A SUMMER IN HIGH ASIA. 



march my pen fails me ; suffice it to say that these 

 few miles from Upshi to Gya, of the many hundreds 

 that I have travelled in the Himalaya, stand out 

 alone in my memory as the most remarkable, for 

 the exaggerated quaintness of their scenery. The 

 road seems even to have struck an old traveller like 

 Moorcroft, who describes it with more than usual 

 detail in the account of his travels in these regions, 

 when he was the first European who had been here, 

 now some seventy years ago. 



I cannot hope to adequately describe the scenery 

 of the upper part of this valley, or to even give a 

 faint idea of what it is like, but transcribe what I 

 wrote at the time in my diary : 



"The mountains had been for a long time wonderful, 

 but here, after passing through the village of Mini, I 

 doubt if they could be equalled anywhere in the fantastic 

 scene that they present. It is Nature gone mad, delirious. 

 The hills and precipices closing in on the gorge are not of 

 a great height, but the strata of sandstone and conglomerate 

 stand out like huge ribs, some fifty feet or more from the 

 slope and sometimes not more than a dozen yards apart, 

 looking as if some giant hand had built huge, rugged 

 walls, from the summit of the mountains to their base. 

 The intervals between these walls are composed of earth 

 or stones, each one being of some different prevailing 

 colour, purple, green, blue, yellow, white, and crimson. 

 I was particularly taken with a turquoise-blue stripe between 

 two Venetian red ones." 



I can only add that some months later, after 

 having seen much of the wondrous colouring of the 

 Ladakh mountains and the highlands of Rupshu, 



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