The track now led out into a wide and treeless valley, flanked by
snow-crowned mountains, and we pushed on merrily until we arrived at the
brink of a rascally torrent, which gave us some trouble to ford, being
both exceeding swift and fairly deep. Luckily, it was greedy, and, not
content with one channel, had spread itself out into four or five branches,
and thus so squandered itself that Jane on her pony and I on coolie-back
accomplished the passage without mishap. For some miles we held on along
an easy path which curved to the right along the right bank of the river,
which was spanned in many places by great snow bridges, often hundreds of
yards in width. We lunched sitting on the trunk of a dead birch which had
been carried by the snow down from its eyrie, and then left, a melancholy
skeleton, bleaching on the slowly melting avalanche. Some two miles
farther on we could see the end of the Kolahoi Glacier, its grey and
rock-strewn snout standing abrupt above the white slopes of snow.
Behind rose the fine peak of Harbagwan, in as yet undisputed splendour,
Kolahoi being still hidden behind the cliffs which towered on our right.
Distances seem short in this brilliant air, but we walked for a long while
over the short turf, flushing crimson with primulas and golden with small
buttercups, and then over snowy hillocks, before we reached the solid ice
of the great glacier.
It was so completely covered with fragments of grey rock that Jane could
hardly he persuaded that it really was an ice slope that we were
scrambling up with such difficulty, until a peep into a cold mysterious
cleft convinced her that she was really and truly standing upon 200 feet
of solid ice.
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