This Is Shergol, The First Village Of Buddhists,
And There I Was 'among The Tibetans.'
CHAPTER II - SHERGOL AND LEH
The chaos of rocks and sand, walled in by vermilion and orange
mountains, on which the village of Shergol stands, offered no
facilities for camping; but somehow the men managed to pitch my tent
on a steep slope, where I had to place my trestle bed astride an
irrigation channel, down which the water bubbled noisily, on its way
to keep alive some miserable patches of barley. At Shergol and
elsewhere fodder is so scarce that the grain is not cut, but pulled
up by the roots.
The intensely human interest of the journey began at that point. Not
greater is the contrast between the grassy slopes and deodar-clothed
mountains of Kashmir and the flaming aridity of Lesser Tibet, than
between the tall, dark, handsome natives of the one, with their
statuesque and shrinking women, and the ugly, short, squat, yellow-
skinned, flat-nosed, oblique-eyed, uncouth-looking people of the
other. The Kashmiris are false, cringing, and suspicious; the
Tibetans truthful, independent, and friendly, one of the pleasantest
of peoples. I 'took' to them at once at Shergol, and terribly faulty
though their morals are in some respects, I found no reason to change
my good opinion of them in the succeeding four months.
The headman or go-pa came to see me, introduced me to the objects of
interest, which are a gonpo, or monastery, built into the rock, with
a brightly coloured front, and three chod-tens, or relic-holders,
painted blue, red, and yellow, and daubed with coarse arabesques and
representations of deities, one having a striking resemblance to Mr.
Gladstone. The houses are of mud, with flat roofs; but, being
summer, many of them were roofless, the poplar rods which support the
mud having been used for fuel. Conical stacks of the dried excreta
of animals, the chief fuel of the country, adorned the roofs, but the
general aspect was ruinous and poor. The people all invited me into
their dark and dirty rooms, inhabited also by goats, offered tea and
cheese, and felt my clothes. They looked the wildest of savages, but
they are not. No house was so poor as not to have its 'family
altar,' its shelf of wooden gods, and table of offerings. A
religious atmosphere pervades Tibet, and gives it a singular sense of
novelty. Not only were there chod-tens and a gonpo in this poor
place, and family altars, but prayer-wheels, i.e. wooden cylinders
filled with rolls of paper inscribed with prayers, revolving on
sticks, to be turned by passers-by, inscribed cotton bannerets on
poles planted in cairns, and on the roofs long sticks, to which
strips of cotton bearing the universal prayer, Aum mani padne hun (O
jewel of the lotus-flower), are attached. As these wave in the wind
the occupants of the house gain the merit of repeating this sentence.
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