f colour. The valley is beautiful, beyond the beauty of the
grandest Alpine scenery, carpeted underfoot with spring flowers, and
ablaze overhead with flowering rhododendrons. To try to describe
mountains and forests is a most unprofitable task; all the adjectives of
scenic description are exhausted; the coinage has been too long debased.
For my own part, it has been almost a pain to visit the most beautiful
parts of the earth and to know that one's sensations are incommunicable,
that it is impossible to make people believe and understand. To those
who have not seen, scenery is either good, bad, or indifferent; there
are no degrees. Ruskin, the greatest master of description, is most
entertaining when he is telling us about the domestic circle at Herne
Hill. But mountain scenery is of all the most difficult to describe. The
sense of the Himalayas is intangible. There are elusive lights and
shades, and sounds and whispers, and unfamiliar scents, and a thousand
fleeting manifestations of the genius of the place that are impossible
to arrest. Magnificent, majestic, splendid, are weak, colourless words
that depict nothing. It is the poets who have described what they have
not seen who have been most successful. Milton's hell is as real as any
landscape of Byron's, and the country through which Childe Roland rode
to the Dark Tower is more vivid and present to us than any of
Wordsworth's Westmoreland tarns and valleys. So it is a poem of the
imagination--'Kubla Khan'--that seems to me to breathe something of the
spirit of the Yatung and Chumbi Valleys, only there is a little less of
mystery and gloom here, and a little more of sunshine and brightness
than in the dream poem. Instead of attempting to describe the
valley--Paradise would be easier to describe--I will try to explain as
logically as possible why it fascinated me more than any scenery I have
seen.

I had often wondered if there were any place in the East where flowers
grow in the same profusion as in Europe--in England, or in Switzerland.
The nearest approach I had seen was in the plateau of the Southern Shan
States, at about 4,000 feet, where the flora is very homelike. But the
ground is not _carpeted_; one could tread without crushing a blossom.
Flowers are plentiful, too, on the southern slopes of the Himalayas, and
on the hills on the Siamese side of the Tennasserim frontier, but I had
seen nothing like a field of marsh-marigolds and cuckoo-flowers in May,
or a m