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I had forty-two in all, of whom the majority were young Lepchas, or Sikkim-born people of Tibetan races: all were active and cheerful looking follows; only one was goitred, and he had been a salt-trader. I was accompanied by a guard of five Sepoys, and had a Lepcha and Tibetan interpreter.
It might have been his breakfast that gave him spirit and speech; he sang a merry, bad song, which the rocks echoed back, and all the goitred women at the roadside stopped with their pack burdens to listen. He told a thousand anecdotes.
Higher up the mountain side, just where the snow line lay, above which there was everlasting ice and snow, was a little rough hostel, where travellers rested and slept before they tried the pass itself. An old half-witted man and his goitred wife kept the place, and provided rough food and bedding for travellers, though interesting themselves in no wise with their concerns.
Here speaks the true panoramic man, the man whose mind attains to fulness of expression on mountain-tops from which the whole landscape of life may be contemplated. And yet he notes the "ominous configuration of Mount Pilatus" and its terrible form, and writes of adjoining mountains as "these hump-backed, goitred giants crouching around me in the darkness."
Whole pages of his sketch-book are filled with squalid heads of shrivelled crones and ghastly old men with idiots, goîtred cretins, criminals, and clowns. It was not that he loved the horrible for its own sake; but he was determined to seize character, to command the gamut of human physiognomy from ideal beauty down to forms bestialised by vice and disease.
Altogether, the queer collection of beasts and their drivers, who were to be seen drinking together greedily and promiscuously from the fountains in the market-place; the steep streets, crowded with lean goats and cows and pigs, and their buyers and sellers; the braying of donkeys and the shrieking of chafferers, with here and there a goitred dwarf of hideous aspect, presented a picture of an Alpine mountain fair, which, once seen, is not readily forgotten.
The men are short, thin, and apparently feeble, with pale cheeks and sickly complexions. The women, over and above these disadvantages, are almost all goitred, and the children look like creatures born in sin and brought up to misery. Probably all this is owing as much to the sort of life which these highlanders lead, as to the severity of their climate.
Ruth, thankful that her attention had been providentially distracted from the matter that filled her own thoughts, in a way that surprised and annoyed her, sorted, and snipped, and pasted, and decided weighty questions as to whether a goitred robin on a twig should be placed next to a smiling plum-pudding, dancing a polka with a turkey, or whether a congealed cross, with "Christian greeting" in icicles on it, should separate the two.
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