118 On the Road to Batang— 
may be described as such, and no other decoration, yet, in 
the darkness which hides the dirt, the size of the room and 
its severe simplicity give an imposing effect. It is warm in 
winter and cool in summer, though the myriads of flies make 
it extremely disagreeable. The roof, which is flat and paved 
with a hard mud floor, is reached through another smaller 
aperture placed to one side, and the roof-garden, so to speak, 
is used for threshing corn. I use the term roof-garden ad- 
visedly, because I have sometimes seen boxes of flowers 
lining the low parapet which surrounds it, though this is 
not common. 
An open shed in which the corn is harvested extends 
along one side, and a dummy chimney into which are thrust 
numerous bamboos bearing prayer-flags and strips of white 
paper or silk decorates one corner. 
These big houses as a rule harbour more than one 
family. The architecture is what might literally be described 
as severely perpendicular, and they are built primarily 
I imagine to withstand and keep out the howling winds 
which make life on the plateau so rigorous. Many of them 
must be extremely old—I never saw one in course of con- 
struction, and the timbers appear so well seasoned that they 
should be eminently capable of standing the ravages of the 
weather. 
In the evening, just as the rain began, we took shelter 
in the last house up the valley, and I found myself installed 
in the open shed on the roof, where I was surrounded by 
sheaves of corn. A big wooden comb stood on the ground, 
and women had been busy pulling the wheat through this 
in order to separate the heads from the stalks preparatory 
to threshing. 
Starting at six o’clock next morning we climbed all day, 
reaching the head of the pass known as the Tsa-lei-la (15,800 
feet) towards evening; there was a fine view of the Salween 
divide and K‘a-gur-pu to the south, but to the north the 
sky over Batang was a lowering blue-black. 
Crossing this pass I was for the first time struck by the 
great difference of vegetation exhibited by valleys facing 
north and south, as well as by the even more striking 
differences, both botanical and geological, between the 
Mekong-Yang-tze and the Mekong-Salween watersheds. 
