re galleries had been built out from
the mountain side, by means of beams let into it, as is still a common
practice in Thibet. These beams of course had long since rotted away,
leaving a gulf between us and the continuation of the path. When we met
with such gaps we were forced to go back and make a detour round or over
some mountain; but although much delayed thereby, as it happened, we
always managed to regain the road, if not without difficulty and danger.

What tried us more--for here our skill and experience as mountaineers
could not help us--was the cold at night, obliged as we were to camp
in the severe frost at a great altitude, and to endure through the long
hours of darkness penetrating and icy winds, which soughed ceaselessly
down the pass.

At length on the tenth day we reached the end of the defile, and as
night was falling, camped there in the most bitter cold. Those were
miserable hours, for now we had no fuel with which to boil water, and
must satisfy our thirst by eating frozen snow, while our eyes smarted
so sorely that we could not sleep, and notwithstanding all our wraps and
the warmth that we gathered from the yak in the little tent, the cold
caused our teeth to chatter like castanets.

The dawn came, and, after it, the sunrise. We crept from the tent, and
leaving it standing awhile, dragged our stiffened limbs a hundred yards
or so to a spot where the defile took a turn, in order that we might
thaw in the rays of the sun, which at that hour could not reach us where
we had camped.

Leo was round it first, and I heard him utter an exclamation. In a few
seconds I reached his side, and lo! before us lay our Promised Land.

Far beneath us, ten thousand feet at least--for it must be remembered
that we viewed it from the top of a mountain--it stretched away and away
till its distances met the horizon. In character it was quite flat, an
alluvial plain that probably, in some primeval age, had been the bottom
of one of the vast lakes of which a number exist in Central Asia, most
of them now in process of desiccation. One object only relieved this
dreary flatness, a single, snow-clad, and gigantic mountain, of which
even at that distance--for it was very far from us--we could clearly see
the outline. Indeed we could see more, for from its rounded crest rose a
great plume of smoke, showing that it was an active volcano, and on the
hither lip of the crater an enormous pillar of rock, whereof the top was
f