have indicated the Cedar of Lebanon, and when shown
° TTe°d“ ’’ declare that they never saw that plant in
the Himalaya!
At the bottom of the valley we crossed the river—
which was a furious torrent, about twelve yards wide
to the village of Kambachen, on a flat terrace, a few
feet above the stream. There were about a dozen
houses of wood, plastered with mud, scattered over a
grassy plain of a few acres, fenced in, as were also a
few fields with stone dykes. The only cultivation
consists of radishes, potatos, and barley: no wheat is
grown, the climate being said to be too cold for it, by
winch is probably meant that it is foggy,-the elevation
(11,880 feet) being 3000 feet less than that of
angma village, and the temperature 6° to 7° warmer •
but of ah the mountain gorges I have ever visited, this
is by far the wildest, grandest, and most gloomy; and
that man should hybemate here is indeed extraordinary,
for there is no route up the vaUey, and all
communication with Lelyp, two marches down the
nver, is cut off during the winter, when the houses are
buried in snow, and drifts fifteen feet deep are said
to be common. Standing on the little flat of Kambachen,
precipices, with inaccessible patches of fir-trees
appeared towering over head; while across the narrow
valley wilder and less wooded crags rose in broken
ndges to the glaciers of Nango. Up the valley, the
view was cut off by bluff cliffs; whilst down it, the
scene was most remarkable: enormous black, round-
backed moraines, rose tier above tier, from a flat
lake-bed, apparently hemming in the river between
the lofty precipices on the east flank of the valley.
These had all been deposited at the mouth of a lateral
valley, opening just below the village, and descending
from Junnoo, a mountain of 25,312 feet elevation,
and one of the grandest of the Kinchinjunga group,
whose top—though only five miles distant in a straight
line—rises 13,932 feet* above the village. Few facts
show more decidedly the extraordinary steepness and
depth of the Kambachen valley, which, though but
11,400 feet above the sea, lies between two mountains
¿only eight miles apart, the one 25,312 feet high, the
other (Nango) 19,000 feet.
The villagers received me very kindly, and furnished
me with a guide for the Choonjerma pass, leading to
the Yalloong valley, the most easterly in Nepal; but
he recommended my not attempting the ascent till the
morrow, as it was past 1 p .m ., and w e should find
no camping-ground for half the way up. The villagers
gave me the leg of a musk-deer, and some red potatos,
about as big as walnuts—all they could spare from
their winter stock. With this scanty addition to our
stores we started down the valley, - for a few miles,
till we crossed the stream from the lateral valley, and
ascending a little, camped on its bank.
On reaching the top. of the great moraine at a place
where it overhung the main river, I had a good coup-
d'oeil of the whole scene. The view south-east up the
* This is one of the most sudden slopes in this part of the Himalaya,
the angle between the top of Junnoo and Kambachen being 2786 feet per
mile, or 1 in 1 '8. The slope from the top of Mont Blanc to the Chamouni
valley is 2464 feet per mile, or 1 in 2*1. That from Monte Rosa top to
Macugnaga greatly exceeds either.