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Coolie labour, supply and wages; map inaccuracy; description of Kishethu |
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To Kishethu, about 7 miles, a really good village that got a magnificent move on when making camp for us. Sirire failed to produce the coolies ordered but the chief man turned up with a request for a red cloth and said they would send coolies when we came to their village itself. I put him in the quarter guard and took him to Kishethu where I held him to ransom for a fine of five pigs for not giving coolies. I got my pig and let him go and then gave him his cloth. I gave four of the pigs to Rishetsu, Sanchore and Anahatore as they had to supply extra men, and were all small villages and only did so with difficulty. Our red wool and salt was finished on the 20th and since then we paid in cash at -/2/- a cooly. Yesterday Phesami tried for -/4/- on the 22nd but failing quite pleasantly accepted -/2/- and today -/2/- was accepted very gladly. Thachumi apparently accept cash for salt hereabouts. |
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Looking from Kishethu up the Zungki valley it is easy to see how the mistake on the map arose. It looks exactly like one long valley going out to Burma, and that, no doubt, caused the one who made the map to show it all as one of the sources of the Namzalein. As a matter of fact there is a very low saddle crossing it, which the Surveyor could see (from Sangpurr, I think) south of which the valley drains into the Zungki. It is this saddle and the high range which holds it that must form the Assam-Burma boundary. |
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Kishethu is a village of about 100 houses with a reputation for looting traders of their goods. I noticed that they hung their heads on bamboos about an erythrina tree as the Yimtsung do and as the Chang village of Chentang does, but the Kishethu golgotha had no fresh skulls, only some old gourds which doubtless once contained "meat". Close by was the remains of a morung reduced to two roofless posts, (with a separate hovel for the boys to sleep in) the front post well carved, decidedly in the Lhota style. The drum, they said, had decayed. I noticed a number of Y posts, quite different to Sema or Yimtsung pattern, being long in the stem and with spreading curve in arms, |
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I noticed here an ingenious dodge of swinging hooks hanging loose over the hearth to take the four corners of a tray for drying meat. The hooks were made of a pierced node of bamboo with part of a shoot cut off to make the hook and these nodes were suspended on canes passed through them and knotted. There were also some very nice two pillared stools cut from one piece of wood. |
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Between Tobu and Kishethu - ie. since the 13th - we have been in villages hitherto entirely unvisited, I believe except for Shotokurr, in which Mr. Dundas slept when he went to punish Ayepungrr. Tomorrow we get back into known and fully surveyed country. It will be rather dull, but it is something to have come through the new part without any permanent transport and relying for our coolies on unvisited villages. |
