254 



OBSERVATIONS ON THE 



are the pasturing regions of innumerable flocks, where it is difficult for 

 the eye to detect any nutritious vestige.* The marginal limit of the 

 snow, which upon the sides of CJmnhorazo occurs at fifteen thousand seven 

 hundred feet, is scarcely permanent in Thibet at nineteen thousand, and 

 upon the southward aspect has no well defined boundary at twenty-one 

 thousand feet. From an altitude approaching to that line, and which was 

 bare of snow, I was in view of a distant chain, the detached peaks of which 

 appeared under an elevation of some minutes ; yet a few traces of snow, 

 like ribbands, only remained on the last day of August. My own position 

 was here at the edge of the snow, from which to the bed of the SpUi, at a 

 perpendicular depth of ten thousand feet, w^as a continuous bare slope. 

 The opposite (northern) declivity was indeed sheeted in snow to the bottom 

 of a deep dell, and all beyond me was uniformly white.! If the objects 



* A late traveller, M. Templand, has discovered in the Peruvian Andes similar scenes to those 

 in Thibet, the level of towns and cultivation having there an altitude of betv/een twelve and fourteen 

 thousand feet, and the highest inhabited villages and fields rising to nearly sixteen thousand. The 

 crest of the mountains is proportionally elevated, two peaks having been determined at twenty-four 

 thousand and twenty-five thousand five hundred feet respectively : the Himalaya are still superior 

 in actual height, and greatly surpass the Andes in the medium of a large tract of lofty level, and the 

 interior regions, which already begin to present a more gigantic display, are wholly unexplored. 



t This spot is upon the northern verge of Kundwer, conterminous with the Chinese frontier, 

 and immediately above the Hamlet of Changrezing. The extreme ascent was effected upon the 

 31st of August, the preceding night having been passed at an elevation of eighteen thousand feet: 

 even here we found ourselves so much exhausted by the rarefaction of the air that every 

 movement was an exertion. Though the wind had a temperature of 42°, the sun's rays were so 

 harassing as to force us to screen our faces, and for my own part literally to envelope myself in a 

 blanket.— Somnolency, languor and sickness affected us so much that we lay all day in hollows 

 amongst the rocks, without thinking of our situation or the chilliness of night. We slept in the open 

 air under a calm resplendent sky and a temperature of 19°, that of the ground we lay upon being 

 14°, yet we did not suffer great inconvenience except when the puffs of cold wind crept in upon us, 

 and congealed the moisture of respiration. The ascent from this spot (short as it was) occupied us 

 upwards of three hours, and latterly our progress was beset by debility and such a sense of 

 suffocation from the partial inflation of the lungs as almost overpowered our utmost efforts to 

 move. I do not think we could have ascended much higher at that time, had it been 

 practicable. At 1 p. m., the Barometer stood at 14,220 inches in a temperature of 30°, 

 which computed from cotemporary observations at Calcutta, indicates an altitude exceeding 

 twenty thousand and four hundred feet, a result which may be depended upon as being 



