142 LADAK. 



being of value in these barren regions, where nothing 

 grows but what is actually extorted from reluctant na- 

 ture. How different from the adjoining country of 

 Cashmere, where, on the other hand, nature is profuse in 

 her gifts, covering mountain and valley with the richest 

 herbage, and yielding heavy crops of cereals to the 

 merest scratches of the plough. Both are wonderful 

 countries : Cashmere, for its beauty and fertility ; Thibet, 

 for its savage desolation and sterility. The natives of 

 each land, too, partake strongly of the relative character- 

 istics of their native land : the Cashmiries, famous for 

 personal beauty, the Thibetans, as notorious for ugliness. 

 Strange, though, they possess some taste ; for almost every 

 individual of the numbers met travelling yesterday and 

 to-day had a bunch of yellow roses, or other bright 

 flowers stuck in his greasy cap. 



10th July. On the march at 5 A.M. the path as 

 ever in these mountainous regions running by a stream 

 threading the narrow valley. Here and there was a strip 

 of green cultivation, with brown mountains, mounts, 

 huge hillocks, all barren, some craggy, others smoothly 

 rounded, heap on heap, pile on pile, here falling sloping 

 back, allowing the eye to range over many successive 

 wave-like summits, there rising up abruptly with crags, 

 and clefts, and dark ravines, closing in upon and over- 

 shadowing the narrow valley. I tried to find some mode 

 of description by which one might give a person verbally 

 some tolerable idea of the combined desolation and gran- 

 deur of these scenes ; but all in vain. 



We had a long and fatiguing ascent, prior to which 

 we passed through the village of Waka, near which 

 abutting on the path, is a sculptured rock standing alone, 

 representing a Hindoo deity. The figure is carved on 

 the face of the rock which is of granite, I think, the 



