LADAK. 
51 
During winter, I believe, it freezes, and then becomes 
a regular thoroughfare. 
On the 1st July we left the Indus and ascended 
the right bank to Nimu, ten miles distant, where 
there is an open cultivated plain several hundred feet 
above the level of the river. On the return journey 
I went direct from Nimu to Nurla by the high 
ground without going to Sospul. We halted half- 
way at a place called Hemis Shukpa, where there is 
a remarkable grove of very ancient pencil cedars 
(Jimiperus excelsd) ; some of them are over thirty feet 
high, and have stems ten to fifteen feet in girth ; 
there are about fifty large trees growing on a small 
knoll surrounded by a wall. Several of the largest 
trees have been dead for many years, but none of 
them are ever cut down, nor is it allowable to remove 
any of the dead branches for fuel. An old villager, 
about eighty years of age, assured me that when he 
was a boy the clump was precisely in its present 
condition, and the trees just as large. He said that 
his father and grandfather used to speak of them as 
having existed in their day. There are no trees of this 
sort near, and when I asked if there was any tradition 
as to how they originally came there, he said they 
had not grown from seed, for hundreds of pounds of 
seed fell from the trees every year, none of which 
ever germinated. This is truly the case, for the trees 
were loaded with ripe seed, and the ground strewn 
with it, but not a single seedling was to be seen, 
although cattle are kept out of the enclosure. The 
old man said he believed they had originated like a 
great many other things about which we knew just 
as little. " Smallpox, for instance, how does it come 
E 'I 
