Above The
Hardier Deciduous Trees Appeared The Pinus Excelsa, The Silver Fir,
And The Spruce; Higher Yet The Stately Grace Of The Deodar Clothed
The Hillsides; And Above The Forests Rose The Snow Mountains Of
Tilail, Pink In The Sunrise.
High above the Zoji, itself 11,500 feet
in altitude, a mass of grey and red mountains, snow-slashed
And snow-
capped, rose in the dewy rose-flushed atmosphere in peaks, walls,
pinnacles, and jagged ridges, above which towered yet loftier
summits, bearing into the heavenly blue sky fields of unsullied snow
alone. The descent on the Tibetan side is slight and gradual. The
character of the scenery undergoes an abrupt change. There are no
more trees, and the large shrubs which for a time take their place
degenerate into thorny bushes, and then disappear. There were
mountains thinly clothed with grass here and there, mountains of bare
gravel and red rock, grey crags, stretches of green turf, sunlit
peaks with their snows, a deep, snow-filled ravine, eastwards and
beyond a long valley filled with a snowfield fringed with pink
primulas; and that was CENTRAL ASIA.
We halted for breakfast, iced our cold tea in the snow, Mr. M. gave a
final charge to the Afghan, who swore by his Prophet to be faithful,
and I parted from my kind escorts with much reluctance, and started
on my Tibetan journey, with but a slender stock of Hindustani, and
two men who spoke not a word of English. On that day's march of
fourteen miles there is not a single hut.
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