Not so my
men. They slept a few feet from me, three on one bench, two on another.
Bedding was not to be had, and so among the dirty straw they huddled
together as closely as possible to preserve what bodily heat they had.
Snow fell heavily. In the early morning sunlight on January 13th the
undulating valley, with its grand untrodden carpet of white, looked
magnificently beautiful as I picked out the road shown me by a poor
fellow whose ears had got frost-nipped.
No easy work was it climbing tediously up the narrow footway in a sharp
spur rising some 1,000 feet in a ribbed ascent, overlooking a fearful
drop. Over to the left I saw an unhappy little urchin, hardly a rag
covering his shivering, bleeding body, grovelling piteously in the
snow, while his blind and goitrous mother did her best at gathering
firewood with a hatchet. The pass leading over this range, through which
the white crystalline flakes were driven wildly in one's face, was a
half-moon of smooth rock actually worn away by the endless tramping of
myriads of pack-ponies, who then were plodding through ruts of steps
almost as high as their haunches.
A man with a diseased hip joined me thirty li farther on, dismounting
from his pile of earthly belongings which these men fix on the backs of
their ponies.
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