Page:Doughty--Mirrikh or A woman from Mars.djvu/105

 hind legs, which is not at all strange when you come to consider that they all wore huge sheepskin coats and caps with the wool turned out.

“Come! come! We must attend to the fire!” cried Maurice suddenly. “Poor wretches! They will be fairly frozen by the time they get here. Hurry, Ah Schow, and put more argols under the k’ang.”

Now the k’ang in a Thibetan or Tartar inn, is of such huge import that I must stop to tell what it is like.

Inns, in the Thibetan mountains, let it be understood, are for the most part mere shelters, maintained for the accomodation of travellers, who are expected to provide for themselves. Indeed the traveller may consider it luck even to find a shelter; he must expect nothing else, or certain  disappointment awaits him. Does he want the tsamba, or barley meal, which forms the staple of diet all over these  regions? If he does, and he has failed to provide himself with it beforehand, then he will be pretty apt to fare badly,  for money here goes for nothing. Even if the inn is in charge of the family whose business it is to keep it clean,  they will have nothing to sell, but rather will try to buy  from you.

Tsamba, vermicelli, or rice, is the kind of diet to which your Thibetan traveller has to accustom himself. He must take his water cask with him; also a copper kettle, a bellows,  a ladle, and a pillow, if he wants one; besides these things  there are the horses or camels to be looked out for. But all this is not telling about the k’ang.

Picture to yourself four mud walls with the binding straw sticking out all over them in spots; thatch overhead, perhaps, or likely enough more mud, plastered over criss-crossed  sticks, with mud pounded hard for the floor.

Such is the average inn interior, all except the k’ang, which is nothing more or less than a broad bench of planks  built up against one wall, closed in front with the exception  of a small opening to thrust the argols through, and numerous holes to let out the heat. Sometimes this opening is in the outside wall, and to build your fire inside you have  to go out of doors.

Usually the k’ang stands about four feet high and takes up three-quarters of the room. Sometimes mats are thrown over it, or bits of carpet, if you have them. In the larger inns, in more populous districts where there are “all modern