258 EAST NEPAL. Chap. XI. 



being 2000 feet less than that of Yangma village, and the 

 temperature therefore 6° to 7° warmer; but of all the 

 mountain gorges I have ever visited, this is by far the 

 wildest, grandest, and most gloomy ; and that man should 

 hybernate here is indeed extraordinary, for there is no route 

 up the valley, and all communication with Lelyp,* two 

 marches down the river, is cut off in winter, when the houses 

 are buried in snow, and drifts fifteen feet deep are said to be 

 common. Standing on the little flat of Kambachen, pre- 

 cipices, with inaccessible patches of pine wood, appeared to 

 the west, towering over head; while across the narrow valley 

 wilder and less wooded crags rose in broken ridges to the 

 glaciers of Nan go. Up the valley, the view was cut off by 

 bluff cliffs; whilst down it, the scene was most remarkable : 

 enormous black, round-backed moraines, rose, tier above 

 tier, from a flat lake-bed, apparently hemming in the river 

 between the lofty precipices on the east flank of the valley. 

 These had all been deposited at the mouth of a lateral 

 valley, opening just below the village, and descending from 

 Junnoo, a mountain of 25,312 feet elevation, and one of 

 the grandest of the Kinchinjunga group, whose top — 

 though only five miles distant in a straight line — rises 

 13,932 feetf above the village. Few facts show more 

 decidedly the extraordinary steepness and depth of the 

 Kambachen valley near the village, wdiich, though nearly 

 11,400 feet above the sea, lies between two mountains only 

 eight miles apart, the one 25,312 feet high, the other 

 (Nango), 19,000 feet. 



The villagers received us very kindly, and furnished us 



* Which I passed, on the Tambur, on the 21st Nov. See page 204. 



i This is one of the most sudden slopes in this part of the Himalaya, the angle 

 between the top of Junnoo and Kambachen being 2786 feet per mile, or 1 in 1*8. 

 The slope from the top of Mont Blanc to the Chamouni valley is 2464 feet per 

 mile, or 1 in 2-1. That from Monte Rosa top to Macugnaga greatly exceeds either. 



