356 TOO LATE TO MEND. 



were seen, but nothing was bagged except some hares. It 

 had been our intention to hunt up the big sheep on the 

 ground north of Hanle"; but man proposes, and the Ovis 

 Ammon very often disposes, at any rate of itself. We now 

 learnt that this ground had just been hunted over by the two 

 Changchenmo sportsmen unsuccessfully, owing to the Oves 

 having this season left it. When too late we had discovered 

 the mistake we had made in not persevering longer in our 

 pursuit of the splendid rams we had seen north of the Indus. 

 Only remaining one night at Hanle", we thence took a 

 westerly direction, and after traversing a long level stretch of 

 dreary country, which appeared quite destitute of any sort of 

 animal, and almost so of vegetable life, we camped late in the 

 afternoon on a patch of greensward in a wild gorge east of 

 the Lanak la, which rises between the Hanle* and Rookshu 

 districts. Next day we crossed the pass, which is somewhere 

 about 17,000 feet high ; but, as is so often the case with Tibe- 

 tan passes, the gradient was easy. Some distance down on its 

 western side, among the broken stony slopes, hares were 

 numerous, but generally so wild as to afford better rifle-prac- 

 tice than sport for a shot-gun. Here we found perfect par- 

 terres of sweetly-scented, pale-blue flowers, with which our 

 Tartars at once proceeded to deck their caps, after the manner 

 of the Swiss mountaineers with the Alpine roses. Notwith- 

 standing the sterile aspect of the country, the variety of 

 beautiful wild flowers growing in many Tibetan localities 

 would delight the heart of a botanist. On a little isolated 

 patch of green beside the Pangong lake, where we stopped 

 one morning to breakfast by a spring, the ground was covered 

 with a plant having flowers like a small pink geranium. In 

 the sterile wilds of Changchenmo, on damp spots, at an alti- 

 tude of quite 17,000 feet, I sometimes found whole beds of a 

 kind of polyanthus, with delicate pink flowers, and usually, 

 strange to say, in places where there was scarcely a blade of 

 any other vegetation to be seen. Another curious fact I 



