Oct. 1849. YAK SLAUGHTERED. JERKED MEAT. 183 



barbarously slaughtered it with arrows, and feasted on the 

 flesh and entrails, singed and fried the skin, and made 

 soup of the bones, leaving nothing but the horns and hoofs. 

 Having a fine day, they prepared some as jerked meat, 

 cutting it into thin strips, which they dried on the rocks. 

 This (called " Schat-chew," dried meat) is a very common 

 and favourite food in Tibet, I found it palatable; bat on the 

 other hand, the dried saddles of mutton, of which they 

 boast so much, taste so strongly of tallow, that I found it 

 impossible to swallow a morsel of them.* 



We staid two days at Lachoong, two of my lads being 

 again laid up with fever ; one of them had been similarly 

 attacked at the same place nearly two months before : the 

 other lad had been repeatedly ill since June, and at all ele- 

 vations. Both cases were returns of a fever caught in the 

 low unhealthy valleys some months previously, and excited 

 by exposure and hardship. 



The vegetation at Lachoong was still beautiful, and the 

 weather mild, though snow had descended to 14,000 feet 

 on Tunkra. Composites were abundantly in flower, apples 



* Raw dried split fish are abundantly cured (without salt) in Tibet ; they are 

 caught in the Yam and great lakes of Ramchoo, Dobtah, and Yarbru, and are 

 chiefly carp, and allied fish, which attain a large size. It is one of the most 

 remarkable facts in the zoology of Asia, that no trout or salmon inhabits any of 

 the rivers that debouche into the Indian Ocean (the so-called Himalayan trout 

 is a species of carp). This widely distributed natural order of fish (Salmonidce) 

 is however, found in the Oxus, and in all the rivers of central Asia that flow north 

 and west, and the Salmo orientalis, M'Clell and ("Calcutta Journ. Nat. Hist." hi., 

 p. 283), was caught by Mr. Griffith (Journals, p. 404) in the Bamean river (north 

 of the Hindo Koosh) which flows into the Oxus, and whose waters are separated 

 by one narrow mountain ridge from those of the feeders of the Indus. The 

 central Himalayan rivers often rise in Tibet from lakes full of fish, but have none 

 (at least during the rains) in that rapid part of their course from 10,000 to 14,000 

 feet elevation : below tbat fish abound, but I believe invariably of different 

 species from those found at the sources of the same rivers. The nature of the 

 tropical ocean into which all the Himalayan rivers de'bouche, is no doubt the 

 proximate cause of the absence of Salmonidce. Sir John Richardson (Fishes of 

 China Seas, &c, " in Brit. Ass. Rep. &c"), says that no species of the order has 

 been found in the Chinese or eastern Asiatic seas. 



