304 THE SECOND HIMALAYAN JOURNEY 



' A howling wilderness ' is the only meet term ; there was 

 neither grandeur in the mountains nor beauty in the valleys 

 to invite the traveller ; in colouring, form of the land and 

 mountains, and their composition and stratification, it 

 strangely reminded me of the Egyptian desert. The rocks 

 were disposed in horizontal strata, cropping out on the 

 mountain faces and broken into low crags along their tops ; 

 not even lending fantastic shapes to relieve the eye. Eange 

 after range was like its fellows until, in the far distance, 

 one range loftier than the rest, black, rugged, and heavily 

 snowed in some places, shut out any more distant horizon. 

 The whole landscape sloped N.W. and the ranges were East 

 and West, so that I do not doubt the truth of the unanimous 

 assertion of the people, that all the waters from north of 

 my position and west of the Paniomchoo are feeders of the 

 Arun which enters Nepaul far west of Kinchin- junga. 



Very different from this dreary Tibetan landscape was the 

 fantastic grandeur of the mountains hard by. There was a 

 great amphitheatre of rock and snow under Kinchinjhow, walled 

 in with precipices and an ice face of 4000 feet, * a great blue 

 curtain reaching from heaven to earth/ only fretted where 

 * icicles fifty feet long run along in lines like organ pipes ' ; 

 its floor, two miles each way, ' a maze of cones of snow laden 

 with masses of rock rising fifty or eighty feet comparable 

 to nothing but the crater of a stupendous volcano, where little 

 enclosed cones of fire have been suddenly turned to ice.' 



. . . What keeps me here is the very curious Flora, though 

 not so rich as that of Kongra-Lama and the Thibetan plains. 

 I have a set of most curious new plants from between 17 

 and 19,000 feet Woolly Lactuceae and Senecioneae like 

 Cukitium, Gentians, Chrysanthemums, Saxifrages of course, 

 Cyananthi, and some very odd things. They are extremely 

 scarce and require close hunting. Sometimes I get but one 

 or two specimens of a kind, and poking with a headache 

 is very disagreeable. 



To-day I went up the flanks of Donkiah to 19,300 feet, 

 amongst the knot of snowy peaks west of Chumulari, and 

 such gulfs, craters, plains, and mountains of snow are surely 

 nowhere else to be found without the Polar circles. Of 



