a considerable period, and contented myself with my own sandwiches.
Then they came and talked to me through the interpreter whom I had with
me, and quite a youthful little nun in a picturesque woolly red cap came
and sat beside me and did her knitting. My overcoat had been wet through
for three days, and the sun coming out gave me a chance of drying it.
Quite warm and cosy it all was, with ladies' society and all thrown in.
I was quite sorry when, after several hours of waiting, a long
serpent-shaped line of mules slowly trailed up the valley and came for
the grain, the tsampa, and the straw.

We were paying again for what we foraged, and I remember doling out what
must have seemed to the recipients a prodigious number of rupees.
Tibetan monasteries are undeniably rich, but, especially in outlying
parts, I fancy they do all their buying and selling in kind. For
instance, they collect their taxes in kind, and it is certainly feasible
for them to obtain labour, clothing, and such necessaries without having
recourse to coin. The fact that the average Lama was unused to dealing
in large sums of money seemed to always have one of two opposite
effects. He either did not seem to grasp the fact that a large sum of
money really represented 'articles of value,' and had no desire whatever
to part with any of his possessions in exchange for it, or else, being
either less ignorant and knowing its value, or more simple-minded and
attracted by its glitter, he would accept the money with pronounced
greed.

The effect of all the coin that we took to and left in the country must
have had a curious economic effect on Tibet. For a country that trades
largely by barter to be suddenly flooded with rupees should, according
to the ordinary principles of political economy, raise the current
prices of all commodities to an extraordinary extent. However, Tibet,
queer country that it is, has probably a political economy all of its
very own, and will arrange such a matter entirely differently from
Western expectation.

Even our rupees, as such, were not always approved, a distinction being
sometimes drawn between those enfaced with King Edward's head and those
enfaced with Queen Victoria's. The latter were approved on the ground
that they were 'Kampani' rupees, the Queen's face being apparently
regarded as the trade mark of the East India Company, of which the past
generation of Tibetans must have heard and passed on the memory to their
childre