Page:The People of India — a series of photographic illustrations, with descriptive letterpress, of the races and tribes of Hindustan Vol 2.djvu/20

 SUNWAE OR SANWAR.— NIPAL. (58, 59, 60)

HE Sunwars are a tribe mostly found north of the Magars and Gorungs, and near and among the Cisnivean Bhotias. Hodgson (p. 134) assigns the Gandaceam basin, below the mountain peaks of Gosainthan, as their seat. They are among the principal Alpine tribes of the sub-Himalayas between the Kali, where the aboriginal tongues are merged into the Prakrit, and the Dhausri, where they begin to pass into monosyllabic-tongued races of presumed Indo-Chinese origin. They inhabit the central and temperate parts of the mountains, "and may be said to occupy a very healthy climate; but one," says Hodgson, "of exact temperatures, as various as the several elevations (4,000 to 10,000 feet) of the ever-varied surface, and which, though nowhere troubled with excessive heat, is so by excessive moisture, and by the rank vegetation which moisture generates with the aid of a deep fat soil."