328 LAST DAYS IN SIKKIM 



I no longer regard the Himalaya as a continuous snowy 

 chain of mountains ; but as the snowed spurs of far higher 

 unsnowed land behind, which higher land is protected from 

 the snow by the Peaks on the spurs, which run South 

 from it. 



It is singular that Thomson and I have, independently, 

 arrived at precisely the same novel conclusions as to the 

 I great features of the Himalayan Kange — its Glaciers, Geo- 

 logical structure and Epochs, Snow Line, &c. 



For the rest of his travels in India, there were to be no more 

 long months of solitary journeying. ' T. Thomson is with me 

 at last,' he cries joyfully on returning from captivity. Thomson, 

 like himself, was the son of a Glasgow professor ; they had 

 been fellow students. He too had travelled in Tibet, and had 

 been a prisoner amongst Asiatics — one of the Ghazni prisoners 

 in 1842. ' He parted from me in 1839, when we quitted England 

 respectively for India and the Antarctic Ocean, and he was the 

 first to greet me on my arrival in Darjiling.' He had fallen 

 ill on his way to join his friend, for six w^eeks, but now, by the 

 end of January, 



he has so wonderfully recovered that we walked together 

 from Khasing to Darjiling, 25 miles, in 6 hours, uphill 3000 

 feet. Still he looks thin, grey and very old. ... 1 cannot 

 return the compliment when he assures me that I look 

 fatter and younger than I did ten or eleven years ago 

 (in 1839) ; for he is grown extremely like his father, and 

 has literally quite as many white as black hairs upon his 

 head. 



Hooker's praises of him as ' a most pleasant companion, very 

 clever, (he always was,) and generous too, devotedly fond of 

 Botany and a famously hard worker, a regular Planchon for 

 acuteness, but with twice the steadiness of character and none 

 of the little Frenchman's crotchets,' culminate in the description 

 * the most valuable friend, certainly, I ever formed.' Their 

 vast collections they proposed to work out together, when 

 they returned to England ; but even thus early a more 

 ambitious scheme floated before them, and Hooker urges his 

 father to engage a certain well-trained assistant for them, 



