covers the ice. We took our plunge into the middle of this glacier at midday. Snow was falling, and at 4.3o p.m. the clouds became so heavy, and it was altogether so threatening, that I thought it best to halt. Of course, no grass or fuel was obtainable ; but we had brought two pony-loads of wood with us, so were quite happy, though this was not a particularly cheerful-looking spot, with the snow falling hard, the great white ice-pinnacles of the glaciers rising all round, the mountains hidden by the heavy snow-clouds, and no place to encamp on but a very stony hollow.
The Gurkha havildar was in great form, He had a joke about getting hold of some " narm pattar," soft stones, to lie on, which kept him and all the Gurkhas in roars of laughter. I asked him where he had got the joke from, and he said some sahib had made it at Kabul in the Afghan war.
On the following morning we set out in a heavy snowstorm
—so heavy that even the bases of the mountains on each side of the glacier were at times not visible, and the summits were not seen till midday, and then only in glimpses. Immediately on leaving camp we were confronted by a series of very bad crevasses, running right across our path. Things looked hopeless at one time, and it was like finding a way through a maze. The naik and I went on ahead, and by going from one end of each crevasse to the other, we managed in every case to find a way across, though to advance a hundred yards we often had to go at least six times that distance, and once we completely lost our front in the maze and the snowstorm, and were wandering off up a side glacier, till I recognized that we were in the wrong direction by a hillside appearing through the mist.
We finally got clear of the bad crevasses, and then had a fairly clear run for a couple of miles, and were beginning to congratulate ourselves that we had got over the worst of the glacier, when we came upon another series of crevasses of the most desperate description—the ice, in fact, was so split up
IIIFカラー高解像度
