IIIF Color HighRes
National Institute of Informatics - Digital Silk Road Project
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| IIIF Color HighRes |
| The heart of a continent : vol.1 |
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Citation Information
[CHAP. I.
THE HEART OF A CONTINENT.
That first wild wandering through the Himalayas is one on which I look back with almost keener enjoyment than
on any other journey I have subsequently made. I had been
in Switzerland and seen snow-mountains before, but only as a boy, when I was not able to wander as I would. Now I
was free, and in all the pride and keenness of twenty-one.
One march a day was not enough for me ; I made two regularly, and sometimes three, and I wanted to go everywhere
in the two months which was all I then had available. The scenery of such valleys as those of Kangra and Kulu was enchanting, and then came the excitement of preparing to cross my first snow-pass. I had pictured to myself every imaginable horror from descriptions in books (written, of course as I afterwards understood, from experiences at exceptional seasons), and I can still recall my disappointment at finding that all these horrors had degenerated into simple heartbreaking plodding through soft deep snow hour after hour, with an icy wind blowing, and the sun striking down on the top of my head and combining with the rarefaction of the air to give me as bad a headache as I ever had. Then, too, the feeling of disgust and despair at the sight of those utterly bare brown mountains which lie beyond the first forest-clad zone of the Himalayas, their cold and almost repellent appearance,—all this I remember well, and the rawness and inexperience of the whole of my arrangements, and the discovery that I could not march for twenty or thirty miles a day, as I had imagined I should be able to do, with just about enough food for the whole day as would form a decent breakfast for a man in hard work. And yet there was a delicious sense of satisfaction as each long day's march was over, as each pass was crossed, each new valley entered, and the magnificent health and strength which came therewith inspired the feeling of being able to go anywhere and do anything that it was within the powers of man to do.
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