Page:Mongolia, the Tangut country, and the solitudes of northern Tibet vol 1 (1876).djvu/122

, they dip the middle finger of the right hand into the cup and flick off the adhering drops.

They eat with their fingers, which are always disgustingly dirty; raising a large piece of meat and seizing it in their teeth, they cut off with a knife, close to the mouth, the portion remaining in the hand. The bones are licked clean, and sometimes cracked for the sake of the marrow; the shoulder-blade of mutton is always broken and thrown aside, it being considered unlucky to leave it unbroken.

On special occasions they eat the flesh of goats and horses; beef rarely, and camels' flesh more rarely still. The lamas will touch none of this meat, but have no objection to carrion, particularly if the dead animal is at all fat. They do not habitually eat bread, but they will not refuse Chinese loaves, and sometimes bake wheaten cakes themselves. Near the Russian frontier they will even eat black bread, but further in the interior they do not know what it is, and those to whom we gave rusks, made of rye-flour, to taste, remarked that there was nothing nice about such food as that, which only jarred the teeth.

Fowl or fish they consider unclean, and their dislike to them is so great that one of our guides nearly turned sick on seeing us eat boiled duck at Koko-nor; this shows how relative are the ideas of people even in matters which apparently concern the senses. The very Mongol, born and bred amid