To-day we met
more salt-carrying parties -- uncouth-looking savages in pig-tails,
speaking a language that not one of our party could understand. We
also encountered an original-looking gold-washing association of
five, who were wending their way towards the snow with their wooden
implements. They were all also weighted with bags of grain, to keep
them alive during their search. Their labour consists in sifting
the fine sand which comes down in the snow-torrents, charged with
minute particles of gold; and the proceeds, from the appearance of
"the trade," would not seem to be very great. They say it amounts
only to a few annas a day, but would probably not allow to the full
amount for fear of being taxed.
At our breakfast-halt we saw the most primitive specimen of a smoking
apparatus probably ever invented. It consisted of a dab of mud stuck
in a hole of a tree, about five feet from the ground. Two small sticks,
inserted in this from above and below and then withdrawn, had evidently
served to form the smoke passage; while the bowl as evidently had
been fashioned by the simple impression of a Thibetian thumb, the
whole forming, for the use of needy travellers, as permanent and
satisfactory a public pipe as could well have been devised.
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