Besides the branch which we had already explored the Rongbuk Glacier has yet another which joins the main stream from the East about 10 miles from Everest. It had always excited our curiosity, and I now proposed to explore it in the initial stages of a journey across the unknown ridges and valleys which separated us from Kharta. I calculated that we should want eight days' provisions, and that we should just have time to organise a camp in advance and start on the 25th with a selected party, sending down the rest to join Howard-Bury. And it was an integral part of the scheme that on one of the intervening days I should ascend a spur to the North of the glacier where we proposed to march in order to obtain a better idea of this country to the East. But we were now in the thickest of the monsoon weather; the 21st and 22nd were both wet days and we woke on the 23rd to find snow all around us nearly a foot deep; it had come down as low as 16,000 feet. It was hardly the weather to cut ourselves adrift and wander among the uncharted spurs of Everest, and we thought of delaying our start. Further it transpired that our organisation was not running smoothly--it never did run smoothly so long as we employed, as an indispensable Sirdar, a whey-faced treacherous knave whose sly and calculated villainy too often, before it was discovered, deprived our coolies of their food, and whose acquiescence in his own illimitable incompetence was only less disgusting than his infamous duplicity. It was the hopeless sense that things were bound to go wrong if we trusted to this man's services--and we had no one else at that time through whom it was possible to order supplies from the natives--that turned the scale and spoilt the plan. Even so, in the natural course of events, I should have obtained my preliminary view. But on the night of the 22nd I received from Howard-Bury an extremely depressing piece of news, that all my photos taken with the quarter-plate camera had failed--for the good reason that the plates had been inserted back to front, a result of ignorance and misunderstanding. It was necessary as far as possible to repair this hideous error, and the next two days were spent in a photographic expedition. And so it came about that we saw no more until a much later date of the East Rongbuk Glacier. Had our plan been carried out even in the smallest part by a cursory survey of what lay ahead, I should not now have to tell a story which is lamentably incomplete in one respect. For the East Rongbuk Glacier is one way, and the obvious way when you see it, to the North Col. It was discovered by Major Wheeler before ever we saw it, in the course of his photographic survey; but neither he, nor Bullock, nor I have ever traversed its whole length. [Illustration]