a well-arranged harness, which enabled them better to carry their loads.  Farther south in British Columbia the piedmont tribes had once a like importance; there they operated especially from the town of Hope on the lower Frazer River as a distributing center.  The Mexican carrier is so efficient and so cheap that he enters into serious competition with modern schemes to improve transportation, especially as the rugged relief of this country makes those schemes expensive.[1204] The Indians of the eastern slope of the Andes pack India rubber, in loads of 150 pounds each, from the upper Purus and Madeira rivers up to the Andean plateau at a height of 15,000 feet, and there transfer their burdens to mules for transport down to the Peruvian port of Mollendo.[1205]

The retarded mountain peoples on the borders of the Central Asia plateau employ the same primitive means of transportation.  The roads leading from the Sze Chuan province of western China over the mountain ranges to Tibet are traversed by long lines of porters, men, women and children, laden with bales of brick tea,[1206] the strongest of them shouldering 350 pounds.  The Bhutia coolies of Sikkim act as carriers on military and commercial expeditions on the track across the Himalayas between Darjeeling and Shigatze.  Colonel Younghusband found that these Bhutias, who were paid by the job, would carry a pack of 250 to 300 pounds, or three times the usual burden of a Central Asia carrier.  Landon cites the case of a Bhutia lady who was said to have carried a piano on her head from the plains up to Darjeeling (7150 feet).[1207] In Nepal, women and girls, less often men, have long been accustomed to carry travellers and merchandise over the Himalayan ranges.[1208] In the marginal valleys of the Himalayas, like Kashmir and Baltistan, the natives are regularly impressed for begar or carrier service on the English military roads to strategic points on the high mountain frontier of the Indian Empire.[1209] So the Igorots of the Luzon province of Benguet pack all goods and supplies from Naguilian in the lowlands up 4000 feet in a distance of 25 miles to their little capital of Baguio; for this service they are now paid one peso (46 cents in 1901) a day with food, or ten times as much as under the Spanish rule.[1210]

[Sidenote:  Power of mountain barriers to block or deflect.]

If the historical movement slackens its pace at the piedmont slope, higher up the mountain it comes to a halt.  Only when human invention has greatly improved communication across the barrier are its obstacles in part overcome.  The great highland wall stretching across southern Europe from the Bay of Biscay to the Black Sea long cut off the solid mass of the continent from the culture of the Mediterranean lands.  Owing to these mountains Central Europe came late into the foreground of history, not till the Middle Ages.  Even the penetrating civilization of Greece reached it only by long detours around the ends of the mountain barrier; by Massilia and the Rhone, by Istria and the Danube, Greek commerce trickled through to the interior of the continent.