We encamped at a most remarkable place: the valley was broad, with little vegetation but stunted tree-junipers: rocky snow-topped mountains rose on either side, bleak, bare, and rugged; and in front, close above my tent, was a gigantic wall of rocks, piled—as if by the Titans—completely across the valley, for about three-quarters of a mile. This striking phenomenon had excited all my curiosity on first obtaining a view of it. The path, I found, led over it, close under its west end, and wound amongst the enormous detached fragments of which it was formed, and which were often eighty feet square: all were of gneiss and schist, with abundance of granite in blocks and veins. A superb view opened from the top, revealing its nature to be a vast moraine, far below the influence of any existing glaciers, but which at some antecedent period had been thrown across by a glacier descending to 10,000 feet, from a lateral valley on the east flank. Standing on the top, and looking south, was the Yangma valley (up which I had come), gradually contracting to a defile, girdled by snow-tipped mountains, whose rocky flanks mingled with the black pine forest below. Eastward the moraine stretched south of the lateral valley, above which towered the snowy peak of Nango, tinged rosy red, and sparkling in the rays of the setting sun: blue glaciers peeped from every gulley on its side, but these were 2000 to 3000 feet above this moraine; they were small too, and their moraines were mere gravel, compared with this. Many smaller consecutive moraines, also, were evident along the bottom of that lateral valley, from this great one up to the existing glaciers. Looking up the Yangma was a flat grassy plain, hemmed in by mountains, and covered with other stupendous moraines, which rose ridge behind ridge, and cut off the view of all but the mountain tops to the north. The river meandered through the grassy plain (which appeared a mile and a half broad at the utmost, and perhaps as long), and cut through the great moraine on its eastern side, just below the junction of the stream from the glacial valley, which, at the lower part of its course, flowed over a broad steep shingle bed. [Illustration: Ancient Moraine thrown across the Yangma Valley, East Nepal]