so great an altitude above sea-level, and forming, as they do, the watershed between India and Turkestan, should have no signs of snow upon them. The only reason I can think of to account for it is that behind this range and between it and the ocean, from which the rain comes, are other far more lofty mountains which intercept the greater part of the moisture ; and as there are no deep trough-like valleys in which the little snow that does fall would collect and be presery ed in the form of glaciers, but only wide shallow valleys where t he snow would lie where it fell in a thin coating over the surface of the mountain, and soon melt under the rays of the sun, it happens that these mountains, whose summits are as high as Snowdon placed on the top of Mont Blanc, are in the summer months as free from snow as our little hills in England.
Descending the northern side of the Karakoram Pass, we passed the spot where poor Dalgleish had been murdered by an Afghan in the previous year, and saw the memorial tablet which had just been placed there by Mr. Dauvergne, Major Cumberland, and Captain Bower. No more dreary spot could be imagined ; and here, on the dividing-line between India and Central Asia, in the very core of these lofty mountain ranges, hundreds of miles away from his nearest fellow-country men, had fallen the one solitary Englishman who had tried to make his home in Central Asia. It was sad to think of such a life being so sacrificed ; and that after he had succeeded, as he had done, in gaining the affections and goodwill of the people of the country in which he had settled, he should have been treacherously murdered in a fit of fanaticism or temper by one who was a stranger like himself.
From the Karakoram Pass we traversed a region only less desolate than that we had passed over on the southern side, and then, after crossing the Suget Pass, seventeen thousand six h undred feet high, we descended rapidly to Shahidula, which we reached on August 21, having in the last six
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