Page:Three Years in Tibet.djvu/121

Rh started out at about two o'clock, my legs were so flabby that I felt as if they were going to drop off. And my increased luggage weighed so heavily on my back, that I was now compelled to take it down and devise some new way of carrying it. This I did by dividing the baggage into two equal parts and, tying one to each end of my two staves (which I had tied together), I slung them across my shoulder. But two rough round sticks grinding against the untrained flesh of the shoulder, with eighty pounds of pressure, were not much of relief for a novice at this method of carrying burdens, and at every hundred or two hundred yards of my progress, which was tardy enough, I had to alter my mode of conveyance. In the two hours which followed, I made an ascent of half a mile and then a descent of about a mile, and when I had arrived at the bank of a river at about four o'clock, exhaustion made further progress impossible for me for the day.

Settled down for a bivouac, I set about making a fire to get tea ready. In Tibetan wilds the only kind of fuel accessible to travellers (except of course dead leaves of trees for kindling purposes) is the dry dung of the yak (these animals being set loose to graze for themselves) and the kyang, a species of native wild horse. I gathered some of these lumps, and built them up into a sort of partially hollow cone, with a broad base and low elevation, and then three pieces of nearly equal size placed tripod-like around this cone completed my arrangement for putting my tea-pot over the fire. But the fire was still to be made, and I may say that making a fire of this description is not a very easy performance until one acquires the knack of the thing; even a pair of hand-bellows is of little help, especially when the fuel is not sufficiently dry. Matches being unknown in those regions, I had to resort to the old-fashioned method of obtaining sparks of fire by striking a stone against a piece of iron, and it is again a matter of