Himalayan Journals — Volume 2: Or, Notes of a Naturalist in Bengal, the Sikkim and Nepal Himalayas, the Khasia Mountains, etc.Hooker, Joseph Dalton
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Himalayan Journals — Volume 2: 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
The Dingpun paid his respects to us in the morning, wearing, besides
his green cloak, a white cap with a green glass button, denoting his
rank; he informed us that he had written to his superior officer at
Kambajong, explaining his motives for conducting us across the
frontier, and he drew from his breast a long letter, written on
_Daphne_* [Most of the paper used in Tibet is, as I have elsewhere
noticed, made from the bark of various species of _Daphneae,_ and
especially of _Edgeworthia Gardneri,_ and is imported from Nepal and
Bhotan; but the Tibetans, as MM. Huc and Gabet correctly state,
manufacture a paper from the root of a small shrub: this I have seen,
and it is of a much thicker texture and more durable than Daphne
paper. Dr. Thomson informs me that a species of _Astragalus_ is used
in western Tibet for this purpose, the whole shrub, which is dwarf,
being reduced to pulp.] paper, whose ends were tied with floss silk,
with a large red seal; this he pompously delivered, with whispered
orders, to an attendant, and sent him off. He admired our clothes
extremely,* [All Tibetans admire sad value English broad-cloth beyond
any of our products. Woollen articles are very familiar to them, and
warm clothing is one of the first requisites of life.] and then my
percussion gun, the first he had seen; but above all he admired rum
and water, which he drank with intense relish, leaving a mere sip for
his comrades at the bottom of his little wooden cup, which they
emptied, and afterwards licked clean, and replaced in his breast for
him. We made a large basin full of very weak grog for his party, who
were all friendly and polite; and having made us the unexpected offer
of allowing us to rest ourselves for the day at Yeumtso, he left us,
and practised his men at firing at a mark, but they were very
indifferent shots.
I ascended with Campbell to the lake he had visited on the previous
day, about 600 or 800 feet above Yeumtso, and 17,500 feet above the
sea: it is a mile and a half long, and occupies a large depression
between two rounded spurs, being fed by glaciers from Kinchinjhow.
The rocks of these spurs were all of red quartz and slates, cut into
broad terraces, covered with a thick glacial talus of gneiss and
granite in angular pebbles, and evidently spread over the surface
when the glacier, now occupying the upper end of the lake, extended
over the valley.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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