PROFESSOR'S TRAVELS

Manawatu Standard, Volume LIII, Issue 22, 22 December 1932, Page 8

PROFESSOR'S TRAVELS

VISIT TO LITTLE TIBET. Through passes higher than Alount Cook, on the road that leads from Kashmir to Ladakh, or Little Tibet, and then along the track that goes to Chinese Turkestan, Professor Arnold Wall wandered a few months ago. With him was his caravan of five ponies and three men.

Professor Wall, who retired only recently from the cha.ir of English at Canterbury College, left Inst March for India, and while there he made a sortie into Ladakh. He returned to Christchurch a few days ago. Alost of his time Professor Wall was in Kashmir, where people sleep on the roofs of houseboats tied up on a river that he decla-res is even more beautiful than his photographs of it. But his trip into Little Tibet was the most interesting part of his whole time away from Christchurch. “Ladakh is not Tibet proper. Tt is the bordering country, and the people are Tibetians and speak the language of Tibet,” Professor Wall said. “Leh, tile capital, in fact the only town that is anything more than a small village, is about 250 miles east of Srinagar, in Kashmir.

150 AIILES THROUGH DESERT. “I went there in July and August. AVheeled traffic cannot get through, and most [people ride. 1 don’t like riding, so I walked. “The first 50 miles is through country where there is good rainfall and plenty of beautiful vegetation and alpine scenery. Then we crossed a pass at 11.500 feet. After that there is a distance of 150 miles through what is practicallv desert —rainless, barren, treeless country. The last five inarches are up the valley of the Indus to Leh.”

Before the traveller reaches Leh, itself almost as high as the top of Alount Cook, he crosses two more high passes at about 13,000 feet. Professor Wall was 10 days at Leh, where there are only three white people, the Ger-man-Swiss Bishop Peter, of the Moravian Mission, and his wife and a young woman missionary doctor. During his stav there, the Professor made an expedition to Khardung Pass on the way to Yarkand in Chinese Turkestan.‘This was the highest point he reached, 18,500 feet above sealevel. He wandered about here, collecting plants and taking photographs. “The people are very primitive,” Professor AVall said. “They are about at the stage we were at —not at the ■time of the Norman conquest, nothing like that—at the time of the Saxon conquest. And it might interest people here to know that they are not in the remotest degree affected by the depression.”

HAD NOT HEARD OF SLUAIP. But because Professor Wall did not speak their language ho could not get cheered up by chatting with people who hadn’t heard of the slump. The villages in the valleys are planted with willows and Lombardy poplar, and with apricot trees, which had ripe fruit on them when Professor Wall was there. 'Hie inhabitants grow wheat, barley, peas, beans, lucerne, and some other crops that are not known here. The people are remarkable neither for beauty nor cleanliness; and their beast of burden, the yaks and zos(tlie zo is cross between a cow and yak) are no more handsome, though they are heavy and powerful. They stood still to he photographed, and apparently were as unworried by the presence in their land of a retired professor from Christcurcli as they were by their owners. Professor Wall gathered a collection of plants, all of which are going to Kew. No hooks have been written on the flora of the region, and little is known of it, he says. Ono stone lie took from a mam, . a sort of wall of stones each of which lias on it an inscription written by someone who hoped to plain merit by doing so, he will probably give to the Canterbury Museum. There was little ill effect from the great heights. Professor AVall said. At 15 000 feet he had to go slowly, but beyond a feeling of constriction across the chest there was no difficulty.