to the north, far above the others, to an elevation of more than twenty-eight thousand feet above sea-level, Kunchin Junga, with its majestic head right away in endless space, distinct and well defined under the clear blue canopy of heaven, looks in its incomparable grandeur like an isolated mountain of molten silver, towering to the skies from an aerial worid of eternal glaciers and snow.
The spot from whence this view is obtained, and from which we were not very far bivouacked, commands the most magnificent prospect of the dazzling Snowy Range visible from any place in India. Nothing in Nature on her grandest scale can be conceived more awe-inspiring, or awfully sublime. Talk about Mont Blanc, why, that lofty snow-capped peak in Europe is, by comparison, a mere hillock to the giant Kunchin Junga in High Asia. And so prominent and stupendous is this wonderful monarch of mountains, that the indigenous mountaineers actually believe its geographical position to be — as expressed in their own words — the centre of the terrestrial worid, and its summit, towering up to heaven, they say is half-way to the celestial realm above, whereon rests the hallowed footstool of the Great God of Heaven! Just as under the influence of similar superstitious nonsense, the inhabitants of the Peshawur valley, about a thousand miles or perhaps more away in the Punjab, call a snow-capped peak Tukht-i-Suleiman, or “Solomon’s throne”! The Viceroy of India has also a throne on these incomparable mountains; and in consequence Simla has been
