368 JOURNEY TO ANAMBARUIN-ULA.
dark gorge is quite short, but at the last angle the gloom was dispersed and the main glen burst upon us bathed in sunshine, with its vegetation and strip of ice, set as it were in a framework. The ice-sheet, which serpentined north-north-west, glittered a turquoise blue, the snow having been blown off it. Alongside it was a belt of vegetation, and an abundance of balghun bushes; and amongst these, though a little higher up, the water was trickling out of a spring that burst in the bed of the stream. About a couple of kilometers higher up the glen, there was excellent grazing, and there stood a Mongol camp. Traces of several such camps occurred around
the spring, and there too we found three fireplaces of brick, with hollows for the cooking-pots and dry fuel stacked around them. Evidently the Mongols intended to return to them soon. ' At the head of the glen we had the same majestic panorama that we had lately witnessed at the end of the transverse glen of Tsagandavo. Camp CXXVI was made on the left side of Dschong-duntsa, on soft earthy ground (alt. 2591 m.), and in a district which for picturesque beauty cannot be matched amongst these desolate mountains. On both sides it is hemmed in by stupendous vertical cliffs of gravel-and-shingle, sunlit parts alternating with darker parts in shadow, and with gloomy portals gaping wide where the side-glens and subsidiary ravines break through to join it. When seen through this picturesque framework, the grand features of the snow-clad, ice-panoplied mountains, the culminating sum-
Fig 290. UPPER PART OF THE GLEN OF DSCHONG-DUNTSA.
IIIF Color HighRes
