TIBET. 
353 
corporal punishment, and the favoured lover effaces the obloquy of 
his transgression by a pecuniary fine. 
If, in general society, the males be sometimes chargeable with cold¬ 
ness towards the female sex, they cannot, therefore, be said with 
cynical severity, to forbid them all indulgence; since very precise 
chastity, before they marry, is not expected in the fair sex, though 
when they have once formed a contract, they are by no means per¬ 
mitted, with impunity, to break it. 
We halted for the night, and pitched our tents near a small and 
solitary village. 
The following morning we again proceeded on our route. Tibet 
does not exhibit, at this season of the year, either a rich or varied pro¬ 
spect ; it is all a leafless, dreary scene, not a blade of grass, and scarcely 
any vestige of verdure is to be seen; one uniform russet brown covers 
alike the vallies and the hills. On the summits of the latter, in some 
situations, springs are seen arrested in their fall, and converted into 
solid monuments of ice, firmly fixed until the genial warmth of summer 
shall return to make them flow. Some of them, now in view, were of 
prodigious bulk and altitude, resembling immense columns, and they 
contributed greatly, together with the universal nakedness of both hills 
and vallies, to impress the traveller with an idea of the bleakness of 
the region, and the severity of the season. 
The atmosphere, indeed,was now in an extreme degree keen and pure. 
During three months that I had passed in Tibet, I had not witnessed 
three cloudy days. The dryness of the soil, and scantiness of vegeta¬ 
tion, contributes little towards charging the air with humidity. The 
