a protecting wall with our baggage. My men covered their heads with
their blankets, but I never could adopt their style of sleeping, as it
seemed to smother me. I always slept with my head uncovered, for not
only could I breathe more freely, but I wished to be on the alert should
we at any time be surprised by the Tibetans. My men moaned and groaned
and their teeth chattered during the night. I woke many times with a bad
pain in my ears, caused by frost-bite; my eyes, too, suffered as the
eyelashes became covered with icicles. Every time I tried to open my
eyelids there was an uncomfortable feeling, as if the eyelashes were
being torn off. In the intense cold the lids became fast frozen directly
they were closed.

At last the sun rose. The night had seemed endless. When I tried to
raise the blanket in order to sit up, it seemed of an extraordinary
weight and stiffness. No wonder! It was frozen hard, was as rigid as
card-board, and covered over with a layer of snow one foot thick. The
thermometer during the night had gone down to 24 deg.

I called my men. They were hard to wake. They were entirely buried under
the snow.

"_Uta! uta! uta!_" (Get up! get up! get up!) I called, shaking one by
one, brushing off the snow from over their blankets.

"_Baroff bahut_" (There is much snow), remarked one man, as he put his
nose outside his blanket and rubbed his eyes, smarting from the white
glare of the snow around us. "Salaam, sahib," he added, when, having
overcome his first surprise, he perceived me, and he raised his hand
gracefully up to his forehead.

The others behaved in a similar manner. Kachi was, as usual, the last
one to wake.

"Oh, Kachi," I shouted, "get up!"

"_Oh, bahiyoh!_" (Oh, father!) yawned he, stretching his arms. Half
asleep, half awake, he looked round as if in a trance, muttering
incoherent words.

"Good-morning, sir. Oh ... much snow. Oh ... look, sir, two _kiangs_
there! What is '_kiang_' in English?"

"Wild horse."

"'Wild' you spell w-i-l-d?"

"Yes."

Here the note-book was produced from under his pillow, and the English
word duly written down.

Odd creatures, these Shokas! The average European, half starved and
frozen, would hardly give much thought to exact spelling under such
trying circumstances.

Poor Mansing, the leper, suffered terribly. He groaned pitiably through
the entire night. I had given him one of my wrappers, but his
circulation had been badly affected by the intense