traveller, considering the very short way he knows he
has to go, will demur at the earliness of his start. But
there will be no mercy shown him. He will be allowed,
perhaps, to ride for 500 yards ; after that he will prefer
to trust to his own feet until all except the last three miles
of the stage have been covered. Climbing over these
boulder-strewn surfaces would be bad at the sea-level;
here, where the air is so thin, it soon becomes a burden
to pull one’s solid body over the heartless obstacles.
If the ascent be at all steep, the newcomer will sit down
every twenty or thirty yards. His muscles are not
tired, and he regains his strength in a surprisingly
short time, but at the moment he sinks upon some
friendly stone, he thinks that another step forward
would be his last. This is a peculiarity which it is impossible
to describe to those who have never been more
than a thousand feet or so above sea-level. The lungs
seem foolishly inadequate to the task imposed upon
them | the pluckiness of one’s own heart is an unmistakable,
but somewhat terrifying, symptom, for it goes
on beating with increasing strokes till it shakes the
walls of the body ; and not the written testimony of the
leading heart expert in London will convince you that
it is not on the point of bursting its envelope. Then
you may be thankful indeed if you escape mountain
sickness. If that should come upon you, your bitterest
enemy will lead your horse for you. I have seen cases of
mountain sickness in which amazement overwhelmed even
one’s sympathy. I have seen men in such a state, that
they seem to have every symptom of habitual drunkenness
| all the limbs shiver, and in the bloodless face the
eyes have that extraordinary look of insanity which is,
I think, caused by an inability to focus them. The
speech comes with difficulty, and in one case that I saw
the mental coherence was as obviously at fault as the
physical. But strange though the appearance is to the
Between Lagyap and Changu on the Natu la track.
outsider, for the sufferer himself I do not suppose that
there can well be condensed into three or four hours such
an agony of aching. The brain seems cleft into two,
and the wedge, all blunt and splintery, is hammered