1878.] 
11. B. Shaw —Stray Arians in Tibet. 
27 
belong to the Dard # race, although they themselves are not aware of the 
kinship. They are known simply as JB role-pa or highlanders). While 
isolated among strangers they have preserved themselves with a caste-like 
feeling from amalgamating with them, and seem to have only recently and 
very superficially accepted the religious beliefs of their neighbours. The 
greater part of the tribe is thus nominally Buddhist, while two or three of 
their north-westernmost villages bordering on Baltistan have become 
Musalman. 
This tribe presents therefore, to the student of early institutions, the 
interesting sight of a people of pure Arian race, isolated in the semi- 
barbarous stage, and who enjoy the rare distinction of being practically 
unaffected by the action of any of the great philosophising or methodising 
religions ; although in some of their customs they have not altogether 
escaped being influenced by contact with neighbours of another race. 
I paid a visit to the Dah-Hanu district (the home of these so-called 
Buddhist Dards) on my way down to India from Ladak (Western Tibet) 
last winter (1876). In a wild gorge through which the narrow Indus 
rushes, and where the grand masses of granite seemingly piled in confusion 
on both banks scarce leave room for the passage of the river and conceal 
the higher mountains behind them, my first camp was pitched. Close by, 
the Hanu Bavine, which in its upper part expands into a wide inhabited 
valley, escapes through a rocky chasm into the Indus. Here, on a little 
triangular plain a few yards in extent between the cliffs and the river, the 
only flat spot around, the people of Hanu were waiting to receive me. 
The sun was setting ; the gorge was already in deep shade ; a line of women 
in dark attire was drawn up along the side of the pathway, each holding 
in her hand a saucer full of burning juniper-wood from which columns of 
smoke ascended in the still air, uniting overhead in a kind of canopy and 
giving out a pungent incense-like odour. A wild music of drums and 
screaming pipes was playing. As I approached, the women bent down and 
placed on the ground at their feet the smoking bowls which screened them 
as in a cloud, while they greeted me in the peculiar manner of their tribe by 
waving the two hands rapidly in front of their faces with fingers closed as 
if holding something. 
My attention was chiefly attracted by some witch-like old hags of the 
number, with faces begrimed by juniper smoke, whose sharp haggard fea¬ 
tures and deep sunk eyes were in marked contrast with the flat Tibetan 
countenances to which one is accustomed in Ladak. These were unmis- 
* Although Dr. Leitner (in his Dardistan) states that the name Dard was not 
claimed by any of the race that he met, yet I have heard the Dras people of that tribe 
apply it to their parent stock in Astor under the form Darde. They are also known to 
their Kashmiri neighbours by the name of Dard , and Dardu. 
