Among the Tibetans | Page 8

and that was CENTRAL ASIA.
We halted for breakfast, iced our cold tea in the snow, Mr. M. gave a
final charge to the Afghan, who swore by his Prophet to be faithful, and
I parted from my kind escorts with much reluctance, and started on my
Tibetan journey, with but a slender stock of Hindustani, and two men
who spoke not a word of English. On that day's march of fourteen miles
there is not a single hut. The snowfield extended for five miles, from
ten to seventy feet deep, much crevassed, and encumbered with
avalanches. In it the Dras, truly 'snow-born,' appeared, issuing from a
chasm under a blue arch of ice and snow, afterwards to rage down the
valley, to be forded many times or crossed on snow bridges. After
walking for some time, and getting a bad fall down an avalanche slope,
I mounted Gyalpo, and the clever, plucky fellow frolicked over the
snow, smelt and leapt crevasses which were too wide to be stepped
over, put his forelegs together and slid down slopes like a Swiss mule,
and, though carried off his feet in a ford by the fierce surges of the Dras,
struggled gamely to shore. Steep grassy hills, and peaks with gorges

cleft by the thundering Dras, and stretches of rolling grass succeeded
each other. Then came a wide valley mostly covered with stones
brought down by torrents, a few plots of miserable barley grown by
irrigation, and among them two buildings of round stones and mud,
about six feet high, with flat mud roofs, one of which might be called
the village, and the other the caravanserai. On the village roof were
stacks of twigs and of the dried dung of animals, which is used for fuel,
and the whole female population, adult and juvenile, engaged in
picking wool. The people of this village of Matayan are Kashmiris. As
I had an hour to wait for my tent, the women descended and sat in a
circle round me with a concentrated stare. They asked if I were dumb,
and why I wore no earrings or necklace, their own persons being loaded
with heavy ornaments. They brought children afflicted with skin-
diseases, and asked for ointment, and on hearing that I was hurt by a
fall, seized on my limbs and shampooed them energetically but not
undexterously. I prefer their sociability to the usual chilling aloofness
of the people of Kashmir.
The Serai consisted of several dark and dirty cells, built round a blazing
piece of sloping dust, the only camping-ground, and under the entrance
two platforms of animated earth, on which my servants cooked and
slept. The next day was Sunday, sacred to a halt; but there was no
fodder for the animals, and we were obliged to march to Dras,
following, where possible, the course of the river of that name, which
passes among highly-coloured and snow-slashed mountains, except in
places where it suddenly finds itself pent between walls of flame-
coloured or black rock, not ten feet apart, through which it boils and
rages, forming gigantic pot-holes. With every mile the surroundings
became more markedly of the Central Asian type. All day long a white,
scintillating sun blazes out of a deep blue, rainless, cloudless sky. The
air is exhilarating. The traveller is conscious of daily-increasing energy
and vitality. There are no trees, and deep crimson roses along torrent
beds are the only shrubs. But for a brief fortnight in June, which
chanced to occur during my journey, the valleys and lower slopes
present a wonderful aspect of beauty and joyousness. Rose and pale
pink primulas fringe the margin of the snow, the dainty Pedicularis
tubiflora covers moist spots with its mantle of gold; great yellow and

white, and small purple and white anemones, pink and white dianthus,
a very large myosotis, bringing the intense blue of heaven down to
earth, purple orchids by the water, borage staining whole tracts deep
blue, martagon lilies, pale green lilies veined and spotted with brown,
yellow, orange, and purple vetches, painter's brush, dwarf dandelions,
white clover, filling the air with fragrance, pink and cream asters,
chrysanthemums, lychnis, irises, gentian, artemisia, and a hundred
others, form the undergrowth of millions of tall Umbelliferae and
Compositae, many of them peach-scented and mostly yellow. The wind
is always strong, and the millions of bright corollas, drinking in the
sun-blaze which perfects all too soon their brief but passionate
existence, rippled in broad waves of colour with an almost
kaleidoscopic effect. About the eleventh march from Srinagar, at Kargil,
a change for the worse occurs, and the remaining marches to the capital
of Ladakh are over blazing gravel or surfaces of denuded rock, the
singular Caprifolia horrida, with its dark-green mass of wavy ovate
leaves on trailing stems, and