242 Notes of an Excursion to the Pindree Glacier. [March, 



la." Bees are said to be particularly fond of the honey afforded by the 

 flowers, and to make it in large quantities when these are most plenti- 

 ful. On the sunniest quartz rocks above Sooring, the Vitis macro- 

 phylla 1 creeps along with its stems 5 or 6 feet long, and great cordate 

 leaves from 18 to 20 inches each way. The people call it "Umlee," 

 " Assonjee," and eat the fruit in November : it is not uncommon near 

 Almorah, and Dr. Royle mentions it as climbing over trees at Mussoo- 

 ree ; where, however, I never saw it ; nor if this be his macrophylla as 

 it should be, has it at all a climbing habit. 



September 1 5th. — To Khatee, 12^ miles, over the Dhakree (or 

 Thakooree) Benaik. There is a bitter proverb that if you want to know 

 the value of money, try to borrow some ; so to realize the height of these 

 mountains, you must walk up one of them. Such an experience will 

 also go far to reclaim one from the intellectual system of the most 

 honest, able, and amiable of bishops since Synesius, Berkeley, who 

 endeavours to reason us out of our senses, and persuade us that all 

 which we see, hear, feel, touch, and taste has really no external exist- 

 ence — all that we perceive being only ideal — and existing therefore 

 only in the mind. The brain itself, as a sensible thing, exists only in 

 the mind, and not the mind in the brain, as the materialists vainly 

 allege : if full of such sublimated cobwebs, one commences such an ascent 

 as to-day's, he speedily begins to waver ; what, have all these rocks, 

 forests, torrents, snows, this " brave o'erhanging firmament" — "im- 

 mense, beautiful, glorious beyond expression, and beyond thought ;" and 

 still more, these wearied legs and craving stomach, no absolute being ? 

 If so, it is quite surprising how these two latter ideas are burnished and 

 stimulated by other ideas, such as an easy chair and a pleasant glass 

 of ale. The higher we mount into the atmosphere, the lower we fall 

 in the region of metaphysics ; and on the summit of the mountain 

 will generally in practice be found pure materialists, adopting with full 

 conviction the moral enjoined in the apologue of Menenius Agrippa. 



We left Sooring at 6 : 20, and reached Tantee, a chalet, about 200 

 feet below the Dhakree Benaik Pass, at 10 : 10. Here we breakfasted. 

 Water boils at about 192|°, giving the elevation about 10,700 feet, and 

 the actual ascent 3000, not half what one has to climb on many other 

 routes. The path rises at once from Sooring, and is in parts very steep 

 and rocky, interspersed with occasional undulating meadows. The 



