364 VALLEY OF THE PARANG. 



been potted at so freely, and generally kept well away from 

 the shore. On a marshy bit of ground, or what I once heard 

 an old gamekeeper describe as a " stanky sort o' place," near 

 the end of the lake, I killed two specimens of the ruff. An- 

 other British bird that we frequently saw up here was the 

 common magpie ; also that cosmopolitan bird, the hoopoe. 



Next morning we forded the Parang, a turbid broken flood 

 of melted snow, which, as is usual with these capricious snow- 

 fed torrents of Tibet, was only passable at an early hour. For 

 three days we trudged up the valley of the Parang, a seem- 

 ingly endless narrow glen, totally destitute of vegetation, and 

 closely hemmed in by steep stony landslips and precipices of 

 a brownish -yellow hue, rising stark and gaunt one above 

 another to a stupendous height, like gigantic stair-steps, save 

 where the V-shaped cleft of some lateral gorge disclosed the 

 broken termination of a glacier, or a towering white mountain- 

 summit. 



The Parang la, with its glaciers and perpetual snow, is quite 

 in keeping with the wild approaches to it on either side. It 

 is perhaps as savagely grand as any of the passes that are 

 ordinarily used as highways for crossing the "divide" or 

 backbone, as it were, of the Himalayan range into Tibet, as 

 well as being one of the highest and most arduous to traverse. 

 And certainly, from my experience of it in September, when 

 its difficulties are supposed to be at their minimum, I can 

 quite imagine it to be the latter. Its height is about 18,600 

 feet, and it is seldom, if ever, open before June, and generally 

 becomes again impracticable to cross about the beginning of 

 October. On our arrival at Leh in June, we found several 

 Indian servants of some travellers who had just come over 

 this pass, laid up there in a pitiable plight from frost-bite ; 

 one of them had lost many of his toes, and his companions 

 were little better off. 



The evening previous to our crossing, we camped a short 

 distance below the foot of the glacier that extends down 



