The Royal Road to Romance by Richard Halliburton

Author:Richard Halliburton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: non-fiction, travel
Publisher: Rare Treasure Editions
Published: 1925-09-15T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER XX

THE STRANGE STORY OF LEH

The highest inhabited region in the world—that is what Ladakh, with the neighboring portions of Tibet, claims to be. In our camp on the outskirts of the town, we were well over two miles above the sea, yet on one of the very lowest plateaus, most of the population living from three to five thousand feet higher. It seems incredible that people can not only exist year after year at such a height, but can rear their children and their cattle and their crops of barley and rice at the same lofty altitude. When the inhabitants of such eyrie levels descend to eleven-thousand-foot Leh, they can not tarry long, for they suffer no doubt from the density of the atmosphere and hasten to climb home where the air is normal.

In keeping with the rest of the country, Leh, with its ten thousand people, is a fantastic and picturesque little city, composed of a tumble-down cluster of ancient stone huts leaning at all angles and in all stages of disrepair. It boasts, however, of its Main Street, a broad straight avenue lined with poplar trees and swarming with a heterogeneous crowd from a hundred different races and sects. The city is not far from where India, Russia and China unite, and one finds evidence of this proximity in the features and costumes seen about the bazaars.

In Leh we had the opportunity to observe at close range the lives of the average Ladakhi, and found that they were very contented lives despite the abnormalities of their country. Though there is no real poverty in this rainless state, the land area that can be irrigated is unalterably limited which limits the food supply and that, in turn, the population. In the thirty-five thousand square miles of territory there are only thirty-five thousand people, who while they have a square mile each to provide for them, have a continual struggle to live. As a means of checking the birth-rate it became customary centuries ago to practise polyandry, and this unique custom is now a firmly established institution. A woman of Ladakh should look twice before she leaps into matrimony, for she does not marry the choice of her parents’ heart alone but all his brothers as well. While the women have become accustomed to managing three or four husbands through generations of experience, when there are six brothers or more it must become difficult to honor and obey so many all at once. There are circumstances, however, which relieve such a multiplicity of household heads, the eldest brother being really supreme, and his word law. He is the legal parent of all the children, and held responsible for their proper place in the community. The wife, in spite of her many mates, is often left entirely alone as Ladakhi men are usually engaged away from home. When a husband returns he leaves his shoes on the door-step as a warning for rival husbands to keep away, and only the eldest brother, whose shoes are inviolate, dares disturb them.

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