LAND OF TIBET

Greymouth Evening Star, 18 April 1934, Page 3

LAND OF TIBET

STREAMS AND DESERTS. Tibetan is a strange-sounding language, which, to quote the words of a better man than I, “I have not yet taken the trouble to master,” but in spite of this I greatly appreciate the expressive names which the Tibetans have coined for their rivers (says a writer in the “Manchester Guardian”). The Wochkachu, for example; you have the stream itself in those three syllables; you hear it slapping along from rock to rock, gurgling in sudden eddies, pushing and shoving itself —wpchking, in fact —along its narrow 7 bed, ignoring the mountains towering above it, with a healthy and justifiable sense of its own importance. Quite different, naturally, is the Sangaloomachu; she glides with suavity along her course. The mountains have respectfully retreated a full half-mile from either bank, so in the spring the Sangaloomachu flows between green ribbons of sprouting barley, and -willow 7 trees —a trifle stunted and with a mou.ntainy look about them, but still real willow trees —grow on her banks and use her as a. mirror, after the manner of their kind.

Different again, as his name makes evident, is the Yapola. He is a small childlike stream that trickles and ripples down a gorge and loses himself as quickly as he can in the Indus. Occasionally he forms a pool under the cliff edge and swirls along looking blue-green and deep for a few yards, but soon his water is all white and broken again, showing plainly \yhat a shallow youngster he really is. The Indus, of course, cannot properly be considered a river of Tibet at all, and even at his source is always called by his Indian name, which sounds highly dignified and cosmopolitan in that wild spot. Where the Yapola joins him he is only perhaps twice as wide as the noisy and selfassertive Woc.hkachu, but already his volume of water is. much greater; he flows undisturbed' by the trivialities of his daily course and with a deep music and steady purposefulness quite unknown to the other mountain streams. His journeys is longer than theirs, and he cannot afford to dally by the way. Surely the source of the expressive river-names used by a Tibetan must be observant affection and gratitude. The deserts of his country have a beauty all their own, but that does not make them less powerful in driving home to him the importance of the streams.

Imagine travelling along a red valley. No water runs down it. The hills are of gritty sand and look as though a hurricane had blown them only yesterday into their fantastic pointed shapes; above them are squares and columns of tawny rock standing rectangular against the dazzling. sky. Every colour is glaring, every line hard, all around are stillness and silence. Presently there is a faint trickling sound; in the flat bottom of the valley a tiny stream has appeared. MAGNIFICENT PICTURE. At the same spot a. faint green tinge spreads itself over the flanks of the hills and on the skyline something moves; goats are grazing there. A small flat-roofed house is tucked into an angle of the rocks with a few pocket handkerchiefs of fields be-

low; a woman's voice gives a long call to someone out of sight. The path leads on; the water sinks into the sand; silence and barrenness return. . . Imagine descending a ravine in the Tibetan Himalayas. The path zigzags downwards for 2000 ft, sometimes cut in the rock, faintly traced across a slope of shale; below it ,the stream churns and splashes. The mountains are mineral stained and many colouredclaret, green, orange, brown, and black. In this fierce spot there is not flat ground for a hut nor soil for a blade of grass, but rose bushes grow 7 out of the shale. Their branches droop like delicate ferns covered with clouds of fragile scentless blossoms pink and red. Where a trickle of water drains down the rock face there a little moss and maidenhair fern cling, and if there is a cranny for a seed columbines bloom. At the foot of the gorge is desert, not red this time but a circle of pale sand bounded by black snow-topped mountains, with the air above it shimmering and dancing in the heat. The traveller toiling onward, his feet sinking ankle-deep at each step, feels as though his eyes were blinded and his face twisted permanently awry by the scorching light. No water can fertilise that sand, but half-way across it the soil allows an oasis, and therefore a village. On its edge is a walled square deeply shaded by great walnut trees. There only softly flecked by the sunlight, cattle feed peacefully while in one corner a group of tired men are lying asleep. Into man and beast, dress and leaf, colour has come back after the shrivelling white-hot emptiness outside. At the further end of the village the streams which have irrigated its fields are led into a wide stone-rimmed pool, also shaded by walnut trees. Here women stand to gossip and children bathe, laughing in the cool water; the world has become gentle again, man can rest and eat.

Truly hs who has ouce crossed a desert will never again think lightly of a stream.