Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 15, 1904.djvu/480

 448 Collectanea.

her quota of stones and prayers, gave me to understand that, in order to secure our future happiness, she must have a couple of Khatah cloths to attach to the flagstaffs ; and there was nothing for it but to unpack one of the baggage-animals, and get out the ' scarves of felicity (?) ' Having given them to the young lady, I was inwardly congratulating myself that now at least we should be able to continue our march, for the afternoon was wearing, and our station for the night was still distant. But my matrimonial embarrassments had not yet ended. It was necessary for 7ne to tie one of the ' scarves of felicity ' to the flagstaff, and kneel in prayer with my bride. This I peremptorily refused to do ; but poor Lo-tzung shed such a torrent of tears, and informed me in such heart-broken accents that if I did not do this we should not be happy, and that she especially would be miserable, that there was nothing for it but to comply. And there, on the summit of a Thibetan mountain, kneeling before a heap of stones, my hand wet with the tears of a daughter of the country, I muttered curses on the fate that had placed me in such a position." ^ Mr. Crooke quotes from a traveller in Ladakh an account of " the usual accumulation of stones and rags" on the top of a pass, "to which the Banka had entreated I would contribute, as the omis- sion would offend the genii of the mountain, and would be punished by some awful catastrophe. I accordingly propitiated the spirits of the pass with the leg of a pair of worn-out nankin trousers, and gratified my people by ordering a sheep to be killed for their entertainment when we had reached the foot of the ghat." 2

I have not in my reading found a trace of the dedication at these shrines of a thank-offering. All the offerings, so far as I know, are propitiatory. The tiger — if it be a tiger represented here — may be the form under which the mountain-spirit is con- ceived. The Korean mountains are infested with tigers, which are greatly feared by the natives. " The number of human lives lost," says Mr. Grififis, " and the value of property destroyed by their ravages, is so great as at times to depopulate certain districts." Elsewhere he says of the tiger that the Koreans " not

' Cooper, op. cit. p. 275.

Trebeck, Travels in the Himalayas.
 * North Indian Notes and Queries, vol. i., p. 76, quoting INIoorcroft and