nue with us.

We hurried down the steep slope on the Tibetan side, to get away quickly
from the bitterly cold, windy pass. Describing a wide curve, and then
across several long snow-beds, we at last reached the river-level, and
pitched our tents on snow at an elevation 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. My men believed that eating cold food
at high elevations, when the temperature was low, led to certain death.
They preferred to remain without food altogether. Night came, and with
it the wind blowing in gusts, and piling the grit and snow around our
tents. In the night, when a hurricane was raging, we had to turn out of
our flapping canvasses several times to make the loosened pegs firmer.
Refastening the frozen ropes was icy-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 of
32 deg.--freezing-point.

In a hurricane of grit and drenching rain we packed our traps as best we
could and again started. To my surprise, as I was marching ahead of my
men, I noticed, some two hundred yards from my former camp, a double
line of recent footmarks in the snow. Those coming toward us were
somewhat indistinct and nearly covered with grit; those going in the
opposite direction seemed quite recent. After carefully examining these
footprints, I became certain that they had been left by a Tibetan. Where
the footprints were nearest our camp, marks in the snow showed that the
man had at different points laid himself flat on the snow. We had
evidently been spied upon and watched during the night. My men, who were
already showing fear of the Tibetans, were now all anxiously stooping
over these footprints. Some of them thought that the stranger must be a
_daku_ (a brigand), and that at night we should be attacked by the whole
band; others maintained that the spy could only be a soldier sent by the
Gyanema officers to watch our movements. This incident was held by them
as an evil omen.

We were travelling on flat or slightly rolling barren ground. We waded
across another cold river with water up to our waists. My men became so
tired that one mile further we were obliged to halt. The elevation of
this point was 16,650 feet.

The cold was intense. Again we had no fuel of any kind. A furious wind
was blowing. Snow fell heavily in the ev