Let me give you just a slight picture of our setting. Our house of stone and mud overlooked small valleys where tea was grown. Beyond, between serried ridges that stuck out in harsh but majestic curves, were valleys full of rice-fields, maize, and fruit orchards. Further on rose the dark evergreen-clad precipices over which reared thousands of feet of pure white ranges, the Kanchinjinga, the peak Makalu, and the Everest ranges. In the first flush of dawn they looked white; but as the light grew in brightness and the sun rose higher, peak after peak defined itself, not far off in the horizon, but piercing the very middle of the sky whence poured a flood of crimson light like the very blood of benediction. One usually sees the Himalayas best in the early morning for they are covered with clouds during the rest of the day. Hindus, who are religious people, get up in good time to behold the sublime hills and to pray to God. Can there be a better setting to prayers than those mountains most of whose peaks yet remain unexplored and untrodden by man? Their inviolate sanctity is something precious, which remains a perpetual symbol of divinity. Heights like that of the Everest are symbols of the highest reality--GOD. They are symbolic of God's mystery, too, for with the exception of the early morning they are as I have said, shrouded with clouds all day. Foreigners who come to India imagine they would like to see them all the time, but let no one complain, for he who has beheld Everest in its morning grandeur and awe-inspiring glory will say "It is too sublime to be gazed at all day long. None could bear it continually before his eyes." In July those early morning views of the Everest are not vouchsafed us every day, for it is the month of rain. All the ranges lie in the grip of the most devastating blizzards. Once in a while above the battle of storms and driven snow the peaks appear--a compact mass of hard ice and white fire. They glow intensely in the sunlight, while at their feet the snow clouds whirl and fall like fanatical dervishes dancing frenziedly before their terrible God. During the summer my friend Radja and our teacher in jungle lore, old Ghond, came to visit our home. Radja was about sixteen years old, already a Brahmin priest, and Ghond we always called old, for none knew his age. Both Radja and I were handed over to that most competent of hunters for the purpose of studying under his guidance the secrets of jungle and animal life. Since I have described them in my other books, I need not repeat myself here. As soon as we had settled down in Dentam, I began to train my pigeons in the art of direction. Whenever we had a clear day we climbed all the forenoon toward the higher peaks amid ilexes and balsam forests, and released our birds from some monastery roof, or from the house of a nobleman. And toward evening when we returned home, we invariably found Gay-Neck and his mother there before us.