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Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books
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The heart of a continent : vol.1 |
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cross before I should find myself in Kashmir again ? Fortunately,
however, mountain sickness wears off as one becomes accustomed
to high altitudes, and I was never troubled with it again.
The journey to Shahidula it is unnecessary to describe in
detail, for it is now well known. We ascended the picturesque
Nubra valley, with its orchards of apricot trees and Buddhist
monuments, and then crossed the Saser Pass, seventeen thou-
sand eight hundred feet—a pass which, on account of the
glacier at its summit, is often very dangerous, but which at
this season presented no difficulty whatever. The mountains
about here and at the head of the Nubra are very grand
and bold, and rise to peaks of twenty-three thousand and
twenty-four thousand feet in height, with fine glaciers rolling
down their sides ; but beyond the Saser Pass we entered the
most utterly desolate country that exists on the face of the
globe. The Depsang Plains are more than seventeen thousand
feet above sea-level, and are of gravel, as bare as a gravel-
walk to a suburban villa. Away behind us the snowy peaks
of Saser and Nubra appeared above the horizon like the sails
of some huge ships ; but before us was nothing but gravel
plains and great gravel mounds, terribly desolate and depress-
ing. Across these plains blew blinding squalls of snow, and
at night, though it was now the middle of summer, there
were several degrees of frost. Crossing the Depsang Plains,
we ascended a shallow valley covered with the skeletons
of ponies, which every traveller who passes through it in-
stinctively names the Valley of the Shadow of Death, to the
Karakoram Pass, eighteen thousand eight hundred and fifty
feet. It might have been supposed that at such height the
snow would have been lying thick ; but there was not a speck
of snow either on it or on the mountain summits by it, which
are well over nineteen thousand feet in height. Karakoram
(Black Gravel) is, as I noted above, the very name for this
pass and range ; but it is strange that these mountains, at
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