hand close to the right extremities and suspending one's weight on the
former, so as to render the right foot and arm ready to make the next
move forward, and so on, till I reached the other side and alighted upon
the narrow track, which was itself only five or six inches wide. Chanden
Sing having tied his shoes and mine over his shoulders, proceeded
bare-footed on the same hazardous enterprise. With none of the excitement
of personal danger, the moments of apprehension while he groped his way
with toes and fingers, half paralysed with cold and fear, were to me
worse even than those of my own passage. But he too got across safe and
sound, and after that the rest was comparatively easy.

It was necessary now to look out for signs of the two men, Kachi and
Dola, who had preceded us. I was glad to find a little farther on fresh
footmarks, undoubtedly those of the two Shokas. The track still ascended
and descended nearly all along precipitous cliffs, and was everywhere
dangerously narrow, with here and there bits on shaky crowbars. At one
spot the rugged formation of the cliff forced one suddenly to ascend to
its very top and cross (on all-fours) a rude kind of bridge made of
branches of trees spanned not horizontally, but at an angle of sixty
degrees over a precipice of several hundred feet. I found a white thread
of wool laid over this primitive structure, in accordance with the custom
of the Shokas at the death of relatives or friends away from their native
village. The soul is supposed to migrate during the dark hours of the
night and to return to the birthplace of the deceased, these white
threads showing the way at dangerous places on the road.

Having lost the track more than once, we found ourselves down at the edge
of the Kali and compelled to climb up some three hundred feet over sand
and rolling stones to regain the path.

We arrived at last at Nabi. There I found my loads safe and sound, having
got here by the better track on the Nepalese side previously to the
Chongur bridge being destroyed by the Tibetans, also Kachi and Dola, who
had got over and recovered from their drink. To make up, perhaps, for
their past misbehaviour, and probably to make me overlook or forget it,
they seemed to have induced the natives to welcome me with particular
cordiality. I was invited by them, with much show of hospitality, to
spend the night in the village.

I was led with some ceremony to a primitive sort of ladder with very