s tumultuous passage to the swarming plains of
India. No sound of its roaring haste comes up to those serenities.
Beyond that blue gulf, in which whole forests of giant deodars seem no
more than small patches of moss, rise vast precipices of many-coloured
rock, fretted above, lined by snowfalls, and jagged into pinnacles.
These are the northward wall of a towering wilderness of ice and snow
which clambers southward higher and wilder and vaster to the culminating
summits of our globe, to Dhaulagiri and Everest. Here are cliffs of
which no other land can show the like, and deep chasms in which Mt.
Blanc might be plunged and hidden. Here are icefields as big as inland
seas on which the tumbled boulders lie so thickly that strange little
flowers can bloom among them under the untempered sunshine. To the
northward, and blocking out any vision of the uplands of Thibet, rises
that citadel of porcelain, that gothic pile, the Lio Porgyul, walls,
towers, and peaks, a clear twelve thousand feet of veined and splintered
rock above the river. And beyond it and eastward and westward rise peaks
behind peaks, against the dark blue Himalayan sky. Far away below to the
south the clouds of the Indian rains pile up abruptly and are stayed by
an invisible hand.

Hither it was that with a dreamlike swiftness Karenin flew high over
the irrigations of Rajputana and the towers and cupolas of the ultimate
Delhi; and the little group of buildings, albeit the southward wall
dropped nearly five hundred feet, seemed to him as he soared down to it
like a toy lost among these mountain wildernesses. No road came up to
this place; it was reached only by flight.

His pilot descended to the great courtyard, and Karenin assisted by his
secretary clambered down through the wing fabric and made his way to the
officials who came out to receive him.

In this place, beyond infections and noise and any distractions, surgery
had made for itself a house of research and a healing fastness. The
building itself would have seemed very wonderful to eyes accustomed to
the flimsy architecture of an age when power was precious. It was made
of granite, already a little roughened on the outside by frost, but
polished within and of a tremendous solidity. And in a honeycomb of
subtly lit apartments, were the spotless research benches, the operating
tables, the instruments of brass, and fine glass and platinum and gold.
Men and women came from all parts of the world for stud