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.
The remaining marches to Leh, the capital of Lesser Tibet, were full
of fascination and novelty. Everywhere the Tibetans were friendly
and cordial. In each village I was invited to the headman's house,
and taken by him to visit the chief inhabitants; every traveller, lay
and clerical, passed by with the cheerful salutation Tzu, asked me
where I came from and whither I was going, wished me a good journey,
admired Gyalpo, and when he scaled rock ladders and scrambled gamely
through difficult torrents, cheered him like Englishmen, the general
jollity and cordiality of manners contrasting cheerily with the
chilling aloofness of Moslems.
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