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First comes a middle-aged man or woman, driving a little silky black yak, grunting under his load of 260 lb. of salt, besides pots, pans, and kettles, stools, churn, and bamboo vessels, keeping up a constant rattle, and perhaps, buried amongst all, a rosy-cheeked and lipped baby, sucking a lump of cheese-curd.
I hired one of these tents for the summer of 1904, and spent several very interesting months in studying the habits and mode of life of the people. If the weather was fine, I made long excursions on horseback or on a yak, and compiled a map of the surrounding country.
"Brother," said the abbot, "shut that great mouth of yours lest an evil spirit should fly down it; take this poor yak and give it fodder with the other cattle." So we unstrapped our belongings from the back of the beast, and the old fellow whose grandiloquent title was "Master of the Herds," led it away.
Then I had to take a firm grip with my knees, for the yak springs and jumps about like a lunatic. Accompanied by specially selected Kirghizes, I tried four times to climb to the top of the "Father of Ice-Mountains," but always without success. Our camp was pitched high up among the moraines.
In the horse family, for instance, the species are not fertile inter se; whereas among the oxen, species seemingly at least as widely separated as the horse, ass, and zebra species such as the domestic ox, bison, yak, and gaur breed freely together and their offspring are fertile; the lion and tiger also breed together, and produce offspring which will breed with either parent stock; and tame dogs in different quarters of the world, although all of them fertile inter se, are in many cases obviously blood kin to the neighboring wild, wolf-like or jackal-like creatures which are specifically, and possibly even generically, distinct from one another.
The yak thrusts down his hoofs so that the white powdered ice spurts up around him, and if the slope is so steep that he cannot get foothold, he stretches out all four legs and holds them stiff and rigid as iron and thus slides down without tumbling. Sometimes I rode over moraine heaps of huge granite blocks piled one upon another.
The jungle was spotted yellow with the withered birch, maple and mountain-ash, and scarlet with berberry bushes; while above, the pastures were yellow-brown with the dead grass, and streaked with snow. Amongst other luxuries, we procured the flesh of yak calves, which is excellent veal: we always returned the foot for the mother to lick while being milked, without which she yields nothing.
The bull had not noticed us, for he was to windward, and thought of nothing but the juicy moss. Water melted from the snow trickled among the stones, the wind blew cold, and the sky was overcast true yak weather. With his gun on his back, Aldat crept up a hollow. At last he pushed himself along on his elbows and toes, crouching on the ground like a cat prowling after prey.
They weave also, and make the clothes of the women and children! The people are all cultivators, and make money also by undertaking the transit of the goods of the Yarkand traders over the lofty passes. The men plough with the zho, or hybrid yak, and the women break the clods and share in all other agricultural operations.
Describing a wide curve, and then across several long snow-beds, we at last reached the river-level, and pitched our tents on snow at an elevation of 16,900 feet. There was no wood; no yak or pony dung, no lichens, no moss, and therefore nothing with which we could make a fire. My men believed that eating cold food at high elevations, when the temperature was low, led to certain death.
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