weight, and a mottled company of argent and silver-grey
and cyanine heaps itself across the track of the setting
sun. The sky deepens from blue to amber without a
transient tint of green, and the red camp-fires whiten as
the daylight fades. But the true sunset is not yet.
After many minutes comes the sight which is perhaps
Tibet’s most exquisite and peculiar g i f t : the double
glory of the east and west alike, and the rainbow confusion
among the wide waste of white mountain ranges.
For ten minutes the sun will fight a path clear of
his clouds and a luminous ray sweeps down the valley,
lighting up the unsuspected ridges and blackening the
lurking hollows of the hills. This is no common light.
The Tibetans themselves have given it a name of its
own, and indeed the gorse-yellow blaze which paints its
shadows myrtle-green underneath the deepened indigo
of the sky defies description and deserves a commemorative
phrase for itself alone. But the strange thing is
still to come. A quick five-fingered aurora of rosy light
arches over the sky, leaping from east to west as one
gazes overhead. The fingers converge again in the east,
where a growing splendour shapes itself to welcome them
on the horizon’s edge.*
Then comes the climax of the transformation scene.
While the carmine is still over-arching the sky, on either
side the horizon deepens to a still darker shade, and the
distant hills stand out against it with uncanny sharpness,
iridescent for all the world like a jagged and translucent
scale of mother-of-pearl lighted from behind. Above
them the ravines and the ridges are alike lost, and in
their place mantles a pearly underplay of rose-petal pink
I * T ravellers have m ore th an once referred to th is curious phenomenon, an d th e T ib e ta n s
have a word, “ T in g -p a ,” fo r th is rosy an d cloudless beam also.