not covered with foliage. Many are rugged and bare.
Some of these are too precipitous to sustain vegetation, others are
masses of quartz and granite. On the hillsides most exposed to the
wind, only grass and small shrubs are able to obtain a foothold.

"On the vast ridges of elevated mountain masses," writes Weber in
_The Forests of Upper India_, "which constitute the Himalayas are
found different regions of distinct character. The loftiest peaks
of the snowy range abutting on the great plateaux of Central Asia
and Tibet run like a great belt across the globe, falling towards
the south-west to the plains of India. Between the summit and the
plains, a distance of 60 to 70 miles, there are higher, middle, and
lower ranges, so cut up by deep and winding valleys and river-courses,
that no labyrinth could be found more confusing or difficult to
unravel. There is nowhere any tableland, as at the Cape or in Colorado,
with horizontal strata of rock cut down by water into valleys or
canyons. The strata seem, on the contrary, to have been shoved up
and crumpled in all directions by some powerful shrinkage of the
earth's crust, due perhaps to cooling; and the result is such a jumble
of contorted rock masses, that it looks as if some great castle had
been blown up by dynamite and its walls hurled in all directions.
The great central masses, however, consist generally of crystalline
granite, gneiss, and quartz rock, protruding from the bowels of the
earth and shoving up the stratified envelope of rocks nearly 6 miles
above sea-level.... The higher you get up ... the rougher and more
difficult becomes the climbing; the valleys are deeper and more cut
into ravines, the rocks more fantastically and rudely torn asunder,
and the very vitals of the earth exposed; while the heights above
tower to the skies. The torrents rushing from under the glaciers which
flow from the snow-clad summits roar and foam, eating their way ever
into the misty gorges."

Those who have not visited the Himalayas may perhaps best obtain an
idea of the nature of the country from a brief description of that
traversed by a path leading from the plain to the snowy range. Let
us take the path from Kathgodam, the terminus of the Rohilkhand and
Kumaun railway, to the Pindari glacier.

For the first two miles the journey is along the cart-road to Naini
Tal, on the right bank of the Gola river.

At Ranibagh the pilgrim to the Pindari glacier leaves the cart-road
and