The silence of the desert reigns in this country where the feet of man have never wandered; only now and then are heard the warning shouts of the caravan men. Not one of the animals is left behind, all goes on satisfactorily. May all this hard day’s march pass fortunately! The valley becomes quite narrow, the water trickles out of the gravelly soil in quantities barely sufficient to form a brook. But even on this gravel the animals sink in the mud.

At the foot of a trough leading up to a side-pass, which had led us astray, the caravan came to a halt, and an accessible passage was searched for.

I rode forwards up innumerable zigzags, and stopped at every corner to take breath. Muhamed Isa reported that the true pass had been found, but I rode with Robert up to a height rising above all the land around, to reconnoitre.

The view from this point was far too striking to be sought merely for the purpose of orientation. Above and behind the mountains in the foreground, some of them coal-black, appeared a white horizon and a jagged line of mighty Himalayan peaks. A really magnificent landscape! The sky was almost clear; only here and there floated a few white clouds. Down below us lay the small valley through which we had struggled so laboriously; here it looked ridiculously small, an insignificant drain in a world of gigantic mountains. Some detachments of the caravan were still toiling up the narrow way, and the shouts and whistles of the men mounted up to us. The horizon was quite clear, not enveloped in haze, as it frequently was; its outlines were exceedingly sharply drawn; silver-white, sun-lighted summits towered up above and behind one another; generally the fields of eternal snow gleam in blue tints of varying intensity, now dull and now dark according to the angle of the slope in relation to the sun’s altitude; now shade and light pass gradually and insensibly into each other, now they are sharply defined. Here physical laws work out their perfect complicated scheme, exacting absolute obedience. On a shelf below us a part of the caravan halts and puffs; the animals appear like black spots on the snow. Up here the south-west wind enwraps us in swiftly passing clouds of whirling snowflakes.

All this agitated sea of the highest mountains in the world seems singularly uniform as the eye passes unhindered over its crests. You conceive that no summit rises above a certain maximum height, for before its head lifts itself above the crowd, wind and weather, denudation, have worn it down. In this the mountains are like ocean waves; when these, too, rise in foaming wrath, their undulations, seen from the ship’s deck, are of equal height, and the horizon is a straight line; and it is just the same with the small ridges between the furrows thrown up by the plough, which are all of uniform height; so that the field seems in the distance quite level.

The horizon seemed to be very far off; nearer heights broke the sky-line only to the north and north-east, hiding those behind, and in this direction thick clouds were hanging, white above and dark and bluish underneath, and lay like soft cushions on the earth. There was, then, no suggestion of a plateau, but far in the north a mountain range seemed to rise right up to heaven. In the north-west a main crest was plainly visible, starting from our point of observation, that is, the height on which we stood. This is the Karakorum range. The whole ridge here took the form of a rounded back, without solid rock, and intersected by numerous small valleys, all starting from the crest, and cutting gradually deeper and deeper into its flanks. The main ridge winds like a snake over the highlands, and the erosion valleys diverge on all sides like the boughs of a tree. Here horizontal lines predominate in the landscape, but lower down, in the peripheral region, vertical lines catch the eye, as in the Chang-chenmo lateral valleys. Down there the scenery is more imposing and picturesque, up here the surface of the earth appears rather flat; here is the abode of storms, and their boundless playground in the long dark winter nights.

55. In the Snow, N.E. of Chang-lung-yogma.56. My Tent.
57. Lake Lighten.

Chilled through to the bones we walked down to the pass gap, where the whole caravan was assembled; here the height was 18,963 feet, and the temperature 2° above freezing-point. The men were too tired to sing, but we had good reason to be satisfied, for all the animals had got up safely with their burdens. We slowly descended along a small valley running northwards. The ground consisted entirely of mud, in which the animals sank at every step, and in the footprints they left behind muddy grey water collected immediately. Round about us lay a chaos of comparatively low, flat hills, furrowed everywhere by clefts which indicate landslips. A tiny rivulet winds silently down the middle of the valley without forming rapids. For the rest, all the country was flooded, and so we had no immediate fear of scarcity of water.

Where we encamped not a blade of grass could be seen; there was, therefore, no object in letting the horses run about loose, so they were tied together in couples, and had to stand waiting till the sun went down. Then Guffaru sat down on a rug, had a sack of maize placed before him, filled a wooden bowl with the grain, and emptied it into a nose-bag, which a Ladaki hung on the muzzle of a horse. And so the men ran about till all the animals had received their rations, and the dry, hard maize corns cracked under the teeth of the hungry beasts. The Ladak horses positively refused to eat maize, and were given barley instead; they whinnied with delight when the bags were brought, but the pleasure did not last long; the chewing gradually ceased, and with lowered heads and blinking eyes they wearily waited for the long night.

Some spare horses were laden with dry yapkak plants; at camp No. 2 there was not a particle of fuel. We were now at a height of 18,215 feet.