Our evening meal was enlivened by one of some precious bottles of generous wine that Maw had added to our stores, reserved for special occasions, such as the present. After this we should gladly have gone to sleep, if stern duty had not forbidden any such luxury. The minimum of evening work for the travelling botanist is to lay out between dry paper the contents of his boxes and portfolios filled during the day. On this occasion the operation was more troublesome than usual, as we struggled to screen our single flickering candle from the night wind in the least exposed corner of the verandah, and midnight had come and gone before we stretched our mattresses on the earthen floor, first duly dusted with insect powder, and sought rest. In our exposed position the cold was very sensible through the night, though the thermometer did not fall below 45° Fahr. The morning sky was so gloomy that no one awoke so early as we had intended; and at sunrise on May 16, when we loudly called for breakfast, the light was still so imperfect that it seemed as though the day had but just dawned. There was less than the usual delay; but six o’clock had passed, and we were not yet ready to start. To our great satisfaction we found that the sheik did not propose to accompany us to-day, but had appointed two men of the village to act as guides. With these, and our usual personal attendants, whom we knew by experience to be active pedestrians, we started about 6.30 A.M. to ascend the main southern branch of the valley. For rather more than a mile the way over the filled-up bed of the old moraine lake is quite flat, and for a considerable distance beyond this the ascent along the bottom of the valley is very gentle; but we were led by the aspect of the ground to ascend the rather steep western slope at a part much farther from the village than we had traversed three days before.