that the glacier-head lay not far away under Chang La, but here near at hand under another col; beyond this must be the glacier of our quest, turning East, as presumably it must turn beyond the skyline we saw now, and beyond the rock peaks which we had observed to the North of us when first we reached the watershed. One more effort was now required so that we might see a little more. Chang La itself was still invisible. Might we not see it from the summit of our mountain? And was it not in any case an attractive summit? An examination of the various pairs of upturned toes where the prostrate forms were still grouped grotesquely in the snow was not encouraging. But the most vigorous of the coolies was with us, Nyima, a sturdy boy of eighteen, who from the very start of the Expedition had consistently displayed a willing spirit in every emergency. To my demand for volunteers he responded immediately, and soon persuaded a second coolie, Dasno, who had been going very strongly on this day, to accompany him. As the three of us started off the clouds suddenly boiled up from below and enveloped us completely. A few minutes brought us to the foot of the steepest slopes; we took off our snow-shoes and crossed a bergschrund, wading up to our thighs. Dasno had already had enough and fell out. But the conical shape of our peak was just sufficiently irregular to offer a defined blunt edge where two surfaces intersected. Even here the snow was deep enough to be a formidable obstacle at that steep angle; but the edge was safe from avalanches. As we struggled on I glanced repeatedly away to the left. Presently through a hole in the clouds all was clear for a moment to the West; again I saw Changtse, and now my eyes followed the line of its arete descending towards Everest until the col itself was visible over the spur in front of us. The view was little enough; the mere rim appeared; the wall or the slopes below it, all that I most wanted to see, remained hidden. We struggled on to the top, in all nearly an hour's work of the most exhausting kind. The reward was in the beauty of the spot, the faintly-defined edges of clean snow and the convex surfaces bent slightly back from the steepness on every side to form the most graceful summit I have seen. To the North-east we saw clearly for a minute down the glacier. The rest was cloud, a thin veil, but all too much, inexorably hiding from us Changtse and Chang La.