The
Heavens Were Dark With Snow-Showers, The Wind Was High And The Cold
Severe, And Gasping Horses, And Men
Prostrate on their faces unable
to move, suggested a considerable amount of suffering; but all safely
reached the summit, 17,
930 feet, where in a snowstorm the guides
huzzaed, praised their gods, and tucked rag streamers into a cairn.
The loads were replaced on the horses, and over wastes of ice, across
snowfields margined by broad splashes of rose-red primulas, down
desert valleys and along irrigated hillsides, we descended 3,700 feet
to the village of Digar in Nubra, where under a cloudless sky the
mercury stood at 90 degrees!
Upper and Lower Nubra consist of the valleys of the Nubra and Shayok
rivers. These are deep, fierce, variable streams, which have buried
the lower levels under great stretches of shingle, patched with
jungles of hippophae and tamarisk, affording cover for innumerable
wolves. Great lateral torrents descend to these rivers, and on
alluvial ridges formed at the junctions are the villages with their
pleasant surroundings of barley, lucerne, wheat, with poplar and
fruit trees, and their picturesque gonpos crowning spurs of rock
above them. The first view of Nubra is not beautiful. Yellow,
absolutely barren mountains, cleft by yellow gorges, and apparently
formed of yellow gravel, the huge rifts in their sides alone showing
their substructure of rock, look as if they had never been finished,
or had been finished so long that they had returned to chaos. These
hem in a valley of grey sand and shingle, threaded by a greyish
stream.
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