354 
THROUGH ASIA 
of the ice, and at reaching warmer and more genial 
regions. 
On August loth we rode up beside the glacier-stream, 
on whose banks we were then encamped. It led to the 
right side of the neighbouring Terghen-bulak glacier, from 
which indeed it derived the greater part of its waters ; but 
it also received several affluents from the ice-sheet. The 
erosive power of the stream is enormous, and its bed was 
filled with round, polished stones. At one o’clock it carried 
210 cubic feet of water in the second. 
The right lateral moraine was about too feet high, and 
hid the glacier, except for a few detached pyramids nearly 
fifty feet high. The yaks toiled on cautiously and with 
their accustomed phlegmatic unconcern up the deep gully 
between the moraines and an enormous gravel slope, which 
had accumulated at the foot of the perpendicular wall of 
rock to the north, and which was crowned by the massive 
ice-sheet. Its edge partly overhung, and was in part 
broken off; and from it the icicles hung down their drip- 
ping tips to a distance of more than 30 feet. From the 
sharp edge of the rock, immediately underneath the ice, 
the glacier water spouted forth in innumerable cascades, 
large and small — crystal-bright jets which fell to such a 
depth that they were shattered to pearl-seed or powdered 
into a mist of rainbow-coloured spray before they reached 
the bottom. The stronger gusts of wind dashed the spray 
against the rocks, down which the water then trickled, and 
finally found its way to the stream under and over the 
gravel slope in a thousand tiny rills and rivulets. 
The Terghen-bulak was a triple glacier fed from three 
sides. The middle ice-stream was much larger than the 
other two, and occupied much the greater area. A smaller 
arm joined it from the right ; and its bed was sunk deeper 
in the mountain, so that the surface of the main glacier 
was considerably higher than the surface of the branch. 
Between the two rose a huge shoulder of the mountain ; 
and in the angle between the two ice-streams, below the 
outermost point of the rocky shoulder, there was a tri- 
angular hollow, forming, as it were, an eddy or backwater. 
