must not come near the fire. One of them cut it into strips and distributed it among his comrades. He had been for twenty years a lama in the monastery Lung-ganden in Tong, but a few years before had been ejected from the confraternity because he had fallen in love with a woman. He spoke of it himself, so it was doubtless true.
Robert’s bay horse was reported dead on the morning of April 20. His late tumble now seemed to us like an omen; though fat and sleek, he died suddenly about midnight. We now ride on again towards higher regions over uncomfortable blocks of stone, but the valley becomes more open and the relative heights diminish. Though the little that is left of the stream still swirls and foams, the ice becomes thicker, and at last covers almost all the bed, and the water is heard rushing and murmuring under it. Juicy moss skirts the banks, the view becomes more extensive, and the whole character of the landscape becomes alpine. We saw ten men with guns in a sheepfold, carrying gun-rests with yellow and red pennants on one of the prongs; perhaps they were highway robbers. Dark clouds sweep over the ridges, and in a minute we are in the midst of icy-cold drifting snow, but it does not last long.
The last bit of road was awful, nothing but boulders and débris, which we could sometimes avoid by riding over the ice of the river. The camping-ground was called Chomo-sumdo, a valley fork in a desolate region, but the escort had seen that some straw and barley were brought up on yaks for our horses.
From here we had to ride on the ice, smooth and firm after 27 degrees of frost in the night. The neighbourhood is not, however, uninhabited, for yaks and sheep were seen grazing in many places, belonging to nomads migrating northwards or merchants coming from Tok-jalung. At two black tents the people were packing up for the day’s march; they had goats, with strips of red cloth bound round the ears.