Tigers and Traitors
CHAPTER I
OUR SANITARIUM
SPEAKING of the great American Andes, the mineralogist Haüy uses a grand expression when he calls them The incommensurable parts of Creation."
These proud words may justly be applied to the Himalayan chain, whose heights no man can measure with any mathematical precision. They occurred to my mind when I first viewed this incomparable region, in the midst of which Colonel Munro, Captain Hood, Banks, and myself were to sojourn for several weeks.
"Not only are these mountains immeasurable," said the engineer, "but their summit must be regarded as inacces- sible; for human organs cannot work at such a height, where the air is not dense enough for breathing!"
This chain may be best described as a barrier of primitive granite, gneiss, and schist rocks, 1,560 miles in length, ex- tending from the seventy-second meridian to the ninety-fifth, through two presidencies, Agra and Calcutta, and two king- doms, Bhootan and Nepaul. It comprehends three distinct zones; the first 5,000 feet high, being more temperate than the lower plain, and yielding a harvest of corn in the winter, and rice in the summer; the second, increasing from 5,000 to 9,000 feet, on which the snow melts in the spring time, and the third, rising to 25,000, covered with ice and snow, which even in the hot season defies the solar rays.
At an elevation of 20,000 feet the mountains are pierced by eleven passes, which, incessantly threatened by ava- lanches, swept by torrents, and encumbered by glaciers, yet make it possible, though dangerous and difficult, to go from India to Thibet. Above this ridge, which is sometimes rounded and then again as flat as Table Mountain at the Cape of Good Hope, rise seven or eight peaks, some volcanic, commanding the sources of the Gogra, the Jumna, and the Ganges. The chief are Mounts Dookia and Kinchinjinga,
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