Himalayan Journals — Volume 1: Or, Notes of a Naturalist in Bengal, the Sikkim and Nepal Himalayas, the Khasia Mountains, etc.Hooker, Joseph Dalton
History
Himalayan Journals — Volume 1: Or, Notes of a Naturalist in Bengal, the Sikkim and Nepal Himalayas, the Khasia Mountains, etc.
Hooker, Joseph Dalton
Himalaya Mountains -- Description and travel; Natural history -- Himalaya Mountains
On the 1st of December I visited the village and terrace, and
proceeded to the head of the Yangma valley, in order to ascend the
Kanglachem pass as far as practicable. The houses are low, built of
stone, of no particular shape, and are clustered in groups against
the steep face of the terrace; filthy lanes wind amongst them, so
narrow, that if you are not too tall, you look into the slits of
windows on either hand, by turning your head, and feel the noisome
warm air in whiffs against your face. Glacial boulders lie scattered
throughout the village, around and beneath the clusters of houses,
from which it is sometimes difficult to distinguish the native rock.
I entered one house by a narrow low door through walls four feet
thick, and found myself in an apartment full of wool, juniper-wood,
and dried dung for fuel: no one lived in the lower story, which was
quite dark, and as I stood in it my head was in the upper, to which I
ascended by a notched pole (like that in the picture of a Kamschatk
house in Cook's voyage), and went into a small low room. The inmates
looked half asleep, they were intolerably indolent and filthy, and
were employed in spinning wool and smoking. A hole in the wall of the
upper apartment led me on to the stone roof of the neighbouring
house, from which I passed to the top of a glacial boulder,
descending thence by rude steps to the narrow alley. Wishing to see
as much as I could, I was led on a winding course through, in and
out, and over the tops of the houses of the village, which
alternately reminded me of a stone quarry or gravel pit, and gipsies
living in old lime-kilns; and of all sorts of odd places that are
turned to account as human habitations.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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