304 THE SECOND HIMALAYAN JOURNEY 
* A howling wilderness ' is the only meet term ; there was 
neither grandeur in the mountains nor beauty in the valleys 
to invite the traveller ; in colouring, form of the land and 
mountains, and their composition and stratification, it 
strangely reminded me of the Egyptian desert. The rocks 
were disposed in horizontal strata, cropping out on the 
mountain faces and broken into low crags along their tops ; 
not even lending fantastic shapes to reheve the eye. Range 
after range was hke its fellows until, in the far distance, 
one range loftier than the rest, black, rugged, and heavily 
snowed in some places, shut out any more distant horizon. 
The whole landscape sloped N.W. and the ranges were East 
and West, so that I do not doubt the truth of the unanimous 
assertion of the people, that all the waters from north of 
my position and west of the Paniomchoo are feeders of the 
Arun which enters Nepaul far west of Kin chin -junga. 
Very different from this dreary Tibetan landscape was the 
fantastic grandeur of the mountains hard by. There was a 
great amphitheatre of rock and snow under Kinchinjhow, walled 
in with precipices and an ice face of 4000 feet, * a great blue 
curtain reaching from heaven to earth,' only fretted where 
* icicles fifty feet long run along in lines like organ pipes ' ; 
its floor, two miles each way, ' a maze of cones of snow laden 
with masses of rock rising fift}^ or eighty feet — comparable 
to nothing but the crater of a stupendous volcano, where Httle 
enclosed cones of fire have been suddenly turned to ice.' 
. . . What keeps me here is the very curious Flora, though 
not so rich as that of Kongra-Lama and the Thibetan plains. 
I have a set of most curious new plants from between 17 
and 19,000 feet — Woolly Lactuceae and Seneciojieae hke 
Culcitium, Gentians, Chrysanthemums, Saxifrages of course, 
Cyananthi, and some very odd things. They are extremely 
scarce and require close hunting. Sometimes I get but one 
or two specimens of a kind, and poking with a headache 
is very disagreeable. 
To-day I went up the flanks of Donkiah to 19,300 feet, 
amongst the knot of snowy peaks west of Chumulari, and 
Buch gulfs, craters, plains, and mountains of snow are surely 
nowhere else to be found without the Polar circles. Of 
