ASCENDING MUS-TAGH-ATA 
341 
with a thin crust, and lay so solidly packed that the men’s 
soft leather boots left no footprint behind ; but then, it is 
true, they were not provided with wooden soles. The 
snow crunched under the yaks' pointed hoofs ; but the 
animals never once stumbled. The higher we went the 
deeper grew the snow, though it never formed drifts 
worthy of the name. From a quarter of an inch its depth 
increased to four or five, and at the highest point we 
reached it was just under fourteen inches. The continual 
wind, the excessive evaporation, and the dome-like shape 
of the underlying surface, which exposed the snow to the 
action of the wind, made it difficult for snowdrifts to 
accumulate. The snow crystals glittered in the sun with 
a thousand dazzling facets, and although I wore double 
snow-spectacles, I suffered somewhat from snow-blindness. 
The men, who had no glasses, complained that everything 
seemed to be going round, and that sometimes the land- 
scape appeared to be quite black. 
We stopped to rest more and more frequently. I 
employed the time in making sketches, and in taking our 
bearings with the compass. We followed the edge of 
the rocky wall on the right-hand side of the glacier ; and 
therefore had a glorious view over its entire surface, which 
glittered below us. Up in the couloir, where the rocky 
walls gradually became lower, according as the surface 
of the glacier rose higher, and where they diverged 
somew'hat from each other, until they finally merged into 
the rounded ridge which connected the two culminating 
summits of the mountain, there was a splendid view of 
the distant trough-shaped depression. 
In the middle part of the glacier longitudinal crevasses 
predominated; the largest ran exactly midway between the 
walls of rock, and stretched down towards the tip of the 
glacier’s tongue. At three places in particular, where the 
ice glided over a natural depression, they were inter- 
sected by transverse crevasses ; and the chequered system, 
with ice cubes and ice pillars, was the result. In one place 
the crevasses appeared to start from a common centre and 
radiate in all directions, as they were broad and gaping 
