have a strong aromatic perfume.

The musk deer is of the height of a goat; it has a small head; its nose
is pointed, and ornamented with long white mustachios; its legs are
small, its haunches large and thick; two long crooked teeth, which grow
out of the upper jaw, enable it to tear up from the ground the
odoriferous roots, upon which it subsists; its hair is generally from two
to three inches long, and is hollow, like that of almost all the animals
which live north of the Himalaya mountains; extremely rough, and always
bristling; its colour is black below, white in the middle, and inclining
to grey above. A bladder, suspended from the belly, near the navel,
contains the precious substance, the musk.

The inhabitants of the schistous valley capture in the chase such a
number of these musk deer, that you see nothing in their houses but the
skins of these animals, hung on the walls by pegs. They use the hair to
stuff the thick cushions, on which they sit during the day, and the sort
of mattress which serves them for a bed; they have in the musk the source
of a very lucrative trade with the Chinese.

The day after our arrival at Che-Pan-Keou, we bade farewell to the
inhabitants of the valley, and proceeded on our way. At the three next
stations, they were quite inexorable on the question of the oulah. The
Chinese were disgusted at the behaviour of these rude mountaineers, who,
as they said, did not comprehend hospitality, and had no notion of what
was right and what was wrong. As to us, on the contrary, we sympathized
with these men and their rude, spirited temperament; their manners, it is
true, were not refined, but their natural disposition was generosity and
frankness itself, and in our eyes matter was of more moment than manner.
At length we reached Kiang-Tsa, and the Chinese now began to breathe more
freely, for we were entering upon a less hostile district. Kiang-Tsa is
a very fertile valley, the inhabitants of which seem to live in plenty.
We remarked among them, besides the soldiers of the garrison, a great
number of Chinese from the provinces of Sse-Tchouen and Yun-Nan, who keep
a few shops and exercise the primary arts and trades. A few years, they
say, enable them, in this country, to amass a tolerably large fortune.
The two military Mandarins of Kiang-Tsa, who had been companions in arms
of Ly-Kouo-Ngan, were alarmed at the deplorable state in which they found
him, and advised him strongly to continu