620 REPORT—1904. 
For fifty years I have loved and at frequent intervals wandered and climbed in 
the Alps. I have had something of a grand passion for the Caucasus. I am 
on terms of visiting acquaintance with the Pyrenees and the Himalaya, the 
Apennines and the Algerian Atlas, the mountains of Greece, Syria, Corsica, and 
Norway. I will try to set in order some observations and comparisons suggested 
by these various experiences. 
As one travels east from the Atlantic through the four great ranges of the 
Old World the peaks grow out not only in absolute height but also in abrupt- 
ness of form, and in elevation above the connecting ridges. The snow and ice 
region increases in a corresponding manner. The Pyreuees have few fine rockpeaks 
except the Pic du Midi d’Ossau ; its chief glacier summits, the Vignemale, Mont 
Perdu, the Maladetta correspond to the Titlis or the Buet in the Alps. The 
peaks of the Alps are infinite in their variety and admirable in their clear-cut 
outlines and graceful curves. But the central group of the Caucasus, that which 
culminates in Dykhtau, Koshtantau, and Shkara, 17,000 feet summits (Koshtantau 
falls only 120 feet below this figure) has even more stately peaks than those that 
cluster round Zermatt. 
Seek the far eastern end of the Himalaya, visit Sikhim, and you will find the scale 
increased ; Siniolchum, Jannu, and Kangchenjunga are a!l portentous giants. To put 
it at a low average figure, the cliffs of their final peaks are half as high again as 
those of Monte Rosa and the Matterhorn. 
In all these chains you will find the same feature of watersheds or partings 
lying not in but behind the geological axis, which is often the line of greatest peak 
elevation. This is the case in the Alps at the St. Gothard, in the Caucasus for some 
forty miles west of the Dariel Pass, in the Himalaya, in Sikhim and Nepal, where 
the waters flowing from the Tibetan plateau slowly eat their way back behind 
Kangchenjunga and the Nepalese snows. The passes at their sources are found 
consequently to be of the mildest character, hills ‘ like Wiltshire Downs,’ is the 
description given by a military explorer. It needs no great stretch of geological 
imagination to believe in the cutting back of the southern streams of Sikhim or 
the Alps, as for instance at the Maloya, but [ confess that I cannot see how the 
gorges of Ossetia, clefts cut through the central axis of the Caucasus, can be 
ascribed mainly to the action of water. 
I turn to the snow and ice region, Far more snow is deposited on the heights 
of the Central Caucasus and the Eastern Himalaya than on the Alps. It 
remains plastered on their precipices, forming hanging glaciers everywhere of the 
kind found on the northern, the Wengern Alp, face of the Jungfrau. Such a peak 
as the Weisshorn looks poor and bare compared with Tetnuld in the Caucasus or 
Siniolchum in the Himalaya. The plastered sheets of snow between their great 
bosses of ice are perpetually melting, their surfaces are grooved, so as to suggest 
fluted armour, by tiny avalanches and runnels, 
In the Aletsch glacier the Alps have a champion with which the Caucasus 
cannot compete; but apart from this single exception the Caucasian glaciers are 
superior to the Alpine in extent and picturesqueness. Their surfaces present the 
features familiar to us in the Alps—icefalls, moulins, and earth-cones. 
In Sikhim, on the contrary, the glaciers exhibit many novel features due no 
doubt mainly to the great sun-heat. In the lower portion their surface is apt to 
be covered with the débr’s that has fallen from the impending cliffs, so that 
little or no ice is visible from any distance. In the region below the névé there are 
very few crevasses, the ice heaves itself along in huge and rude undulations, 
high gritty mounds, separated by hollows often occupied by yellow pools which 
are connected by streams running in little icy ravines; a region exceptionally 
tiresome, but in no way dangerous to the explorer. In steep places the Alpine 
icefall is replaced by a feature [ may best compare with a series of earth-pillars 
such as are found near Evolena and elsewhere, and are figured in most text- 
books. The ice is shaped into a multitude of thin ridges and spires, resembling 
somewhat the Nieves Penitentes of the Andes—though formed in a different 
material. 
Great sun-heat acting on surfaces unequally protected, combined in the latter 
