SIKHIM AND BHUTAN
occasions I had noticed men carefully extinguishing the remains of their night’s fire, and now learnt that any carelessness in the matter of fire in the forests was most severely punished by the Bhutanese authorities.
Descending the other side, our path, owing to the frozen snow in the shade and to melting slush in the sun, would have been very difficult had not the villagers thickly strewn it with thick soft moss, which made walking quite pleasant. High above on our right was the nunnery of Kyila, built on the face of a very steep precipice, and said to contain sixty nuns; but as I counted twenty-five houses, the majority quite large, I fancy the number of inhabitants must be considerably greater. The road leading to it must be very difficult, and as it lay some distance off, across a small valley, I did not attempt to visit it. The rule forbids any male creature to remain in the precincts of the establishment.
We arrived at Cha-na-na, a small hamlet of half a dozen houses, mostly in ruins, about midday, and camped there for the night. Our experience in crossing the Chiu-li-la was so different in every respect from that of Eden that I cannot but suspect that he was deliberately guided away from the proper route to some mere cattle-track, and my boiling-point readings, which are about 600 feet lower than Eden’s, point conclusively to this theory. While here I nearly lost my best riding-mule from the effects of a poisonous herb which it had eaten; but after the native remedy, bleeding from the ear, had been resorted to it sufficiently recovered to leave camp with us. We soon emerged on a spur, whence we obtained a grand view of the valleys of the Pa-chhu and its tributaries. There we found a broad, well-cultivated, level country, which under good management ought to produce all temperate crops in abundance. On a distant mountain to the south-east was situated the monastery of Danka-la, visible, I believe, from Poonakha; on a hill a little to the north-east was Beila-jong, close to which our future road ran; while away
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