ABORS AND GALONGS. 101 



undulating grassy downs, dotted with villages and covered with fields, enriched with 

 clumps of bamboos and fruit trees now heavy with ripening peaches, and watered by 

 numerous streams. Where the industrious villager has not tilled, the land is under 

 grass; brambles, black, red and yellow, an excellent wild raspberry and brachen 

 break the stretches of short green grass and here and there are fields of iris, now in 

 seed. 



The country simply bristles with chhortens, and these catafalque-like expressions 

 of piety, I am told, occasionally mark the grave of some earlier settler. Many of the 

 streams as they murmur towards the high cliffs bordering the Tsanpo turn a prayer- 

 barrel enshrined in a little white- washed stone house. Tsogans are attached to the 

 more important villages and the villages themselves differ entirely in appearance from 

 those lower down the valley. Solid houses of wood (very rarely of stone) roofed, at 

 hardly any slope, with stout planks weighted down with stones have a friendly look 

 across the plains ; the hedges and fences, the lanes and roads are like nothing closer 

 than Assam. Sometimes a bamboo pipe leads the village water supply into a large 

 trough made of a hollowed-out tree-trunk ; but the bamboo aqueduct is not the 

 feature it is further south. As one follows the main path it is only where some big 

 tributary has carved out a steep valley on its way to the Tsanpo that jungle is met 

 with, and through it the path winds down, or follows a contour up the re-entrant, fur- 

 ther evidence of the engineering skill of the inhabitants and a contrast to the country 

 below that can only be fully appreciated by those who have scrambled about in Abor 

 land. 



All to-day the country on the opposite bank seemed much steeper. We had a 

 longish climb up to the chhorten just outside Didung, which is built on a saddle below 

 the Dzong which overlooks the neat prosperous cluster of houses. A wide grassy 

 slope leads down to the village which is in two parts (like many of the villages up 

 here) separated by some fields. At the chhorten were grouped several banners and 

 against the shrine itself was a square plank box about 6 feet each way and 3 feet 

 6 inches high half covered in with boards. On this lid were half a dozen of the 

 text-inscribed pots one has learnt to associate with the entrance to a Memba 

 village — its Temple Bar in fact. Laid beside the pots were two square red cane 

 baskets of eggs and a cluster of the little conical baked clay nodules (tsatsa [ ) we first 

 saw at Geling in the prayer-barrel house. The box itself was nearly half full of them. 



A climb to another village ; and then a steep descent to the rocky gorge of the 

 Kitsiri followed by a stiff and leech-infested climb out brought us back to the culti- 

 vated plateau land. As we rose out of the Kitsiri valley we found the steepest fields 

 I have ever seen — far steeper than the Galong cultivation I once thought precipitous 

 enough. From a high shoulder we could see Pongo, which we had skirted some hours 

 previously after leaving Didung, and below us Didung itself set in its light-green rice 



1 In his " Trans-Himalaya " (Vol. Ill, Ch. XXII) Dr. Sven Hedin explains their origin. He was told that they are 

 made of the ashes of persons (monks), who have been cremated, mixed and kneaded with clay. When still moist some 

 sacred word or sentence is printed with a stamp. The ashes of a dead man, so his I<ama informant stated, make a 

 couple of thousand tsatsa which are deposited in a hollow in the plinth of the chhorten. 



