ANIMAL LIFE AT HIGH ALTITUDES^ 



By Maj. R. W. G. Hingston, I. M. S. 

 Naturalist to the Mount Everest Expedition of J92.fi 



[With 2 plates] 

 (Read at the meeting of the Royal Geographical Society January 12, 1925) 



This paper is a condensed account of certain observations in 

 natural history made while serving with the Mount Everest Expe- 

 dition. It refers to life on the Tibetan plateau, especially with 

 regard to the struggle for existence in those bare inhospitable tracts 

 above the limit of the Himalayan tree line. 



First, a word as to physical features. Tibet is a desert, a high- 

 altitude mountainous desert at an elevation of about 14,000 feet. 

 This is a point we must thoroughly realize, for the life of Tibet 

 is in many particulars the life of a desert waste. Compare it for 

 a moment with a low-lying wilderness, such as the sweeps of open 

 sand in Arabia, Sahara, or Sind. It differs from these in one 

 particular: It has none of their intense heat. But otherwise Tibet 

 is essentially a desert — empty, bleak, and bare. As we travel across 

 it we see all the features of the desert, the wide tracts of brown and 

 barren soil, the vast distances spread out before the eye, the fierce 

 display of light. Here, as in the desert, we meet tracts of sand, 

 often loose and crumbling and at the mercy of the wind. In one 

 place we see how its surface is rippled, in another how it is covered 

 with a saline incrustation, in another how it stupifies the scanty 

 vegetation or piles itself into crescent dunes. Here, too, we observe 

 the same cloudless skies, the same glare from the platea'u soil, how 

 the air rises in shimmering waves or clothes the surface in a true 

 mirage. There is the great range of temperature characteristic of 

 the desert, often 50 degrees between day and night. The rainfall 

 is scanty. The atmosphere is so dry that it splits the skin and nails, 

 and prevents the ordinary decomposition of flesh. Fierce winds 

 blow across it from the main range, and these might be compared 

 with the Sirocco or Shamal. Frequently they raise up vortices of 

 dust which career over the empty plain. As in the desert, we ob- 



' Reprinted by permission from) The Geographical Journal, Vol. LXV, No. 3, Mhrch, 

 1925. 



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