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Tibet and Turkestan : vol.1 |
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of European travellers in their estimates of Oriental
wealth.
When Europe was poor, Asia was relatively rich,
but never as rich as the camel would have one be-
lieve. When you see even a hundred of him mark-
ing the distant plain with immutable pace you would
swear him to be some gnome in Pluto's service,
bearing half a world's wealth. But the simplest
arithmetic shows that the whole caravan load is less
in weight than that of one big American freight car.
So it is that only the most precious commodities
can be interchanged even at the astonishingly low
per-diem rates of hire for man, and the equally
low rate of food-consumption exacted by the self-re-
straining brute. Thus let us pursue the calculation
on the basis of forty cents per day per camel, paid
by us to the Kirghiz in Western Tibet. Each burden
was about four hundred pounds, and the day's
march averaged about fifteen miles; that makes the
cost per ton-mile about thirteen cents. On the
great railways of America the corresponding figure
is 0.65 cents, or one twentieth as great. Such com-
parisons have led to the dreaming of fabulous profits
by the over-zealous promoters of steam railways
in caravan lands, the infirmity of their calculations
arising from an over-estimate of the total amount
of merchandise to be handled.
The dominating feature of Tibetan traffic is tea,
imported from China, chiefly through the mart of
Ta-chien-lu, where caravans sent from Lhasa and
even from Shegatze are loaded annually with thir-
teen millions of pounds of the heaven-sent leaf.
Coming out of Tibet, their loads have been lighter
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