turned down, and one found that half a hundred stars
were already blinking whitely in the grey-blue depths.
On the next day we went on to Chak-sam ferry, a
distance of about six miles. The valley of the Tsang-po
is different indeed from what one had been given to
expect. Instead of a full and racing sweep of water,
cutting its way, like the southern Himalayan streams,
through a densely forested gorge, the yellow volume,
almost without a ripple, swerves and divides itself
across and between a mile-wide stretch of sand, bordered
on either side by a broad strip of well-cultivated
fields of barley, wheat and peas. Here and there are
openings between the hills dotted with the white and
blue of the surrounding houses, and encroached upon
by the wastes of billowy sand, which the tide at first,
and the wind afterwards, have banked and shelved
against the base of the hills.* Beside the cool’ lush
greenery of the road, the whitening barley fields were
edged with rank growths of thistles and burdock, and
“ black-veined whites ” and “ orange-tips ” fluttered
over the opened dog-roses. Where the vegetation
ceased, the arid waste of triturated granite running up
to the mountain buttresses is dotted with a kind of
mimosa which seems rarely to obtain a height of more
than two or three feet, but is useful in binding together
the shifting sands of the river bank.
Chak-sam is so called because of the iron bridge
which was made many years ago to span the deepest
and narrowest channel of the river ; the chains are all
that now remain, but these are magnificent enough
* Mr. Hayden, the geologist of the Mission, is of opinion that these enormous
blankets of sand are due to the local disintegration of the hillsides, and that they remain
in s itu till they fall or are blown away.
Embarking mules at Chak-sam Ferry. The wooded island to which the iron chains are attached
is to be seen in midstream in'the distance. ,