A Day after Burhel 201 



executing a pas on the spot. After a minute he 

 rejoined me, where I was vainly trying to pick 

 up the herd, and showed me where to look. 



I saw a ram standing up, then another beast 

 lying down, then another, and another, and the 

 longer I looked the more animals I saw. It was 

 a big herd of fifteen or more. They were amongst 

 a tumbled mass of rock debris at the bottom of a 

 grey cliff of rock, a kind of ground on which 

 burhel are almost invisible. The appearance of 

 a burhel dead, or in unnatural surroundings such 

 as zoological gardens, conveys no idea how these 

 beasts are protected by their strongly marked 

 colouring of slaty blue or brown, black and white. 

 They just lose themselves on suitable ground, and 

 the most suitable of all is the long slopes of 

 grey boulders so common in the higher Himalaya. 

 Against this background, even their dark olive- 

 coloured horns seem expressly designed by Nature 

 to imitate the black interstices of the boulders. 



The stalk looked simple, as a ravine ran right 

 up close by the herd. So we started and climbed 

 steadily to our point, which was reached in some- 

 thing over an hour and a half. Here we found 

 that the herd had moved, and were now well out 

 of shot and the space intervening too open for a 

 stalk. An examination of the ground, with due 

 regard to the wind, which was in our faces, showed 



