erce. But in this case petticoat influence has
altogether prevailed, for the yak is the mildest natured of animals. He
moves very slowly, takes life very quietly, and is content with little
here below, or rather here above, for if you take him below 9,000 feet
he pines for the heights. I believe he is really at his cosiest when
lying in a snowdrift on a winter's day with his petticoats around him
and only his horns showing. He then feels really well tucked up.

Both yaks and donkeys were very cheap forms of transport. It is true
that yaks had a way of dying and donkeys of deserting, but even so their
initial cost was very small, they needed very few drivers in proportion
to their numbers, and possessed the art of living on the country. An
animal that along a line of communications of some four hundred miles'
length, and lying in an inhospitable country, neither asks you to bring
him up fodder or even grain from the base, nor yet expects you to go
foraging for him, is indeed a treasure.

The yak and donkey drivers were Tibetans, as also were many of the
hospital ambulance carriers. The most noticeable points about these
Tibetans were that they were inveterate gamblers, and were also very
much married. The idea of accompanying us without their womenkind was
quite foreign to them, and we had to accede to their prejudices in the
matter. Merry little souls those women mostly were. Their foreheads and
noses usually smeared with that pigment of sows' blood which proclaims
to the world the Tibetan woman's chastity, they were ever to be seen
laughing or chaffing one another, either on the march or else in camp,
over their domestic duties or their knitting. Their stocking-knitting
was of a high order, except that the art of 'turning a heel' was unknown
to them.

I remember passing a knot of them one day as we climbed one of the worst
passes that we had to encounter on the march--a climb of four thousand
feet without a break. Hill people know better than any one the
advantage of breathing rhythmically, and the Tibetan loves to acquire
this rhythm by singing over any work that strains him at all. Tibetan
men and women, as they thresh their corn with the flail, chant pretty
ditties in unison, and Tibetan boatmen on the Sangpo will sometimes sing
to their work. And here was this band of women singing cheerily as they
climbed that mountain side, and never pausing in their song. They were
well up with the advance guard too, and the c