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bowl and a black copper teapot. After we passed them, they kept running to overtake us, and seemed determined to keep with us. Five or six miles out, they sat down to wait, while I walked up a precarious path in the gorge. On my return, they offered me a refreshing drink of curdled milk and water, and some apricots. By order of the headman those two men walked ten or twelve miles in the hot sun to render this small service. The next day, when I left Pujiya, the two men shown opposite page 150 suddenly appeared in the desert six or eight miles from the village, and began to run before us. One balanced on the tips of the fingers of his left hand a wooden bowl of the inevitable sour milk, which, by the way, most travelers find both wholesome and palatable, when once they learn to use it. In his right he held a teapot filled with water, a china bowl, and a wooden spoon. The other bore in either hand a platter of apricots and of mulberries. They had been ordered to run a mile or two farther in the hot summer sun to the top of a pass. We stopped, however, as soon as we found some shade at the foot of a cliff. In both these cases, two men had been detailed to do what could have been done by only one or by my guide. The prevalence of such needlessly courteous customs would be impossible if a low standard of living and cheap food did not give the people abundant leisure, and if the Chantos were not so abjectly submissive to every form of authority.
The submissiveness of the Chantos is largely the result of cowardice, and this in turn is probably due in great measure to their isolation by mountains and deserts. The untraveled headman at Pujiya trembled visibly when he
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