328 THROUGH ASIA 
purest blue, and heaps of snow lay at the bottom. The 
glacier was for the most part covered with a thin layer 
of soft, wet slush, caused partly by the newly fallen 
snow, partly by the destructive ag'ency of ablation, d he 
beautiful transparent blue ice was only visible in the 
fissures, and in the channels where the small glacial 
streams flowed over the surface of the glacier. These 
streams, with their delightfully babbling, crystal - clear 
ON THE YAM-BULAK GLACIER, LOOKING EAST 
water, were none of them large ; for usually they were 
soon swallowed up by some gaping crevasse. 
After we had advanced some 440 yards on the glacier, 
probably a third of the whole way across, the ice became 
perfectly impracticable, a maze of hummocks and pyramids, 
crevasses and streams, these last running in deep trenches, 
sunk between the irregularities of the ice and partly 
hidden by snow-bridges. 
Looking upward from this point towards the rocky part 
of the mountain, situated between its perpendicular but- 
tresses, i.e. towards the east, we perceived even then that 
