further on I met another European. This one at any rate, I thought, must be an Englishman, and I walked up to him with all the eagerness a traveller has to meet a countryman of his own after not seeing one for nearly seven months. But this time it turned out the stranger was a Russian ! He announced himself as M. Nicolas Notovitch, an adventurer who had, I subsequently found, made a not very favourable reputation in India. I asked M. Notovitch where he had come from, and he replied that he had come from Kashmir. He then asked me where I had come from. I said from Peking. It much amused me, therefore, when on leaving he said, in a theatrical way, " We part here, the pioneers of the East ! "
This same M. Notovitch has recently published what he calls a new " Life of Christ," which he professes to have found in a monastery in Ladak, after he had parted with me. No one, however, who knows M. Notovitch's reputation, or who has the slightest knowledge of the subject, will give any reliance whatever to this pretentious volume.
On the day after leaving M. Notovitch I crossed my last pass, the Zoji-la, eleven thousand four hundred feet high. It was perfectly easy, and then on descending the southern side we found all the mountain-sides covered with forest. The change from the bare hillsides on the north was very striking and very pleasant. Hitherto, from far away at their rise from the Yarkand plains, the mountains had been barren and destitute of any trace of forest. Occasionally in some favoured sheltered spot a dwarfed tree or two might be seen, but as a whole it was only in the valley bottoms and on cultivated lands that any trees were met with. Now of a sudden all was changed. We had reached the southern-facing slopes of the outward ridge of the Himalayas, and upon these slopes all the rains of the monsoon are expended, while none is left to reach the parched hill slopes beyond. Consequent upon
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