486 FROM THE KUN-LUN TO LONDON CH.XCVII
among the transport animals, and by October 3rd crossed the Kara-koram Pass, 18,687 feet above sea, and with it the frontier between China and India.
So far the marches, though long and very fatiguing to me in my helpless condition, had been practically free from natural obstacles except such as the high elevation and the total want of grazing for the animals offered. But after the camping-place of Burtze, which was reached on the following day, the track among the rocks of the Murghe defile became so difficult that it would have been quite impossible to get my gimcrack litter carried through on ponies. It was hence a great relief when, at the foot of the very first impasse, my sorry little caravan was met by a band of Tibetan coolies with which Lala Udho Das, the energetic and attentive Naib Tahsildar of Leh, had pushed across the Sasser. Without this timely help which Captain D. G. Oliver, of the Indian Political Department and British Joint Commissioner in Ladak, had provided, I could never have got myself carried in my litter over the ground before us—and I do not care to think now what sitting in a saddle would then have meant for me.
On October 7th I was taken over the glacier slopes and moraines of the Sasser Pass, the patient and good-natured Ladaki coolies doing their best to spare me painful tumbles on the ice and snow. But it was sad to think how a few weeks earlier I should have enjoyed such grand mountain scenery and such a glacier climb. Now the best I could do was to divert my thoughts, by reading, from the little miseries of the present and from worrying anxiety about what would become of my feet. I derived much pleasure in particular from the handy little volume of ' Selections from. Erasmus,' which my dear friend Mr. P. S. Allen, of Merton College, Oxford, the editor of the great humanist's correspondence, had sent me as a forerunner of his magnum oJus.
At last by the evening of October 8th, when descending towards Panimikh, the highest Ladak village on the Nubra River, I had the great relief of being met by the Rev. S. Schmitt, in charge of the hospital of the Moravian Mission at Leh. Though himself then still suffering from the aftereffects of a serious illness, he had with kindest self-sacrifice
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