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0241 Tibet and Turkestan : vol.1
チベットとトルキスタン : vol.1
Tibet and Turkestan : vol.1 / 241 ページ(カラー画像)

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doi: 10.20676/00000231
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effort be avoided; and, in the long run of travel, this
may become a cheerfulness under difficulties which,
at lower levels, frequently induce heaviness of spirits,
if not actual discouragement. Certain it is that
every Tibetan traveller has met with conditions
which are always on the edge of being fatal to him,
yet in no recital familiar to me can I recall any ex-
pressions of that gloom which the honest traveller
in Africa or other lowlands has often recounted.
Certain also it is that in his struggle for life the
Tibetan is cheerful, almost gay. He is dirty—it is
not easy to be clean when you are poor and live in
a perennially cold country, where fuel always, and
water often enough, are in scant supply.
Would you not, O dainty reader, compromise
with your morning bath if it were frozen, if you had
no fuel but yak dung, if you must strip in a tempera-
ture anywhere below zero? Since, in spite of his
dirt, which is a depressing influence, the Tibetan is
still a cheerful being, he may fairly thank the thin,
keen air, the clear sunshine, the blue sky, for the
simple joyousness of his narrow life. But these, for
their good results, suppose a living, nourished body,
warm with the internal combustion of food. And
there 's the rub! Nearly all the Tibetan fields have
been wrenched from the valley's arid flank, have
been terraced and revetted against occasional rain-
flood, and then have been fed through a tortuous
ditch with water from the nearest mountain-stream.
The difficulty of thus obtaining workable areas is
great, or, in other words, the land supply in this
shut-away world being so closely limited, it is obvi-
ous that population must be correspondingly limited.