ndred
feet to the torrent below. After that I led my beast for a mile until we
came to a charcoal-burner's hut. Two or three Bhutias were sitting round
a log fire, and I persuaded one to go in front of me with a lighted
brand. So we came to Sedongchen, where I left my beast dead beat, rested
a few hours, bought a good mule, and pressed on in the early morning by
moonlight. The road to Gnatong lies through a magnificent forest of oak
and chestnut. For five miles it is nothing but the ascent of stone steps
I have described. Then the rhododendron zone is reached, and one passes
through a forest of gnarled and twisted trunks, writhing and contorted
as if they had been thrust there for some penance. The place suggested a
scene from Dante's 'Inferno.' As I reached the saddle of Lingtu the moon
was paling, and the eastern sky-line became a faint violet screen. In a
few minutes Kinchenjunga and Kabru on the north-west caught the first
rays of the sun, and were suffused with the delicate rosy glow of dawn.

I reached Gnatong in time to breakfast with the 8th Gurkhas. The camp
lies in a little cleft in the hills at an elevation of 12,200 feet. When
I last visited the place I thought it one of the most desolate spots I
had seen. My first impressions were a wilderness of gray stones and
gray, uninhabited houses, felled tree-trunks denuded of bark, white and
spectral on the hillside. There was no life, no children's voices or
chattering women, no bazaar apparently, no dogs barking, not even a
pariah to greet you. If there was a sound of life it was the bray of
some discontented mule searching for stray blades of grass among the
stones. There were some fifty houses nearly all smokeless and vacant.
Some had been barracks at the time of the last Sikkim War, and of the
soldiers who inhabited them fifteen still lay in Gnatong in a little
gray cemetery, which was the first indication of the nearness of human
life. The inscriptions over the graves were all dated 1888, 1889, or
1890, and though but fourteen years had passed, many of them were barely
decipherable. The houses were scattered about promiscuously, with no
thought of neighbourliness or convenience, as though the people were
living there under protest, which was very probably the case. But the
place had its picturesque feature. You might mistake some of the houses
for tumbledown Swiss chalets of the poorer sort were it not for the
miniature fir-trees planted on the roofs, with thei