The last bit of road was awful, nothing but boulders and débris, which we could sometimes avoid by riding over the ice of the river. The camping-ground was called Chomo-sumdo, a valley fork in a desolate region, but the escort had seen that some straw and barley were brought up on yaks for our horses.
From here we had to ride on the ice, smooth and firm after 27 degrees of frost in the night. The neighbourhood is not, however, uninhabited, for yaks and sheep were seen grazing in many places, belonging to nomads migrating northwards or merchants coming from Tok-jalung. At two black tents the people were packing up for the day's march; they had goats, with strips of red cloth bound round the ears.
A little farther up is a precipitous rock on the right side of the valley, and two caves open their black mouths in the wall. The lower one (Illust. 190) is the entrance to a passage leading to the upper, where a famous hermit has fixed his solitary abode. The upper opening has a partly natural balcony decorated with streamer-poles and ribands. Below the lower stand _mani_ cairns, long garlands of string with coloured prayer-strips, a prayer-mast, and a metal idol in a niche of the rock.
We tethered our horses at the edge of the ice and went up to the lower grotto. Here two young nuns from Kirong (on the border of Nepal) met us, and two mendicant monks from Nepal, one of whom spoke Hindustani, so that Robert could converse with him. The nuns were pretty, well-grown, sun-burnt, and somewhat like gypsies; their large black eyes had the shimmer of velvet, and their black hair was parted on the forehead and fell in luxuriant waves over their shoulders; they were clothed in red rags and wore Tibetan boots adorned with red ribands. They spoke cheerfully and pleasantly in strikingly soft, extremely sympathetic voices, and were not in the least timid. Their simple dwelling, which we saw, was in the great entrance of the grotto, under a smoke-blackened vault, surrounded by a small wall and a palisade of _pama_ branches, and partly hung with cloth. A sleeping-place was made of rugs of interwoven strips of cloth, and a tea-kettle was boiling on the fire. One of the men had a thick pigtail and a red lama frock; the other wore a sheepskin, and had not had his hair cut in the present, twentieth, century. The dwelling proper was situated in a higher part of the cavern.