During the mid-hours of a summer day, Tibet is
perhaps not unlike the rest of the dry tropical zone.
Here, as elsewhere, the fierce Oriental sun scares away
the softer tints, and the shrinking and stretching
shadows of the white hours are too scanty to relieve the
mirage and the monotony. All about Chang-lo the con-
T h e iris p la n ta tio n a t Chang-lo.
temptuous shoulders of the shadeless mountains stand
blank and unwelcoming. All along the plain as far as
the eye can see the stretches of iris or barley and the
plantations of willow-thorn are dulled into eucalyptus
grey by the dust ; the trees lift themselves dispirited,
and the faint droop of every blade and every leaf tires
the eye with unconscious sympathy. Far off along the
Shigatse road a pack-mule shuffles along, making in sheer
weariness as much dust as the careless hoofs of a bullock,
that dustiest of beasts. One does not look at the houses.
The sun beats off their coarse and strong grained whitewash,
and one can hardly believe that they are the
same dainty buildings of pearl-grey or rose-pink that one
watched as they faded out of sight with the sunset
yesterday evening. Everything shivers behind the
crawling skeins of mirage. There is no strength, there
are no outlines to anything in the plain, and even the
hard thorn trees in the plantation are flaccid. As one
passes underneath them a kite or two dives downward
from the branches. He will disturb little dust as he
moves, for your kite mistrusts a new perch, and the
bough he sits on must be leafless both for the traverse of
his outlook, and for the clear oarage of his wide wings.
Also, you may be sure he has been to and fro fifty times
to-day. See him settle a hundred yards away near that
ugly significant heap of dirty maroon cloth, and mark
the dust thrown forward by the thrashing brake-stroke
of his great wings. It hangs in a petty cloud still when
we have come up to him and driven him away in indig
nation for a little space.
Under foot the dwarf clematis shuts in from the midday
heat its black snake-head flowers, and the young
shoots of the jasmine turn the backs of their tender
leaflets to the sun, drooping a little as they do so.
Veronica is there in stunted little bushes ; vetches, rest-
harrows, and dwarf indigo-like plants swarm along the
sides of the long dry water channels ; and here and there,
where the ditch runs steep, you may find, along towards
the southern face, what looks for all the world like a
thickly-strewn bank of violets. Violets of course they