i6o SPORT IN THE HIGHLANDS OF KASHMIR chap. 



water abound, and there are big fissures here and there 

 with sides of smooth ice. Great boulders He embedded 

 in many of these, and in others the ice is so split and 

 cut away underneath that cavernous hollows are formed. 

 From almost all the sound of running water is heard, 

 and a fall into some would be almost certainly fatal, 

 as the victim of such an accident would be carried far 

 down the channels which must exist below. 



The ice at the highest point of the glacier, where we 

 crossed it on the 19th, was much less covered with 

 gravel and debris than lower down. The crevasses also 

 were deeper and wider, and we had considerable diffi- 

 culty in reaching the lateral moraine on the far side. 

 Many times we were turned back by the impassable 

 barrier of a yawning chasm in the ice, the sides perfectly 

 smooth and shining with a steely blue. In some places 

 the ice-blocks lay in big masses high above the ordinary 

 level of the glacier, and we went past walls of ice higher 

 than our heads. The main glacier on which we stood 

 was apparently the result of the accumulations of snow 

 which had come sliding down from the ravines in the 

 semicircle of mountains around us. The pressure ap- 

 peared to have turned the snow into blue ice. In many 

 places regular steps of ice, yards high, had been formed 

 by blocks of the same substance breaking off 



The view from this glacier looking up was exceedingly 

 fine. As observed already, the mountains here form a 

 wide semicircle, with several subsidiary glaciers in their 

 ravines, always at work, slowly grinding their way down- 

 wards. Each of these was a repetition, on a small scale, of 

 the immense ice-river into which they all flow, except that 



