SPITI VALLEY, &c. 269 



who descries them from afar through the loaming air like fortified castles, 

 but here man is not his enemy. 



At this point of the valley the river has an actual elevation of twelve 

 thousand feet, and the narrow inhabited slip, from two to four hundred feet 

 higher, trends on each side with a steep cliff to the stream, backed up by 

 the bases of the mountains which here assume a perpendicular form, and 

 the gradual erosion of their surface has thrown up heaps of finely attrited 

 matter that reaches high upon the sides of the rock no longer visible, and 

 in the course of time will overtop the loftiest peaks, and the whole country 

 be thus buried in its own dust by a process of nature, which, however 

 slow, is inevitable and irresistible. 



The rise of the level continues beyond Rangnk, at the rate of thirty 

 feet a mile ; the river winding with a varying expanse and making 

 sharper flexures ; the rocks of a packed structure assume a bolder and 

 more lumpy form, their inward faces steep and scabrous, terminate in flat 

 summits, or are deflected in a slanting plane at a medium height between 

 sixteen and seventeen thousand feet, a limit which is occasionally whiten- 

 ed by snow at mid summer. These are but the cheeks of the river, and 

 the roots of a parent chain on each side which towers majestically in the 

 back ground. The villages of Ilayl and Hansi rest at an elevation 

 between twelve and thirteen thousand feet: here the river is still of con- 

 siderable volume, but fordable with some exertion; and at the 

 last inhabited spot, a few miles higher, tlie stream was found so much 

 reduced that I crossed it with ease upon a man's back in the month of 

 August, but tlie width of its bed argued its luucii greater size at an 

 antecedent period of the year. IJcyond Lossttr tlie river has not been 

 traced. Oncoming down upon tlx villano from the Jieads of \\\c Chun ib, 

 I found its bed, at a t^pot nearly a mile lnulu r, to have an ( levaliou 

 approaching to thirteen thousand li\e lunulred I'eei, and the tjlow rise 



