300 BUDDHIST MANES. 



routes and avocations unfortunately lay in different direc- 

 tions. 



Here I met a brother sportsman, Major M., who was bound 

 for Changchenmo ; and as it is as pleasant as advisable to have 

 a companion in remote uninhabited regions, we joined camps. 

 We were rather disappointed, however, on hearing that two 

 other members of the fraternity had already preceded us 

 there; for in Changchenmo the wild yaks usually frequent 

 certain localities, from which they are soon scared away if 

 disturbed. 



At Leh we engaged the services of an individual named 

 Kurreem, a half-bred Tartar, who had, I believed, been con- 

 verted to the Mohammedan persuasion. He willingly agreed 

 to act as interpreter in the language of the country and make 

 himself generally useful, on a salary of four rupees a-month 

 and his food. The advent of a packet of letters and news- 

 papers by the Maharajah's post to Leh was a matter of much 

 rejoicing; but the pleasure it afforded was considerably 

 damped by the tidings it brought of the death of my old 

 Goorkha servant Kirpa, who had been accidentally shot by 

 a comrade with whom he was out hunting. 



After two days' rest we made a fresh start. For two 

 marches our route lay along the right (north) bank of the 

 Indus. We passed several of those curious oblong-shaped 

 cairns which are so often seen by the wayside in Tibet, 

 called manes. They are formed of small slabs of rough stone 

 piled loosely one upon the other, and vary in length from a 



force of gravity under different conditions of the earth's crust, had been pro- 

 posed by the Royal Society. They were carried out by means of pendulums 

 swung at various geodetic stations in India, and for this work Captain Basevi 

 had been selected. His investigations had necessarily to be conducted under 

 circumstances which would have been most trying to any constitution, and 

 doubtless were partly the cause of his death. The valuable services to science, 

 and the mental and physical labours undergone by him in this arduous under- 

 taking, were recorded by Colonel J. T. Walker, R. E., Superintendent of the 

 Great Trigonometrical Survey of India, as a tribute to his memory, in a letter 

 to the ' Times,' under date 19th September 1871. 



