The marches which followed were along valleys, plains, and mountain-sides of gravel, destitute of herbage, except a shrivelled artemisia, and on one occasion the baggage animals were forty hours without food.  Fresh water was usually very scarce, and on the Lingti plains was only obtainable by scooping it up from the holes left by the feet of animals.  Insect life was rare, and except grey doves, the ’dove of the valleys,’ which often flew before us for miles down the ravines, no birds were to be seen.  On the other hand, there were numerous herds of kyang, which in the early mornings came to drink of the water by which the camps were pitched.  By looking through a crevice of my tent I saw them distinctly, without alarming them.  In one herd I counted forty.

They kept together in families, sire, dam, and foal.  The animal certainly is under fourteen hands, and resembles a mule rather than a horse or ass.  The noise, which I had several opportunities of hearing, is more like a neigh than a bray, but lacks completeness.  The creature is light brown, almost fawn colour, fading into white under his body, and he has a dark stripe on his back, but not a cross.  His ears are long, and his tail is like that of a mule.  He trots and gallops, and when alarmed gallops fast, but as he is not worth hunting, he has not a great dread of humanity, and families of kyang frequently grazed within two hundred and fifty yards of us.  He is about as untamable as the zebra, and with his family affectionateness leads apparently a very happy life.

On the Kwangchu plateau, at an elevation of 15,000 feet, I met with a form of life which has a great interest of its own, sheep caravans, numbering among them 7,000 sheep, each animal with its wool on, and equipped with a neat packsaddle and two leather or hair-cloth bags, and loaded with from twenty-five to thirty-two pounds of salt or borax.  These, and many more which we passed, were carrying their loads to Patseo, a mountain valley in Lahul, where they are met by traders from Northern British India.  The sheep are shorn, and the wool and loads are exchanged for wheat and a few other commodities, with which they return to Tibet, the whole journey taking from nine months to a year.  As the sheep live by grazing the scanty herbage on the march, they never accomplish more than ten miles a day, and as they often become footsore, halts of several days are frequently required.  Sheep, dead or dying, with the birds of prey picking out their eyes, were often met with.  Ordinarily these caravans are led by a man, followed by a large goat much bedecked and wearing a large bell.  Each driver has charge of one hundred sheep.  These men, of small stature but very thickset, with their wide smooth faces, loose clothing of sheepskin with the wool outside, with their long coarse hair flying in the wind, and their uncouth shouts in a barbarous tongue, are much like savages.  They sing wild chants as they picket their sheep in long double lines