wards under the snowy shoulders of Nichi-kang-sang;
and over 8,000 feet below the gigantic mass of unrelieved
ice and snow which forms his highest peak,
the ribbon-like track dives abruptly into the river-bed
beside a little stream which has cut its way through
this gigantic curtain of rock.
The gorge that opens here is narrow and the road
bad. Closely hugging the southern bluff the trang*
makes its snowy way over the boulders and almost
through the waters of this ice-fed rivulet. On either
side the cliffs rise so steeply that one hardly catches a
sight of the eternal snows that slope steeply back from
the crest of these frowning heights. Now and again a
ravine betrays the sparkling glory of the white ice-cornice
against the deep blue of the upper sky. In May there is
nothing to be seen here in the way of plants except the
dead sticks of a curious thorny scrub, which during its
hibernation is of an unusual pink colour, cobwebbed
about with the gray dead filigree of last year’s leaves.
This will burn, and, indeed, it forms the only fuel to be
found for many miles.
Sharply ascending, the road after a mile and a half
crosses the stream now sparkling in a noisy shallow
between the pebbles of its b ed ; and a climb of another
two hundred yards brings one into an oval plain which,
probably from the fact that in the summer the whole
extent of it is permeated and saturated with water from
the melting glaciers, the Tibetans call the Plain of Milk.f
In May the cold was intense enough, except in the
middle of the day, largely to reduce the volume of the
* A trang is a track cut out of the c liff beside a stream. There is a steep rock on one -
side and the water immediately below. It is a useful word for a feature which is not
easily described otherwise.
t This is also the name of the plain in which Lhasa stands.