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Chapter six. Introduction to the Zemi |
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The road was now a rocky shelf along the face of the Barail. It climbed and climbed through tall-trunked mountain forest, (52) till the trees thinned and gave way to scrub and old fields and we crossed a pass at some 4000 feet. Then close on our right rose Thumjang Klang, the highest peak in the district; and from it, and from the main range running on to the left, ridges stretched southward like teeth from a comb and cut the country into parallel valleys - first the steep cleft of the Jenam before us, then the still steeper one of the Jiri, then the Makru, then the Barak, and so on all the way to the Imphal plain, and from the pass we could see the intervening ridges, dark and whale-backed, shouldering one behind the other along the skyline. |
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Normally we should have stayed at the Laisong rest-house, where the foot-track crossed the Jenam river. But, for my benefit, we were to camp at Laisong village itself. |
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We were still in the grassy foothills and half a mile from the stream when a path came up from below, met the track at right angles, and vanished up a steep hill on the left. We followed it. For three or four hundred yards we climbed precipitously, at first towards the foot of a line of crags, and next along below them; and then we saw the jutting roofs of the village morungs above the surrounding copse. The path widened; we passed a stone sitting-platform, and entered the wood; and then we debouched into the head of the village street by a side-alley littered with chaff, dung, refuse and all the storm-washings of the ground above it. |
