Dec. 1848. GRANITE BLOCKS. 255 



scorching, and my back freezing. Rice, boiled with a few- 

 ounces of greasy dindon aux truffes was now my daily 

 dinner, with chili-vinegar and tea, and I used to relish it 

 keenly : this finished, I smoked a cigar, and wrote up my 

 journal (in short intervals between warming myself) by the 

 light of the fire ; took observations by means of a dark- 

 lantern ; and when all this was accomplished, I went to 

 roost. 



December 5. — On looking out this morning, it was with 

 a feeling of awe that I gazed at the stupendous ice-crowned 

 precipices that shot up to the summit of Nango, their flanks 

 spotted white at the places whence the gigantic masses 

 with which I was surrounded had fallen ; thence my eye 

 wandered down their black faces to the slope of debris at 

 the bottom, thus tracing the course which had probably 

 been taken by that rock under whose shelter I had passed 

 the previous night. 



Meepo, the Lepcha sent by the rajah, had snared a 

 couple of beautiful pheasants, one of which I skinned, and 

 eat for breakfast ; it is a small bird, common above 12,000 

 feet, but very wild ; the male has two to five spurs on 

 each of its legs, according to its age ; the general colour 

 is greenish, with a broad scarlet patch surrounding the eye ; 

 the Nepalese name is " Khalidge." The crop was distended 

 with juniper berries, of which the flesh tasted strongly, and 

 it was the very hardest, toughest bird I ever did eat. 



We descended at first through rhododendron and 

 juniper, then through black silver-fir {Abies Webbiana), and 

 below that, near the river, we came to the Himalayan larch ; 

 a tree quite unknown, except from a notice in the journals 

 of Mr. Griffith, who found it in Bhotan. It is a small tree, 

 twenty to forty feet high, perfectly similar in general 

 characters to a European larch, but with larger cones, 



