Doker-la—the Sacred Mountain 103 
beat the cold rain in our faces, baulking every attempt to 
start a fire and obtain a rough boiling-point reading. 
However, though there was now no snow on the summit, 
I think that the Doker-la must be a little higher than the 
Sie-la. 
Why this mountain should be so sacred | cannot think, 
for there is nothing about it to stir the imagination. It is 
easy to understand people bowing in awe before the virgin 
peak of ice and snow to the north, and it is quite possible 
that on a clear day K‘a-gur-pu would be readily seen; but 
Doker-la by itself, in comparison at least, looks rather mean, 
though the weather may have biased me. 
On our journey up we had passed several small parties 
of supplicants returning from a visit after adding their 
quota of rags to the prayer-scattering bamboo wands which 
crowned the pass, but autumn is the proper pilgrim season, 
and in October hundreds of them passed through A-tun-tsi. 
Still I firmly believe that it is K ‘a-gur-pu that really inspires 
them, though Doker-la may well be the easiest approach 
to a somewhat inaccessible peak. Tibetans do not moun- 
taineer for fun, and even sacred Kailas is worshipped from 
afar. 
This day’s journey finally shattered the belief to which 
I had all along clung, namely that we were going to cross 
the snowy range, though our turning south-east on the 
previous day had made this seem very problematical. 
A rough precipitous descent finally brought us down to 
a deep valley in which flowed a big torrent, obviously 
another glacier stream from K ‘a-gur-pu, which could not 
have been very far to the north, and we halted for tea 
under the shelter of an enormous granite boulder, the rock 
on this side being mostly granite, in strong contrast to the 
quartz-bearing limestone on the other side. 
Another thing worth noting is that the watershed is 
asymmetrically placed, being considerably nearer the Mekong 
than the Salween, nor are there here, in the arid region to- 
wards which we were descending, any barrier ranges. In the 
rainy regions we have already remarked that the streams 
flow from their source for some distance parallel to the main 
rivers, so that the main spurs are often parallel to the main 
range for some distance. In the arid regions, however, the 
