uld presently prepare. Whereat he
was greatly delighted, and fetched the meat, which he had stowed away in
a kind of horse-cloth, for safety against ants.

I am not a bad cook at a pinch, and so we sat down and made a
cooking-place with stones, and built a fire, and let the flame die down
into coals, and I dressed the meat as best I could, and flavoured it
with gunpowder and pepper, and we were merry. The man was thenceforth
mine, and I knew I could trust him; a bivouac in the Himalayas, when one
is alone and far from any kind of assistance, is not the spot to indulge
in any prejudice about colour. I did not think much about it as I
hungrily gnawed the meat and divided the birds with my pocket-knife.

The lower Himalayas are at first extremely disappointing. The scenery is
enormous but not grand, and at first hardly seems large. The lower parts
are at first sight a series of gently undulating hills and wooded dells;
in some places it looks as if one might almost hunt the country. It is
long before you realise that it is all on a gigantic scale; that the
quickset hedges are belts of rhododendrons of full growth, the
water-jumps rivers, and the stone walls mountain-ridges; that to hunt a
country like that you would have to ride a horse at least two hundred
feet high. You cannot see at first, or even for some time, that the
gentle-looking hill is a mountain of five or six thousand feet; in Simla
you will not believe you are three thousand feet above the level of the
Rhigi Kulm in Switzerland. Persons who are familiar with the aspect of
the Rocky Mountains are aware of the singular lack of dignity in those
enormous elevations. They are merely big, without any superior beauty,
until you come to the favoured spots of nature's art, where some great
contrast throws out into appalling relief the gulf between the high and
the low. It is so in the Himalayas.

You may travel for hours and days amidst vast forests and hills without
the slightest sensation of pleasure or sense of admiration for the
scene, till suddenly your path leads you out on to the dizzy brink of an
awful precipice--a sheer fall, so exaggerated in horror that your most
stirring memories of Mont Blanc, the Jungfrau, and the hideous _arete_
of the Pitz Bernina, sink into vague insignificance. The gulf that
divides you from the distant mountain seems like a huge bite taken
bodily out of the world by some voracious god; far away rise snow peaks
such as were not dre