r burdens of prayers
hanging from the branches like parcels on a Christmas-tree.

These were my impressions a year or two ago, but now Gnatong is all life
and bustle. In the bazaar a convoy of 300 mules was being loaded. The
place was crowded with Nepalese coolies and Tibetan drivers, picturesque
in their woollen knee-boots of red and green patterns, with a white star
at the foot, long russet cloaks bound tightly at the waist and bulging
out with cooking-utensils and changes of dress, embroidered caps of
every variety and description, as often as not tied to the head by a
wisp of hair. In Rotten Row--the inscription of 1889 still remains--I
met a subaltern with a pair of skates. He showed me to the mess-room,
where I enjoyed a warm breakfast and a good deal of chaff about
correspondents who 'were in such a devil of a hurry to get to a
God-forsaken hole where there wasn't going to be the ghost of a show.'

I left Gnatong early on a borrowed pony. A mile and a half from the camp
the road crosses the Tuko Pass, and one descends again for another two
miles to Kapup, a temporary transport stage. The path lies to the west
of the Bidang Tso, a beautiful lake with a moraine at the north-west
side. The mountains were strangely silent, and the only sound of wild
life was the whistling of the red-billed choughs, the commonest of the
_Corvidae_ at these heights. They were flying round and round the lake in
an unsettled manner, whistling querulously, as though in complaint at
the intrusion of their solitude.

I reached the Jelap soon after noon. No snow had fallen. The approach
was over broken rock and shale. At the summit was a row of cairns, from
which fluttered praying-flags and tattered bits of votive raiment.
Behind us and on both sides was a thin mist, but in front my eyes
explored a deep narrow valley bathed in sunshine. Here, then, was Tibet,
the forbidden, the mysterious. In the distance all the land was that
yellow and brick-dust colour I had often seen in pictures and thought
exaggerated and unreal. Far to the north-east Chumulari (23,930 feet),
with its magnificent white spire rising from the roof-like mass behind,
looked like an immense cathedral of snow. Far below on a yellow hillside
hung the Kanjut Lamasery above Rinchengong. In the valley beneath lay
Chumbi and the road to Lhasa.

There is a descent of over 4,000 feet in six miles from the summit of
the Jelap. The valley is perfectly straight, without a bend, so