Himalayan Journals, vol 1 by J. D. Hooker (best thriller books to read txt) 📕

melting. Sometimes our way lay close to the black precipices on our right, under which the snow was deep; and we dragged ourselves along, grasping every prominence of the rock with our numbed fingers. Granite appeared in large veins in the crumpled gneiss at a great elevation, in its most beautiful and loosely-crystallised form, of pearly white prisms of felspar, glassy quartz, and milk-white flat plates of mica, with occasionally large crystals of tourmaline. Garnets were very frequent in the gneiss near the granite veins. Small rushes, grasses, and sedges formed the remaining vegetation, amongst which were the withered stalks of gentians, Sedum, Arenaria, Silene, and many Composite plants.

 

At a little below 15,000 feet, we reached enormous flat beds of snow, which were said to be perpetual, but covered deeply with the October fall. They were continuous, and like all the snow I saw at this season, the surface was honeycombed into thin plates, dipping north at a high angle; the intervening fissures were about six inches deep.

A thick mist here overtook us, and this, with the great difficulty of picking our way, rendered the ascent very fatiguing.

Being sanguine about obtaining a good view, I found it almost impossible to keep my temper under the aggravations of pain in the forehead, lassitude, oppression of breathing, a dense drizzling fog, a keen cold wind, a slippery footing, where I was stumbling at every few steps, and icy-cold wet feet, hands, and eyelids; the latter, odd as it sounds, I found a very disagreeable accompaniment of continued raw cold wind.

 

After an hour and a half’s toilsome ascent, during which we made but little progress, we reached the crest, crossing a broad shelf of snow between two rocky eminences; the ridge was unsnowed a little way down the east flank; this was, in a great measure, due to the eastern exposure being the more sunny, to the prevalence of the warm and melting south-east winds that blow up the deep Kambachen valley, and to the fact that the great snowbeds on the west side are drifted accumulations.* [Such enormous beds of snow in depressions, or on gentle slopes, are generally adopted as indicating the lower limit of perpetual snow. They are, however, winter accumulations, due mainly to eddies of wind, of far more snow than can be melted in the following summer, being hence perennial in the ordinary sense of the word. They pass into the state of glacier ice, and, obeying the laws that govern the motions of a viscous fluid, so admirably elucidated by Forbes (“Travels in the Alps”), they flow downwards. A careful examination of those great beds of snow in the Alps, from whose position the mean lower level of perpetual snow, in that latitude, is deduced, has convinced me that these are mainly due to accumulations of this kind, and that the true limit of perpetual snow, or that point where all that falls melts, is much higher than it is usually supposed to be.] The mist cleared off, and I had a partial, though limited, view. To the north the blue ice-clad peak of Nango was still 2000 feet above us, its snowy mantle falling in great sweeps and curves into glacier-bound valleys, over which the ice streamed out of sight, bounded by black aiguilles of gneiss. The Yangma valley was quite hidden, but to the eastward the view across the stupendous gorge of the Kambachen, 5000 feet below, to the waste of snow, ice, and rock, piled in confusion along the top of the range of Junnoo and Choonjerma, parallel to this but higher, was very grand indeed: this we were to cross in two days, and its appearance was such, that our guide doubted the possibility of our doing it. A third and fourth mountain mass (unseen) lay beyond this, between us and Sikkim, divided by valleys as deep as those of Yangma and Kambachen.

 

Having hung up my instruments, I ascended a few hundred feet to some naked rocks, to the northward; they were of much-crumpled and dislocated gneiss, thrown up at a very high angle, and striking northwest. Chlorite, schist, and quartz, in thin beds, alternated with the gneiss, and veins of granite and quartz, were injected through them.

 

It fell calm; when the distance to which the voice was carried was very remarkable; I could distinctly hear every word spoken 300 to 400

yards off, and did not raise my voice when I asked one of the men to bring me a hammer.

 

The few plants about were generally small tufted Arenarias and woolly Compositae, with a thick-rooted Umbellifer that spread its short, fleshy leaves and branches flat on the ground; the root was very aromatic, but wedged close in the rock. The temperature at 4 p.m. was 23 degrees, and bitterly cold; the elevation, 15,770 feet; dewpoint, 16 degrees. The air was not very dry; saturation-point, 0.670°, whereas at Calcutta it was 0.498° at the same hour.

 

The descent was to a broad, open valley, into which the flank of Nango dipped in tremendous precipices, which reared their heads in splintered snowy peaks. At their bases were shoots of debris fully 700 feet high, sloping at a steep angle. Enormous masses of rock, detached by the action of the frost and ice from the crags, were scattered over the bottom of the valley; they had been precipitated from above, and gaining impetus in their descent, bad been hurled to almost inconceivable distances from the parent cliff. All were of a very white, fine-grained crystallised granite, full of small veins of the same rock still more finely crystallised. The weathered surface of each block was black, and covered with moss and lichens; the others beautifully white, with clean, sharp-fractured edges.

The material of which they were composed was so hard that I found it difficult to detach a specimen.

 

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 Northwest 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 Northwest Himalaya (west of Nepal), and four* [Larch, Cupressus funebris, Podocarpus neriifolia, Abies Brunoniana.] are not: of the thirteen natives of the northwest 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