cently. At Camp L there was a freshwater spring, and around it short but scanty grass. The altitude was 4,890 m.
That day the weather was very peculiar : instead of the usual hard wind from the west, that is so tiring, it blew in the morning from the east and the sky became heavy with clouds. After that they discharged their contents in various different forms, partly as fine drizzling rain, the temperature rising meanwhile to + I I° at I p. m. ; then after the temperature had dropped several degrees, it turned to mingled rain and snow; and finally, upon the thermometer going down to the freezing-point, we had snow, hail (sleet), and drifting, blinding snow. In one and the same squall in summer it was generally possible to observe that the precipitation came down in the following order — rain, hail, and snow, and often rain again. The rarest form is actually frozen hail, the pellets hard and bright. Snowy hail — small round »hard» intensely white grains — is perhaps the commonest form assumed by the downfall. From 5.30 to 8.30 p. m. the snow fell in the stormiest fashion. The wind, which blew at a velocity of rather more than 9 m. in the second, came from the north-east. The face of the entire country was buried under a close coverlet of snow, which did not disappear for several days. On the windward side of my round yurt (tent) the snow was piled up into a circular wall 3 dm. high, assuming precisely the same shape as the circular dunes which form around the tamarisk-mounds in the desert. It went on snowing, though nothing like'so heavily, until midnight.
September 15th. One thing which proves clearly that the mountain-ranges in this part of Tibet run north-west and south-east is that day after day we were able to march towards the north-west without crossing over any mountains, nay even without once seeing hard rock, nothing but soft desintegrated materials. The land-
IIIFカラー高解像度
