At Length The News Came That A Fall Of Snow Had Roughened Its Surface.

A number of men worked for two days at scaffolding a path, and with great difficulty, and the loss

Of one yak from a falling rock, a fruitful source of fatalities in Tibet, we reached Khalsar, where with great regret we parted with Tse-ring-don-drub (Life's purpose fulfilled), the gopa of Sati, whose friendship had been a real pleasure, and to whose courage and promptitude, in Mr. Redslob's opinion, I owed my rescue from drowning. Two days of very severe marching and long and steep ascents brought us to the wretched hamlet of Kharzong Lar-sa, in a snowstorm, at an altitude higher than the summit of Mont Blanc. The servants were all ill of 'pass-poison,' and crept into a cave along with a number of big Tibetan mastiffs, where they enjoyed the comfort of semi-suffocation till the next morning, Mr. R. and I, with some willing Tibetan helpers, pitching our own tents. The wind was strong and keen, and with the mercury down at 15 degrees Fahrenheit it was impossible to do anything but to go to bed in the early afternoon, and stay there till the next day. Mr. Redslob took a severe chill, which produced an alarming attack of pleurisy, from the effects of which he never fully recovered.

We started on a grim snowy morning, with six yaks carrying our baggage or ridden by ourselves, four led horses, and a number of Tibetans, several more having been sent on in advance to cut steps in the glacier and roughen them with gravel. Within certain limits the ground grows greener as one ascends, and we passed upwards among primulas, asters, a large blue myosotis, gentians, potentillas, and great sheets of edelweiss. At the glacier foot we skirted a deep green lake on snow with a glorious view of the Kharzong glacier and the pass, a nearly perpendicular wall of rock, bearing up a steep glacier and a snowfield of great width and depth, above which tower pinnacles of naked rock. It presented to all appearance an impassable barrier rising 2,500 feet above the lake, grand and awful in the dazzling whiteness of the new-fallen snow. Thanks to the ice steps our yaks took us over in four hours without a false step, and from the summit, a sharp ridge 17,500 feet in altitude, we looked our last on grimness, blackness, and snow, and southward for many a weary mile to the Indus valley lying in sunshine and summer. Fully two dozen caresses of horses newly dead lay in cavities of the glacier. Our animals were ill of 'pass-poison,' and nearly blind, and I was obliged to ride my yak into Leh, a severe march of thirteen hours, down miles of crumbling zigzags, and then among villages of irrigated terraces, till the grand view of the Gyalpo's palace, with its air- hung gonpo and clustering chod-tens, and of the desert city itself, burst suddenly upon us, and our benumbed and stiffened limbs thawed in the hot sunshine.

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