398 GRAND SNOW-SCENE. 



not only did he seem to bear a charmed life himself, but he 

 had effectually succeeded 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 circuitous, 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 sanctuary 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 alter- 

 nating with rocky gullies. I killed one of the little animals 

 which offered an irresistibly tempting chance, a rather unwise 

 proceeding where there was every probability of the shot dis- 

 turbing the game we were more especially 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 adequate 

 compensation for all the difficulty and trouble undergone 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 habitu- 

 ated, I may say, to grand mountain-scenery, the effect pro- 

 duced on me by the startling revelation of this mighty frozen 



