p, then him. After some time he, too, got over
the severe shock and fright, and though he was rather shattered and
aching all over, I succeeded in persuading the man that nothing was the
matter with him.

We then hurried down the steep declivity on the Tibetan side, to get away
quickly from the bitterly cold, windy pass. Describing a wide arc of a
circle, and then making straight down across several long snow-beds, we
at last reached the river level and pitched our tents on snow at an
altitude of 16,900 feet. There was no wood, no yak or pony dung, no
lichens, no moss, and therefore nothing with which we could make a fire.
It seemed hard upon my men that, after such a toilsome day, they should
be compelled to go to sleep without having had a good meal. They
believe--and they are right--that eating cold food at such high
elevations, with such low temperature, leads to certain death. They
preferred, therefore, to remain without food altogether. Night came, and
with it the wind blowing in gusts, and piling the grit and snow around
our tents. During the nocturnal hours, with the hurricane raging, we had
to turn out of our flapping canvases several times to make the loose pegs
firmer. Fastening all the frozen ropes was very cold work. At 2 A.M. the
thermometer was down to 12 deg.. At 9 A.M. in the sun, it went up to 26 deg., and
inside the tent at the same hour we had a temperature as high as
32 deg.--freezing-point.

CHAPTER XXVI

Mysterious footprints--Brigand or spy?--Passes and
tracks--Intense cold--No fuel--A high flat plateau--Fuel at
last!--Two spies in disguise--What they took us for.

IN a hurricane of grit and drenching rain we packed up our traps as best
we could and again started on our way. I was slightly in advance when, to
my surprise, I noticed, some two hundred yards only from camp, a double
line of recent footmarks on the snow. Those coming towards us were
somewhat indistinct and nearly covered with grit, those going in the
opposite direction seemed quite recent. After carefully examining these
footprints, I felt pretty certain that they had been made by a Tibetan.
Where the footprints stopped, marks in the snow showed that the man had
at different points laid himself flat on the ground. No doubt we had been
spied upon and watched. My own men had shown many signs of terror ever
since we had crossed to this side of the Himahlyas, and were now all
anxiously stooping low over these p