called the Hunza Valley. Here live the once lawless robber tribes of
the Hunzas and Nagaris, whose conquest cost the British a dangerous and
expensive campaign in 1892, but whose extensive terraces of irrigated
fields and evidences of skillful tillage gave the whole country an
appearance of civilization strangely at variance with the barbarous
character of its inhabitants.[1274]

[Sidenote: In Tibet and China.]

North of the outer Himalayan range, near the sources of the Indus and
Sutlej rivers in Ladak or Western Tibet, this same form of cultivation
has been resorted to by the retarded and isolated Mongolian inhabitants.
Here at an altitude of 11,000 feet or more (3354 meters), along mountain
ranges of primitive rock yielding only a scant and sterile soil,
terraces are laboriously constructed; their surfaces are manured with
burnt remains of animal excrements, which must first serve as fuel in
this timberless land before they are applied to the ground. In this
stronghold of Buddhism almost every lamasery has its terraced fields
yielding good crops of grain and fruit.[1275] In the densely populated Sze
Chuan province of western China, cultivation has climbed from the
fertile basins of the Min and upper Yangtze rivers far up the
surrounding mountains, where it is carried on terraces to the foot of
vertical cliffs.[1276] Farther north where the mountain province of Shensi
occupies the rise of land from the Chinese lowlands to the central
highlands of Asia, terraces planted with wheat or other grains cover the
mountain slopes.[1277]

[Sidenote: In ancient Peru.]

Terrace tillage is rare in new countries of extensive plains, like the
United States and Canada, where the level lands still suffice for the
agricultural needs of the people; but in the confined mountain basins
and valleys which made up the Inca's territory in ancient Peru, every
available natural field was utilized for cultivation, and terraces
brought the obstinate mountain sides under the dominion of the Andean
peasant. They were constructed, a hundred or more in number, rising 1000
or 1500 feet above the floor of the highland valley, contracting in
width as they rose, till the uppermost one was a narrow shelf only two
feet broad. These were extended by communal labor year after year, with
increase of population, just as to-day in Java and the neighboring
islands, and became the property of the Inca. Streams from the higher
slopes were conducted in canals a