The weather signs were decidedly more hopeful as I looked out of our tent next morning, and we decided at once to spend the day in some sort of reconnaissance up the valley. Presently away at the head of it we saw the clouds breaking about the mountain-sides. Everest itself began to clear; the great North-east arete came out, cutting the sky to the right; and little by little the whole Eastern face was revealed to us. As I recall now our first impression of the amazing scenery around us, I seem chiefly to remember the fresh surprise and vivid delight which, for all we had seen before, seemed a new sensation. Even the map of the Kama Valley, now that we have it, may stir the imagination. Besides Everest itself the crest of the South Peak, 28,000 feet high, and its prodigious South-east shoulder overlook the Western end; while Makalu, 12 miles from Everest, thrusts out Northwards a great arm and another peak to choke the exit; so that whereas the frontier ridge from Everest to Makalu goes in a South-easterly direction, the Kangshung Glacier in the main valley runs nearly due East. In this spacious manner three of the five highest summits in the world overlook the Kama Valley. And we now saw a scene of magnificence and splendour even more remarkable than the facts suggest. Among all the mountains I have seen, and, if we may judge by photographs, all that ever have been seen, Makalu is incomparable for its spectacular and rugged grandeur. It was significant to us that the astonishing precipices rising above us on the far side of the glacier as we looked across from our camp, a terrific awe-inspiring sweep of snow-bound rocks, were the sides not so much of an individual mountain, but rather of a gigantic bastion or outwork defending Makalu. At the broad head of the Kama Valley the two summits of Everest are enclosed between the North-east arete and the South-east arete bending round from the South Peak; below them is a basin of tumbled ice well marked by a number of moraines and receiving a series of tributaries pouring down between the buttresses which support the mountain faces in this immense cirque. Perhaps the astonishing charm and beauty here lie in the complications half hidden behind a mask of apparent simplicity, so that one's eye never tires of following up the lines of the great aretes, of following down the arms pushed out from their great shoulders, and of following along the broken edge of the hanging glacier covering the upper half of this Eastern face of Everest so as to determine at one point after another its relation with the buttresses below and with their abutments against the rocks which it covers. But for me the most magnificent and sublime in mountain scenery can be made lovelier by some more tender touch; and that, too, is added here. When all is said about Chomolungma, the Goddess Mother of the World, and about Chomo Uri, the Goddess of the Turquoise Mountain, I