298 GRAND SNOW-SCENE. 



ceeded in inveigling us away from other animals we might 

 have found elsewhere. How heartily did I join with my 

 companions in anathematising the brute, as, with only one 

 of my arms to trust to for support, I wearily scrambled 

 back by even a more breakneck, though a much less cir- 

 cuitous, route than the one by which we had come out. 



Soon after daybreak next morning we were making the 

 best of a bad way up the side of the glen. We scrambled 

 along for about a mile and a half, and then struck up a lateral 

 gorge, where our work soon became comparatively easy and 

 the ground more open. Here we found many fresh tracks 

 of big tahr, and altogether the place looked a perfect sanc- 

 tuary for game. We started several musk-deer, for which 

 the nature of the ground was particularly well suited, there 

 being many strips and patches of birch and rhododendron 

 bushes alternating with rocky gullies. I killed one of the 

 little animals which offered an irresistibly tempting chance 

 a rather unwise proceeding where there was every proba- 

 bility of the shot disturbing the game we were more especi- 

 ally in quest of. Thence we ascended a long steep gully, 

 flanked with rhododendron-bushes and birches, in order to 

 prospect the ground on the farther side of a high ridge, 

 from which the gully ran down. 



On reaching the crest of the ridge, the superb prospect 

 that suddenly burst in sight was in itself a more than ade- 

 quate compensation for all the difficulty and trouble under- 

 gone to obtain it. Anything more weirdly grand in the 

 shape of a snow-scene it would have been difficult to find. 

 There, facing us, immediately across a wide treeless abyss, 

 stood the pale spectral form of Doonagiri " purbat " (high 

 mountain), its gigantic proportions abruptly rising in vast 

 cliffs and slopes of solid ice and snow until they culminated 

 in a glistening white peak over 23,000 feet high. Although 

 I had become habituated, I may say, to grand mountain- 

 scenery, the effect produced on me by the startling revela- 

 tion of this mighty frozen pile, and my unexpected proximity 



