I descended to my camp, full of anxious anticipations for the morrow; while the novelty of the scene, and its striking character, the complexity of the phenomena, the lake-bed, the stupendous ice-deposited moraine, and its remoteness from any existing ice, the broad valley and open character of the country, were all marked out as so many problems suddenly conjured up for my unaided solution, and kept me awake for many hours. I had never seen a glacier or moraine on land before, but being familiar with sea ice and berg transport, from voyaging in the South Polar regions, I was strongly inclined to attribute the formation of this moraine to a period when a glacial ocean stood high on the Himalaya, made fiords of the valleys, and floated bergs laden with blocks from the lateral gulleys, which the winds and currents would deposit along certain lines. On the following morning I carried a barometer to the top of the moraine, which proved to be upwards of 700 feet above the floor of the valley, and 400 above the dry lake-bed which it bounded, and to which we descended on our route up the valley. The latter was grassy and pebbly, perfectly level, and quite barren, except a very few pines at the bases of the encircling mountains, and abundance of rhododendrons, _Andromeda_ and juniper on the moraines. Isolated moraines occurred along both flanks of the valley, some higher than that I have described, and a very long one was thrown nearly across from the upper end of another lateral gulley on the east side, also leading up to the glaciers of Nango. This second moraine commenced a mile and a half above the first, and abutting on the east flank of the valley, stretched nearly across, and then curving round, ran down it, parallel to and near the west flank, from which it was separated by the Yangma river: it was abruptly terminated by a conical hill of boulders, round whose base the river flowed, entering the dry lake-bed from the west, and crossing it in a south-easterly direction to the western extremity of the great moraine. The road, on its ascent to the second moraine, passed over an immense accumulation of glacial detritus at the mouth of the second lateral valley, entirely formed of angular fragments of gneiss and granite, loosely bound together by felspathic sand. The whole was disposed in concentric ridges radiating from the mouth of the valley, and descending to the flat; these were moraines _in petto,_ formed by the action of winter snow and ice upon the loose débris. A stream flowed over this débris, dividing into branches before reaching the lake-bed, where its waters were collected, and whence it meandered southward to fall into the Yangma. [Illustration: Ancient moraines in the Yangma Valley]