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 



