strong contrast their faces wrapped tightly round with
white turbans. Some wore fur caps with ear flaps; all had long sheepskin
coats and high boots of skins; many used snow spectacles; and as this
procession, silent and grave, with loads on their backs, struggled higher
and higher with piteous panting, you speculated apprehensively as to
how many of them would ever return. Moving cautiously to avoid the many
treacherous cracks, I made my way ahead with considerable trouble to a
spot six hundred feet higher, where I halted for a while on a rocky
island fairly clear of snow. As coolie after coolie arrived, breathing
convulsively, he dropped his load and sat quietly by the side of it.
There was not a grumble, not a word of reproach for the hard work they
were made to endure. Sleet was falling, and the wet and cold increased
the discomfort. There was now a very steep pull before us. To the left,
we had a glacier beginning in a precipitous fall of ice, about one
hundred feet in height. Like the Mangshan glacier, it was in horizontal
ribbon-like strata of beautifully clear ice, showing no dirt bands.
Perpendicular stripes of a darker greenish colour could be observed
arising from the unequal degrees of compactness of the ice; the strata
showed almost horizontal, with no curvatures nor depressions in any part
of them. The top, the base and the sides of the glacier were in this case
also buried in deep snow.

The doctor and I went ahead. In our anxiety to reach the summit, unable
to discern the track, now covered by several feet of snow, we mistook our
bearings, and with great fatigue climbed up an extremely steep incline.
Here we were on a patch of the troublesome loose _debris_, on which we
struggled for over half an hour until we reached the top of the range,
18,750 feet, considerably higher than the pass itself. Four men had come
with us, the others, to whom we signalled, bearing more to the west by
another dangerous track skirting the glacier.

The wind from the N.E. was piercing and the cold terrible. Under the lee
of a large rock we found temporary shelter, and through my telescope
scanned the Tibetan plateau spread out before us. From this high eyrie we
obtained a superb bird's-eye view. Huge masses of snow covered the
Tibetan side of the Himahlyas, as well as the lower range of mountains
immediately in front of us, running almost parallel to our range. Two
thousand feet below, between these two ranges, flowed, in a wi