valley alive, and it was absolutely certain that I should be torn to pieces and devoured by the dreadful monsters that guarded its entrance and exit. But I was not to be moved, and the man went back, with hot tears of farewell, thinking no doubt that he had seen the last of me. A solitary traveller, in one of the untrodden depths of the Himalayas, and loaded with a dead weight of about sixty-five pounds, my progress thenceforward was a succession of incidents and accidents of the most dangerous nature, made doubly trying by innumerable hardships and privations.
On that first day of July, 1900, early in the morning, after watching the form of my faithful guide on his return journey until he had disappeared behind a projecting rock, I then turned round and proceeded due north. To my joy I found the pathway not so difficult as I had expected, owing to the entire absence of rugged rocks. Still, there was always enough to weigh me down with anxiety, as I had to push my way over the trackless field of deep snow, with a solitary compass and a mountain peak as my only guides. One night I slept on the snow under the sky, and another I passed in the hollow of a cliff; three days' jogging, after parting with my carrier, brought me across to the other side of the northern peak of the Dhavalagiri. It is here that the dominion of Nepal ends and
The Frontier of Tibet Begins.
As I stood on that high point, which commanded on the south the snow-capped heads of the Dhavalagiri family, and on the north the undulating stretch of the North-east Steppes of Tibet, interspersed here and there with shining streams of water, which appeared to flow out of and then disappear into the clouds, I felt as if my whole being had turned into a fountain of welling emotions. Toward the south, far, far away, beyond the sky-reaching Dhavalagiri, I imagined that I saw
