1. Here is one of the numerous instances where the Mongolian
tale-repeater introduces into the Indian story details drawn to the
life from the manners and customs around him of his own people. Compare
with it the following sketch from personal observation in Mongolia,
given in Abbé Huc's "Travels:"--"You sometimes come upon a plain
covered with animation; tents and herds dotted all over it.... It is
a place whither the greater supply of water and the choicer pastures
have attracted for a time a number of nomadic families; you see
rising in all directions tents of various dimensions, looking like
balloons newly inflated and just about to take flight; children with
a sort of hod upon their backs run about collecting argols (dried
dung for fuel), which they pile up in heaps round their respective
tents. The women look after the calves, make tea in the open air,
or prepare milk in various ways; the men, mounted on fiery horses,
armed with a long pole, gallop about, guiding to the best pastures
the great herds of cattle which undulate over the surrounding country
like waves of the sea. All of a sudden these pictures, anon so full
of animation, disappear. Men, tents, herds, all have vanished in the
twinkling of an eye. You see nothing left behind but deserted heaps
of embers, half-extinguished fires, and a few bones of which birds
of prey are disputing the possession. Such are the sole vestiges that
a Mongol tribe has just passed that way. The animals having devoured
all the grass around, the chief gives the signal for departure, and
all the herdsmen, folding their tents, drive their herds before them,
no matter whither, in search of fresh pastures."
This nomadic life, characteristic of the Mongols, would seem never
at any time to have entered into Indian manners and customs. Though
in early times pastoral occupations so engrossed them that they have
left deep traces in their language (e. g. gotra, meaning originally a
breed of cows, came to stand for a family lineage; and gôpa, gôpala,
originally a cowherd, for a prince), and the hymns of the Rig-Vêda
are full of invocations of blessings on the herds (Rig V. 1. 42,
8. 67, 3. 118, 2); yet wherever they came they occupied themselves
with agriculture also, and settled themselves down with social habits
which early led to the foundation of cities. Consult Lassen, i. 494,
685, 815, &c.
2. Abbé Huc incidentally mentions also this practice of carrying the
produce of the flocks and herds stored in sheep's paunches, as the
present common usage of the Mongolians, and adopted by himself among
the provisions for his journeyings among them (vol. ii. chap. iii.,
and other places).
3. Marmot. The sandy plains of Tibet are frequently inhabited by
marmots, who live together in holes, and whose fur is at the present
day an important article of the Tibetian trade both with India and
China. It is now generally allowed that it must be these beasts which
were intended in the marvellous accounts of the old Greek writers
of the gold-digging ants. Though the Indians themselves gave them
the name of ants, pipîlika (e. g. Mahâ Bhârata, i. p. 375, v. 1860),
the description of them would pass exactly for that of this little
animal--in size somewhat smaller than a fox, covered with fur, in
habits social, living in holes underground in the winter.