298 GRAND SNOW-SCENE. 



ceeded 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 cir- 

 cuitous, 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 sanc- 

 tuary 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 alternating with rocky gullies. I killed one of the 

 little animals which offered an irresistibly tempting chance 

 —a rather unwise proceeding where there was every proba- 

 bility of the shot disturbing the game we were more especi- 

 ally 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 ade- 

 quate compensation for all the difficulty and trouble under- 

 gone 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 habituated, I may say, to grand mountain- 

 scenery, the effect produced on me by the startling revela- 

 tion of this mighty frozen pile, and my unexpected proximity 



