A MAGNIFICENT EFFECT. 389 



like broad sheets of burnished silver in the sheen of the 

 moonbeams that played on them, causing the shadowy forms 

 of the adjacent snow-peaks to loom all the more dim and 

 unearthly in their pallid solemnity. 



Early next morning we went to look after our wounded 

 tahr. We found him lying dead at the foot of the precipice 

 where he had fallen, evidently from the very ledge on which 

 we had last seen him standing. A shaggy, black old buck 

 he was too, with horns nearly 14 inches long. 



Although I saw many more tehrny and young bucks, I 

 had no further sport among the great old tahr during the 

 remainder of the short time I was up here. There were, 

 however, ample and continual sources of delight in the ever- 

 changing views of the grand frozen peaks in the neighbour- 

 hood, as seen from these heights. One charming prospect I 

 especially remember. As the last rays of the setting sun, 

 shooting out from under a cloud-bank of violet, crimson, and 

 gold, shed a ruddy glow on the snowy slopes of Trisool, and 

 the half-naked crest (over 25,600 feet high) of Nandadevi 

 the wall-like shoulders of which mighty mountain are so 

 nearly vertical as in some places to leave the pale-coloured 

 rock quite bare of snow the effect was truly magnificent. 



On the evening I returned to Tapoobun, some villagers 

 came running to tell me that a bear was in a corn-field close 

 by. On reaching the place, sure enough there I could in- 

 distinctly see a black object among the corn. But thinking, 

 from its being so close to the village, it might possibly be a 

 human being enveloped in a black blanket, I refrained from 

 shooting until the brute hustled off, when I missed my 

 chance at him in the dusky twilight. Good black- partridge 

 shooting might have been got about here, had the birds been 

 in proper season, judging from the number of cocks that 

 were crowing in the vicinity. 



Above this the Doulee valley grows much narrower, and 

 its flanking heights more lofty and precipitous so much so 



