tastes.

AT 4 A.M., before the sun rose, I made a fresh and hurried start. I
proceeded quickly to the spot where I had left the two drunken men. They
had gone ahead.

Indeed the track was a bad and dangerous one, overhanging precipices, and
hardly wide enough to give standing room upon it. We came to a spot where
the narrow path stopped. There was before us a perpendicular rock
descending straight as a wall to the Kali River. The corrosive action of
dripping water and melting snow, of which last there seemed to be a thick
layer higher above on the summit of the cliff, had worn the face of the
rock quite smooth. The distance across this vertical wall-like ravine was
not more than forty or fifty feet. On the other side of it the narrow
track began again.

Owing to this and other dangerous places, this route is but very seldom
used by the natives or by any one else. The road generally taken is on
the opposite side of the Kali River, in Nepal territory. Nevertheless, a
few Shokas possess bits of land on this bank of the stream, and it was by
them that, in order to surmount the obstacle before which I now stood,
the following expedient was devised in former years.

By letting down a man from above with ropes they succeeded in making two
rows of small hollows in the rock, along two parallel horizontal lines,
the higher of which was about six feet or so above the lower. The holes
were dug at intervals of three or four feet along each line, the upper
ones to be caught on by one's hands, the lower ones to support one's
feet, and none of the cavities are deeper than a few inches.

[Illustration: A PERILOUS PASSAGE]

The transit seemed dangerous at any time, and impossible just then,
because the drizzling rain which had set in had wetted the rock and made
it as slippery as glass, but I realised that the thing had to be risked,
and at any cost. With an affected air of assurance, I therefore took off
my shoes and went ahead.

I could not look about me, for I clung with my body to the wall, feeling
my way with my toes and fingers. The cavities were, as a matter of fact,
so shallow that progress was slow and troublesome. When the toes of the
right limb seemed firmly planted in a receptacle, the right arm was made
to slide along the rock until the fingers had obtained a firm grip in the
cavity directly above the one in which the toes were. Then the entire
body had to be shifted from left to right, bringing the left foot and