in the distance so clearly
that it seems far nearer than it is. Distance-judging by eye for
military purposes in high altitudes is an art governed by rules entirely
different from those that govern it at an ordinary elevation.

I was a bit weak after my attack of mountain sickness, and stuck to my
pony's back the whole way. I felt a natural anxiety with regard to the
native followers who accompanied me--an orderly, a syce, and a bearer.
They were all three plainsmen. Hills of any size whatever were quite
strange to them. Whether they would live at the height of Mont Blanc was
a question of some moment. I expected at any time to see one or other of
them lying down gasping like a freshly caught fish. I think they all
died in imagination many times before they reached the top of the pass.
They turned wild eyes of anguish and reproach towards me whenever I
waited to see how they were getting on. Eventually I found it best to
leave them to themselves, and only know that they arrived down the far
side alive, but expressing a poor opinion of Tibet as a country (for we
now were in Tibet).

The walk down to Langram was trying to the toes, but brought us off the
bare mountain tops and into a region of pine-woods, the very smell of
which is always comforting. Here I stopped the night, descending next
morning to Rinchingong, which is in the Chumbi valley, and stands
barely over 9,000 feet. Two miles above Rinchingong we had passed Yatun,
the frontier Tibetan village built against that Chinese wall which
stretched as a barrier right across the valley, but has since been
demolished by British dynamite. Here, besides the dwellings of some
Tibetan inhabitants, were the houses of the British official who
controls the Chinese customs in this direction, and of Miss Annie
Taylor, the lady missionary who has worked for long, and all alone,
among the Tibetans of the border, nursing them in sickness, and telling
them of Christianity. 'Ani' is Tibetan for nun, and the name 'Ani
memsahib' has therefore a double signification to those who use it.

The first glimpse of a building on the north side of the Jalap-La
proclaims the fact that you are no longer in India or under the
influence of Indian ideals of domestic or other architecture. The houses
in the Chumbi valley are not, however, as typically Tibetan as those
further north, being far more Chinese in appearance. It is, in fact,
curious that Chinese influence seems more prevalent in the Chu