CHAPTER XXX - SIN-WEN-PING TO LI-FAN TING

Summary

After leaving that quiet place, where the temperature was only 52° at 7.30 a.m., we plunged at once into a wild part of the gorge, very thinly peopled and desolate, on which grim snow-peaks looked down from the head of every lateral cleft. The traffic on the road was altogether Tibetan, partly accounted for by the junction of the road to Mou-Kung Ting, a thousand li away, with the Sung-pan Ting road, which we were following. There were large caravans of very big, powerful mules, loaded either with wool or with medicinal roots, and with a merry inclination to lunge at us with hoofs or teeth as we passed them; the rough, uncouth muleteers always cheerful and friendly as they exchanged with us their national salutation zho.

One man at least in each caravan—every man having charge of four mules—can shoe his own beasts, and I had the luck, in consequence of a mule kicking off his shoe as we passed him, to see that the method is the same as in Western Tibet. They tie the fore and hind legs of the animal together, cast him, put a pole through the lashings, the ends of which are held by two men, and cold shoe him, paring the hoof only very slightly, using very long nails with tacket heads.