led in the
dance, grotesquely magnified; stones and nettles become walls and men.
All the country is elusive and unreal.

A few miles beyond Guru the road skirts the Bamtso Lake, which must once
have filled the whole valley. Now the waters have receded, as the
process of desiccation is going on which has entirely changed the
geographical features of Central Asia, and caused the disappearance of
great expanses of water like the Koko Nor, and the dwindling of lakes
and river from Khotan to Gobi. The Roof of the World is becoming less
and less inhabitable.

From the desert to Arcady is not a long journey, but armies travel
slowly. After months of waiting and delay we reached the promised land.
It was all suddenly unfolded to our view when we stood on the Khamba la.
Below us was a purely pastoral landscape. Beyond lay hills even more
barren and verdureless than those we had crossed. But every mile or so
green fan-shaped valleys, irrigated by clear streams, interrupted the
barrenness, opening out into the main valley east and west with perfect
symmetry. To the north-east flowed the Kyi Chu, the valley in which
Lhasa lay screened, only fifty-six miles distant.

To the south of the pass lay the great Yamdok Lake, wild and beautiful,
its channels twining into the dark interstices of the hills--valleys of
mystery and gloom, where no white man has ever trod. Lights and shadows
fell caressingly on the lake and hills. At one moment a peak was ebony
black, at another--as the heavy clouds passed from over it, and the
sun's rays illumined it through a thin mist--golden as a field of
buttercups. Often at sunset the grassy cones of the hills glow like
gilded pagodas, and the Tibetans, I am told, call these sunlit plots the
'golden ground.'

In bright sunlight the lake is a deep turquoise blue, but at evening
time transient lights and shades fleet over it with the moving clouds,
light forget-me-not, deep purple, the azure of a butterfly's wing--then
all is swept away, immersed in gloom, before the dark, menacing
storm-clouds.

On the 25th I crossed the river with the 1st Mounted Infantry and 40th
Pathans. My tent is pitched on the roof of a rambling two-storied house,
under the shade of a great walnut-tree. Crops, waist-deep, grow up to
the walls--barley, wheat, beans, and peas. On the roof are garden
flowers in pots, hollyhocks, and marigolds. The cornfields are bright
with English wild-flowers--dandelions, buttercups, astragalus,