328 LAST DAYS IN SIKKIM 
I no longer regard the Himalaya as a continuous snowy 
chain of mountains ; but as the snowed spurs of far higher 
unsnowed land behind, which higher land is protected from 
the snow by the Peaks on the spurs, which run South 
from it. 
It is singular that Thomson and I have, independently, 
arrived at precisely the same novel conclusions as to the 
great features of the Himalayan Kange — its Glaciers, Geo- 
logical structure and Epochs, Snow Line, &c. 
For the rest of his travels in India, there were to be no more 
long months of solitary journeying. ' T. Thomson is with me 
at last,' he cries joyfully on returning from captivity. Thomson, 
like himself, was the son of a Glasgow professor ; they had 
been fellow students. He too had travelled in Tibet, and had 
been a prisoner amongst Asiatics — one of the Ghazni prisoners 
in 1842. ' He parted from me in 1839, when we quitted England 
respectively for India and the Antarctic Ocean, and he was the 
first to greet me on my arrival in Darjiling.' He had fallen 
ill on his way to join his friend, for six weeks, but now, by the 
end of January, 
he has so wonderfully recovered that we walked together 
from Khasing to Darjiling, 25 miles, in 6 hours, uphill 3000 
feet. Still he looks thin, grey and very old. , . . I cannot 
return the compliment when he assm-es me that I look 
fatter and younger than I did ten or eleven years ago 
(in 1839) ; for he is grown extremely like his father, and 
has literally quite as many white as black hairs upon his 
head. 
Hooker's praises of him as ' a most pleasant companion, very 
clever, (he always was,) and generous too, devotedly fond of 
Botany and a famously hard worker, a regular Planchon for 
acuteness, but with twice the steadiness of character and none 
of the little Frenchman's crotchets,' culminate in the description 
* the most valuable friend, certainly, I ever formed.' Their 
vast collections they proposed to w^ork out together, when 
they returned to England ; but even thus early a more 
ambitious scheme "floated before them, and Hooker urges his 
father to engage^a certain well-trained assistant for them. 
