THE KARAKORUM PLATEAU 73
bodily upon them by pulling its head and tail. Often a poor beast plunged its legs inextricably into the snow, whereupon the men dug them out one by one, pulled them out by hand, or even dragged them out with ropes. By sunset the exhausted men and animals had all descended a thousand feet more to a miserable camp at an elevation of 17,000 feet, where the snow was only a foot or two deep. No one seemed to suffer from a temperature of minus two degrees Fahrenheit the next morning, May 19. As we had plenty of grain for the animals, and food for the men, every one was ready for work. We all reached Durgukh in safety. When the fifty or sixty coolies were paid off, Mr. Barrett gave generous presents to those who had worked hard. Thereupon it appeared that even the patient, cheerful Ladakhi has socialistic tendencies, and appeals to mob violence on occasions. When those who had received only the regular wages found that their complaints were in vain, they combined to take away the extra money from the more fortunate ones by force, and after a wordy fight with some blows, divided it equally among all.
The fords of the Shyok River, to which we had been looking forward with such anxiety, proved much easier than Chang La. We spent the eight days from May 22 to May 29 in traveling northward up the steep-sided, broad-bottomed glacial valley, crossing the river twenty-seven times, and once making our horses wade half a mile in the stream, all without the least difficulty. The reason for the half mile in the river was that just before turning up a tributary canyon to the Depsang plain, we found the whole valley bottom covered with a sheet of ice. As its bed became
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