trinsic worth, it is one of the few
things that can be imported into India with a profit. It there fetches
enormous prices; a small musk necklace, which I saw in the possession of
the Minister, and which certainly was not a foot long, was valued at 25
pounds. It is very seldom, however, that musk can be procured
unadulterated. It is not, however, so much as an ornament, as a
medicine, that we should use this now costly substance.

But the most valuable productions at present imported from Thibet are
mineral. Immense quantities of salt are brought over the Himalayas on
sheep's backs; gold-dust, borax, sulphur, antimony, arsenic, orpiment,
and medicinal drugs are also imported into Nepaul.

The animals which abound in these cold regions, and which might be worth
importing, are musk-deer, sheep, shawl-goats, chowrie bullocks, falcons,
pheasants--in fact, it would be hopeless to attempt to enumerate all
those productions, animal, vegetable, and mineral, which are now scarcely
known except by name, but which will doubtless some day be objects of
traffic and commercial enterprise. For instance, there are various
medicinal drugs and dyes (among which may be mentioned madder and
spikenard) which are said to exist, but are now almost totally unknown.

Among the present articles of import are embroideries, taffetas, chintz,
silk, cotton, cloth, carpets, cutlery, sandalwood, tobacco, conch-shells,
soap, etc. Surely it is no very extravagant flight of imagination to
suppose that the day may yet come when the unattainable and almost
unknown productions of the trans-Himalayan regions will be transported
across that mighty range, in well-appointed carriages, over macadamised
mountain-passes; and the noble work of the scientific engineer will thus
supersede the flocks of heavily-laden sheep, driven by uncivilized and
ill-clothed Bootyas, who, "impelled by the force of circumstances over
which they have no control," will don their smockfrocks and turn draymen;
when the traveller, going to the coach-office, Durbar-square, Katmandu,
may book himself in the royal mail through to H'Lassa, where, after a
short residence at the Grand Lama Hotel, strongly recommended in Murray's
'Handbook for the Himalayas,' he may wrap himself in his fur bukkoo, and,
taking his seat in a first-class carriage on the Asiatic Central Railway,
whisk away to Pekin, having previously telegraphed home, _via_ St.
Petersburg, that he proposes returning through