“That mountain is on no map in the world,” said Wrexham as he took its bearing. “You remember all this part and several hundred miles on it is empty desert even on the latest maps. We shall have the pleasure of naming a new mountain among our other finds. It’s high, too--I should say twelve thousand or thirteen thousand feet, at least--to show snow at this time of year so low as that. What shall we call it?” “I think we’d better wait till we get there. The white-skinned people have probably got a name already.” “I wonder if it will be a name redolent of old Greece,” said Forsyth. “Perhaps one of the goddesses of old times. Anyway, if it hasn’t, I’m for giving it something a d----d sight more poetic than K2 or K5 or any other of the beastly insults that the Survey of India put on some of the most beautiful things in the world. Even the unpoetic Indian treats them better than that. Nanga Parbat is at least graceful.” “The lady blushes at the suggestion,” I said. “Look, really blushes.” The sun had just sunk below the horizon, and the great peaks ahead, still catching the rays now hidden to us, turned rose-colour, then darker red, then faded to purple, and last cold blue. A minute later they were but a white patch against the opal sky, and then they had disappeared. “She thinks your remarks are flippant and has veiled herself, Forsyth,” I continued. “Well, what about a meal if Wrexham has done his calculations? The lower hills, too, are fading fast now.” We moved back to the tent, and while Payindah was bringing food Wrexham told us how his calculations had worked out. By his reckoning the hills should be about fifty-odd miles away: the low hills, of course, not the snow-peak which was not showing when he had taken his bearings from the two ends of his base-line. The fifth day from now should, therefore, see us at the foot, reckoning on twelve miles a day average if we started early each morning. During the next three days we did thirty-eight miles, and as we went the dunes began to get lower, and by the evening of the second day, the ninth day of our march, were not more than thirty feet high. The desert was ever the same, greyish sand-dunes, now wind-tossed once more, for the wind had risen again, though not with the same violence that had marked the earlier days of our journey. On the evening of the ninth day the snow-peak had sunk much lower, from which we were the more convinced that it lay some way behind the long wall of rock which now filled all our northeast horizon. Wrexham measured it again, and made us out twenty-three miles from the near hills, somewhat more than his last estimate had been, taken at much over double the distance. The snow mountain he considered at least fifty miles beyond the first hills.