We continued our route, and plodded on, the sun now hot, finally arriving at our camping place, the village of Shazgool, a Buddhist place, with the lama's house curiously built into the face of a perpendicular rock looking down on the village, a shabby tumble-down place, and some tombs or shrines tawdrily painted with clumsy devices of hideous demons on them. These are paltry looking constructions, of mud principally.
This was a small village of some nine or ten houses in a dilapidated condition; but they are all apparently in like bad case, the inhabitants miserably poor, judging from their appearance and surrounding indications. But they seem to be stout, healthy, and cheerful. The women, I fancy, do most of the work, as with all barbarians. A large wicker basket seems to be a fixture on their backs, and with this appendage they are seen busy in the fields, weeding, putting every shred of herbage so gathered into the said basket which by evening is filled, when they return, and the produce of their industry serves for fodder for cow, sheep, or goat, every blade of vegetation being of value in these barren regions, where nothing grows but what is actually extorted from reluctant nature. How different from the adjoining country of Cashmere, where, on the other hand, nature is profuse in her gifts, covering mountain and valley with the richest herbage, and yielding heavy crops of cereals to the merest scratches of the plough. Both are wonderful countries: Cashmere, for its beauty and fertility; Thibet, for its savage desolation and sterility. The natives of each land, too, partake strongly of the relative characteristics of their native land: the Cashmiries, famous for personal beauty,--the Thibetans, as notorious for ugliness. Strange, though, they possess some taste; for almost every individual of the numbers met travelling yesterday and to-day had a bunch of yellow roses, or other bright flowers stuck in his greasy cap.
10th July. On the march at 5 A.M.--the path as ever in these mountainous regions running by a stream threading the narrow valley. Here and there was a strip of green cultivation, with brown mountains, mounts, huge hillocks, all barren, some craggy, others smoothly rounded, heap on heap, pile on pile, here falling sloping back, allowing the eye to range over many successive wave-like summits, there rising up abruptly with crags, and clefts, and dark ravines, closing in upon and overshadowing the narrow valley. I tried to find some mode of description by which one might give a person verbally some tolerable idea of the combined desolation and grandeur of these scenes; but all in vain.