278 TO DAEJILING : FIRST HIMALAYAN JOURNEY 
days' comradeship with so good a friend stood out as a golden 
time in Hooker's journeyings. On January 2, 1849, he records : 
Here I bade adieu to Dr. Campbell, and toiled up the hill, 
feeling very lonely. The zest with which he had entered 
into all my pursuits, and the aid he had afforded me, to- 
gether with the charm that always attends companionship 
with one who enjoys every incident of travel, has so attracted 
me to him that I found it difficult to recover my spirits. It 
is quite impossible for any one w^ho cannot from experience 
realise the sohtary wandering life I had been leading for 
months, to appreciate the desolate feeling that follows the 
parting from one who has heightened every enjoyment, and 
taken far more than his share of every annoyance and dis- 
comfort : the few days we had spent together appeared then, 
and still, as months. (Himalayan Journals, i. 332.) 
After parting from Campbell, he turned north again to 
Joiagri. This was a deserted yak post, never before visited in 
winter, consisting of two rude stone huts for summer travellers 
at an altitude of 13,000 feet on the great spur that runs south 
from the Kinchinjunga massif and divides Sikkim from Nepaul. 
Here he was on the veritable Kinchin, some fifteen miles as 
the crow flies from the actual summit ' whose grand snows 
rise on all sides on rugged granite precipices which have pierced 
the Gneiss and Mica-slate rocks, carrying them up in shattered 
peaks and cHffs to 20,000 feet.' Nearer along the massif stood 
the lesser giants, Kubra and Gubroo, the saddleback wdth a 
25,000 feet peak at either end, and to the north-east the sharp 
cone of Pundeim dropping five or six thousand feet in a sheer 
precipice to the sea of glaciers below : the chff, too steep to 
carry snow, showing a face of burnt red stratified rocks, so 
twisted and contorted as to appear like shot silk, permeated 
with broad white grains of the granite which caps the whole. 
Here, till driven out l)y a prolonged snowstorm, he stayed 
three cold January days in his gipsy-like shelter, a blanket 
stretched for tent from the roof of his followers' hut, with a 
little stone dyke at the sides and a fireplace in front. The 
ground was frozen sixteen inches deep ; to dig holes for the 
ground thermometers was a work of hours. Many of the 
