252 EAST NEPAL. Chap. XI. 



At a little below 15,000 feet, we reached enormous flat 

 beds of snow, which were said to be perpetual, but covered 

 deeply with the October fall. They were continuous, and 

 like all the snow I saw at this season, the surface was 

 honeycombed into thin plates, dipping north at a high 

 angle ; the intervening fissures were about six inches deep. 

 A thick mist here overtook us, and this, with the great 

 difficulty of picking our way, rendered the ascent very 

 fatiguing. Being sanguine about obtaining a good view, I 

 found it almost impossible to keep my temper under the 

 aggravations of pain in the forehead, lassitude, oppression 

 of breathing, a dense drizzling fog, a keen cold wind, a 

 slippery footing, where I was stumbling at every few steps, 

 and icy-cold wet feet, hands, and eyelids ; the latter, odd 

 as it sounds, I found a very disagreeable accompaniment of 

 continued raw cold wind. 



After an hour and a half's toilsome ascent, during which 

 we made but little progress, we reached the crest, crossing 

 a broad shelf of snow between two rocky eminences ; the 

 ridge was unsnowed a little way down the east flank ; this 

 was, in a great measure, due to the eastern exposure being 

 the more sunny, to the prevalence of the warm and melting 

 south-east winds that bloAv up the deep Kambachen 

 valley, and to the fact that the great snow-beds on the 

 west side are drifted accumulations.* The mist cleared 



* Such enormous beds of snow in depressions, or on gentle slopes, are gene- 

 rally adopted as indicating the lower limit of perpetual snow. They are, however, 

 winter accumulations, due mainly to eddies of wind, of far more snow than can 

 be melted in the following summer, being hence perennial in the ordinary sense 

 of the word. They pass into the state of glacier ice, and, obeying the laws that 

 govern the motions of a viscous fluid, so admirably elucidated by Forbes (" Travels 

 in the Alps"), they flow downwards. A careful examination of those great beds 

 of snow in the Alps, from whose position the mean lower level of perpetual 

 snow, in that latitude, is deduced, has convinced me that these are mainly due 

 to accumulations of this kind, and that the true limit of perpetual snow, or that 

 point where all that falls melts, is much higher than it is usually supposed to be. 



