view to the south was seen through a haze. All the same, when I had climbed with the Sub-Surveyor a ridge rising about 500 feet above the pass, we were rewarded by the sight of a grand glacier-girt mountain rising in solitary splendour to the south-east. It was impossible to mistake the " Kuen-luen Peak, No. 5," which the tables of the Indian Trigonometrical Survey showed with a height of 23,890 feet. Right and left of it stretched a chain of ice mountains, but their crests were hidden in clouds, and our endeavour to recognize among them other peaks fixed from the southern side was in vain. The wind on the pass was cutting and the temperature close to freezing-point. By boiling-point thermometer we found the height to be over 12,000 feet.
I was glad to leave by 4 p.m. the cheerless ridge. The descent into the Biqa Valley, which runs from east to west draining by an inaccessible gorge into the Y urung-kash, was very steep and trying. The bleak mountain-side is fissured by narrow ravines, and the path follows the ridges between them. The landscape looked wild and lifeless in the extreme. It was quite dark before we had extricated ourselves from the rocky ledges that project from the decomposed slopes and lead ladder-like down to the valley. With some difficulty our guide found the way to the main group of huts of Buya, but the straggling baggage animals were much belated, and I had to sit till midnight in a smoky mud hovel before my tent was pitched and my dinner ready.
Next morning when I rose I found to my delight that the sky had completely cleared. In order not to lose the good chance for survey work, I decided to push on to Pisha, though men as well as animals seemed in need of a day's rest. The valley of Buya, about a mile broad at the principal hamlet, supports from its scanty fields of oats a population of thirty odd Holdings. The level of our camp was close on 8,000 feet. To the south of the valley rises a series of plateaus showing on the surface only detritus and gravel, with conical hills
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