re
experienced in the journey from Siliguri to Tuna. Choose the coldest day
in the year at Kew Gardens, expose yourself freely to the wind, and then
spend five minutes in the tropical house, and you may gather some idea
of the sensation of sleeping in the Rungpo Valley the night after
crossing the Jelapla.

When I first made the journey in early January, even the Rungpo Valley
was chilly, and the vicissitudes were not so marked; but I felt the
change very keenly in March, when I made a hurried rush into Darjeeling
for equipment and supplies. Our camp at Lingmathang was in the
pine-forest at an elevation of 10,500 feet. It was warm and sunny in the
daytime, in places where there was shelter from the wind. Leaf-buds were
beginning to open, frozen waterfalls to thaw, migratory duck were coming
up the valley in twos and threes from the plains of India--even a few
vultures had arrived to fatten on the carcasses of the dead transport
animals. The morning after leaving Lingmathang I left the pine-forest at
13,000 feet, and entered a treeless waste of shale and rock. When I
crossed the Jelapla half a hurricane was blowing. The path was a sheet
of ice, and I had to use hands and knees, and take advantage of every
protuberance in the rock to prevent myself from being blown over the
_khud_. The road was impassable for mules and ponies. The cold was
numbing. The next evening, in a valley 13,000 feet beneath, I was
suffering from the extreme of heat. The change in scenery and vegetation
is equally striking--from glaciers and moraines to tropical forests
brilliant with the scarlet cotton-flower and purple Baleria. In Tibet I
had not seen an insect of any kind for two months, but in the Sikkim
valleys the most gorgeous butterflies were abundant, and the rest-house
at Rungpo was invested by a plague of flies. In the hot weather the
climate of the Sikkim valleys is more trying than that of most stations
in the plains of India. The valleys are close and shut in, and the heat
is intensified by the radiation from the rocks, cliffs, and boulders. In
the rains the climate is relaxing and malarious. The Supply and
Transport Corps, who were left behind at stages like Rungpo through the
hot weather, had, to my mind, a much harder time on the whole than the
half-frozen troops at the front, and they were left out of all the fun.

Besides the natural difficulties of the road, the severity of climate,
and the scarcity of fodder and fuel, the Trans