PITI and Hungrung are two valleys in the Himalaya. That of the Piti river is entered from Kanawar by the Huugrung pass, elevated 14,800 feet ; the Parang pass, 18,500, leads over the range dividing the Parang from the Piti rivers. The district of Piti, which was formerly almost independent, but paid tribute to, or exchanged presents with, all the Tibetan countries in its neighbourhood, namely, with Garu, Ladakh, and Lahul, as well as with Kanawar, followed, in 1846, the fortunes of Lahul in being transferred to British rule. It is a very thinly populated valley, the villages being small and distant, and the arable tracts of no great extent. The mountains on its southern border, by which it is separated from Kanawar, are so very elevated that they wholly intercept all access of humidity from the districts to the northward of them, and render the climate entirely rainless. The houses are in con sequence very generally built of unburut bricks, made of the fine lacustrine clay so common in the valleys, and their flat roofs are thickly covered with a layer of the same material. The gradual
transition, in ascending the Sutlej, from Iliudularn to Buddhism, is very remarkable, and not the less so because it is accompanied by an equally :narked change in the Optical aspect of the inhabitants, the Hindus of the Lower Sutlej appearing to pass by insensible gradations as we advance from village to village, till at Ian we arrive at a pure Tartar population. The people of Upper Piti have quite the Tartar physiognomy, the small stature and stout build of the inhabitants o f Ladakh, to whom also they closely approximate in dress. To what extent mere climatic influences may cause these differences, and how far they depend on an intermixture of races, it is difficult to decide. It is impossible, however, to avoid being struck by the coincidence between these physical and moral changes in the human race, and the gradual alteration in the forms of the vegetable world, which are observable as wo advance from a wet to a dry climate.—Theinson's Travels in IV. Himalaya and Tibet, p. 109 ; f. et T. p. 223.