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| 0459 |
The heart of a continent : vol.1 |
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OCR Text
In the long night marches in the desert, my thoughts turned
chiefly on the relations of this world with the worlds of space.
Of the magnitude of this our own world, my best idea was
formed from observation of high mountains. In the pages
of this book I have described many a scene among the
Himalayas where I stood spell-bound at the height and
grandeur of the mountains. I see before me now the Tian-shan
—the "Heavenly Mountains"—as I saw them from the Gobi
Desert, their white summits forming part of heaven itself,
and their base rooted in the broad bosom of the desert. I
recall to my mind the sight of the Pamir Mountains, the outer
wall of the "Roof of the World," viewed from the plains of
Turkestan, and rising from them like one vast rampart. I
think of the Mustagh—the "Ice Mountains"—rising tier upon
tier before me, and the great peak K.2, the second highest
mountain in the world, soaring above all the rest. I remember
the Nanga Parbat—the "Naked Mountain"—seen across the
lovely vale of Kashmir, or, again, from the banks of the river
Indus, above which it rises for twenty-three thousand feet
in one continuous slope. All these scenes I recall, and many
others with them—the Rakapushi Peak in Hunza, and the
Tirich Mir in Chitral, each of them twenty-five thousand feet
above sea-level; and I think of the first sight I ever had
of high snow-mountains, when from the Juras I looked across
to the Mont Blanc range, and could not at first believe that
the snowy summits were not clouds, so high above this earth
did they appear. Mont Blanc was but a little mountain in
comparison with the giants I afterwards saw in the Himalayas,
and yet even these, we find, are mere roughnesses on the
surface in comparison with the whole volume of the earth.
Of such enormous size is this world—this world, which in
proportion to the sun is as a pin's head beside an orange,
and, in relation to the starry universe, but as a drop of water
in comparison with the Atlantic ocean—that mountain heights
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