learn to leave behind us all the logic of the west. A
thing is so in Tibet because it has always been so ; research
is not encouraged ; progress is a form of heresy.
Galinka lies at the foot of the great dam which
once fell across the waters of the Ammo chu and made
a lake where now the plain of Lingma-tang stretches
itself. This is a curious feature of the valley. One
climbs 200 feet up from Galinka by the side of the
sprawling torrent and at last reaches a piece of turf
about a mile and a half long, a quarter of a mile wide,
and as flat as Lord’s. In the rainless months the turf
grows here short and thick, and provides the best
grazing of all the valley. It would be easy to make
some arrangement for the draining of the plain in
the rains, but, as it is, from the end of July onwards,
Lingma-tang is a mere swamp, overgrown indeed
with luxuriant vegetation and bright flowers, but,
from a more practical point of view, a useless nuisance.
Through this plain, in the curves of a tortured worm,
the Ammo chu winds and re-winds itself. When the
expedition first crossed the plain the rocky sides of
the containing hills were bare of all but the seemingly
dead trunks of birch, and the hardly more life-like
blackish-green of the pines. A scanty’ and thorny brush
filled in the interstices among the boulders just where
the steep hills stood knee-deep [in the plain, but that
was all. The “ vleis ” of South Africa, which have been
formed in a similar manner, will offer the, best suggestion
of the exactly perfect surface— then covered
with brown, burnt grass, cropped short by sheep, and,
as we once discovered, by shao also. At the southern
end of the valley the forest comes down close to the
plain, and one leaves behind the treeless level to be
LINGMA-TANG " 7
engaged at once among the junipers and pines of the
last stage of vegetation which at this great altitude
the valley of the Ammo chu can show. The thorny
shrubs cease as if by magic when the road has reached
A printed piece Of tissue paper (made from the bark of the Daphne Cannabind)
containing “ Om mani padme hum,” repeated about eighty times. This
was taken from a large eight-foot- prayer wheel, which probably contained
the mantra upwards of a hundred million times.
the upper part of the rocky slope which has to be scaled
before the road begins again an even ascent by the side
of the stream. The silver firs come down thickly to
the very edge of the water, and under their shade the
track runs between moss-covered rocks some twenty