Darkness had already come on, and the coolies being far behind, we encamped by the light of the moon, shining through a thin fog, where we first found dwarf-juniper for fuel, at 13,500 feet. A little sleet fell during the night, which was tolerably fine, and not very cold; the minimum thermometer indicating 14.5 degrees.
Having no tent-poles, I had some difficulty in getting my blankets arranged as a shelter, which was done by making them slant from the side of a boulder, on the top of which one end was kept by heavy stones; under this roof I laid my bed, on a mass of rhododendron and juniper-twigs. The men did the same against other boulders, and lighting a huge fire opposite the mouth of my ground-nest, I sat cross-legged on the bed to eat my supper; my face scorching, and my back freezing. Rice, boiled with a few ounces of greasy dindon aux truffes was now my daily dinner, with chili-vinegar and tea, and I used to relish it keenly: this finished, I smoked a cigar, and wrote up my journal (in short intervals between warming myself) by the light of the fire; took observations by means of a dark-lantern; and when all this was accomplished, I went to roost.
December 5.—On looking out this morning, it was with a feeling of awe that I gazed at the stupendous ice-crowned precipices that shot up to the summit of Nango, their flanks spotted white at the places whence the gigantic masses with which I was surrounded had fallen; thence my eye wandered down their black faces to the slope of debris at the bottom, thus tracing the course which had probably been taken by that rock under whose shelter I had passed the previous night.
Meepo, the Lepcha sent by the rajah, had snared a couple of beautiful pheasants, one of which I skinned, and ate for breakfast; it is a small bird, common above 12,000 feet, but very wild; the male has two to five spurs on each of its legs, according to its age; the general colour is greenish, with a broad scarlet patch surrounding the eye; the Nepalese name is "Khalidge." The crop was distended with juniper berries, of which the flesh tasted strongly, and it was the very hardest, toughest bird I ever did eat.
We descended at first through rhododendron and juniper, then through black silver-fir (Abies Webbiana), and below that, near the river, we came to the Himalayan larch; a tree quite unknown, except from a notice in the journals of Mr. Griffith, who found it in Bhotan. It is a small tree, twenty to forty feet high, perfectly similar in general characters to a European larch, but with larger cones, which are erect upon the very long, pensile, whip-like branches; its leaves,—now red—were falling, and covering the rocky ground on which it grew, scattered amongst other trees. It is called "Saar" by the Lepchas and Cis-himalayan Tibetans, and "Boarga-sella" by the Nepalese, who say it is found as far west as the heads of the Cosi river: it does not inhabit Central or West Nepal, nor the North-west Himalaya. The distribution of the Himalayan pines is very remarkable. The Deodar has not been seen east of Nepal, nor the Pinus Gerardiana, Cupressus torulosa, or Juniperus communis. On the other hand, Podocarpus is confined to the east of Katmandoo. Abies Brunoniana does not occur west of the Gogra, nor the larch west of the Cosi, nor funereal cypress (an introduced plant, however) west of the Teesta (in Sikkim). Of the twelve* [Juniper, 3; yew, Abies Webbiana, Brunoniana, and Smithiana: Larch, Pinus excelsa, and longifolia, and Podocarpus neriifolia.] Sikkim and Bhotan Coniferae (including yew, junipers, and Podocarpus) eight are common to the North-west Himalaya (west of Nepal), and four* [Larch, Cupressus funebris, Podocarpus neriifolia, Abies Brunoniana.] are not: of the thirteen natives of the north-west provinces, again, only five* [A juniper (the European communis), Deodar (possibly only a variety of the Cedar of Lebanon and of Mount Atlas), Pinus Gerardiana, P. excelsa, and Crupressus torulosa.] are not found in Sikkim, and I have given their names below, because they show how European the absent ones are, either specifically or in affinity. I have stated that the Deodar is possibly a variety of the Cedar of Lebanon. This is now a prevalent opinion, which is strengthened by the fact that so many more Himalayan plants are now ascertained to be European than had been supposed before they were compared with European specimens; such are the yew, Juniperus communis, Berberis vulgaris, Quercus Ballota, Populus alba and Euphratica, etc. The cones of the Deodar are identical with those of the Cedar of Lebanon: the Deodar has, generally longer and more pale bluish leaves and weeping branches,* [Since writing the above, I have seen, in the magnificent Pinetum at Dropmore, noble cedars, with the length and hue of leaf, and the pensile branches of the Deodar, and far more beautiful than that is, and as unlike the common Lebanon Cedar as possible. When it is considered from how very few wild trees (and these said to be exactly alike) the many dissimilar varieties of the C. Libani have been derived; the probability of this, the Cedar of Algiers, and of the Himalayas (Deodar) being all forms of one species, is greatly increased. We cannot presume to judge from the few cedars which still remain, what the habit and appearance of the tree may have been, when it covered the slopes of Libanus, and seeing how very variable Coniferae are in habit, we may assume that its surviving specimens give us no information on this head. Should all three prove one, it will materially enlarge our ideas of the distribution and variation of species. The botanist will insist that the typical form of cedar is that which retains its characters best over the greatest area, namely, the Deodar; in which case the prejudice of the ignorant, and the preconceived ideas of the naturalist, must yield to the fact that the old familiar Cedar of Lebanon is an unusual variety of the Himalayan Deodar.] but these characters seem to be unusually developed in our gardens; for several gentlemen, well acquainted with the Deodar at Simla, when asked to point it out in the Kew Gardens, have indicated the Cedar of Lebanon, and when shown the Deodar, declare that they never saw that plant in the Himalaya!
At the bottom of the valley we turned up the stream, and passing the Tassichooding convents* [These were built by the Sikkim people, when the eastern valleys of Nepal belonged to the Sikkim rajah.] and temple, 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 and dung, 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 which is probably meant that it is foggy,—the elevation (11,380 feet) being 2000 feet less than that of Yangma village, and the temperature therefore 6 degrees to 7 degrees warmer; but of all the mountain gorges I have ever visited, this is by far the wildest, grandest, and most gloomy; and that man should hybernate here is indeed extraordinary, for there is no route up the valley, and all communication with Lelyp,* [Which I passed, on the Tambur, on the 21st Nov. See Chapter IX.] two marches down the river, is cut off in 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 pine wood, appeared to the west, towering over head; while across the narrow valley wilder and less wooded crags rose in broken ridges 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* [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.] above the village. Few facts show more decidedly the extraordinary steepness and depth of the Kambachen valley near the village, which, though nearly 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 us very kindly, and furnished us with a guide for the Choonjerma pass, leading to the Yalloong valley, the most easterly in Nepal; but he recommended our not attempting any part of the ascent till the morrow, as it was past 1 p.m., and we should find no camping-ground for half the way up. The villagers gave us 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 alternately along flat lake-beds and over moraines, till we crossed the stream from the lateral valley, and ascending a little, camped on its bank, at 11,400 feet elevation.
In the afternoon I botanized amongst the moraines, which were very numerous, and had been thrown down at right-angles to the main valley, which latter being here very narrow, and bounded by lofty precipices, must have stopped the parent glaciers, and effected the heaping of some of these moraines to at least 1000 feet above the river. The general features were modifications of those seen in the Yangma valley, but contracted into a much smaller space.
The moraines were all accumulated in a sort of delta, through which the lateral river debouched into the Kambachen, and were all deposited more or less parallel to the course of the lateral valley, but curving outwards from its mouth. The village-flat, or terrace, continued level to the first moraine, which had been thrown down on the upper or north side of the lateral valley, on whose and curving steep flanks it abutted, and curving outwards seemed to encircle the village-flat on the south and west; where it dipped into the river. This was crossed at the height of about 100 feet, by a stony path, leading to the bed of the rapid torrent flowing through shingle and boulders, beyond which was another moraine, 250 feet high, and parallel to it a third gigantic one.
Ascending the great moraine at a place where it overhung the main river, I had a good coup-a'oeil of the whole. The view south-east up the glacial valley—(represented in the accompanying cut)—to the snowy peaks south of Junnoo, was particularly grand, and most interesting from the precision with which one great distant existing glacier was marked by two waving parallel lines of lateral moraines, which formed, as it were, a vast raised gutter, or channel, ascending from perhaps 16,000 feet elevation, till it was hidden behind a spur in the valley. With a telescope I could descry many similar smaller glaciers, with huge accumulations of shingle at their terminations; but this great one was beautifully seen by the naked eye, and formed a very curious feature in the landscape.