Our path led us up a steep side-valley from the Poe Chu, ascending over a vast moraine to the foot of a small glacier about two miles in length. Here I saw a rare sight: a Laemmergeier (bearded vulture) came sailing down in wide circles and settled on the ice barely a hundred paces from us, where he began to peck at something--a dead hare perhaps, but it was impossible to see or to approach nearer over the crevasses. The Laemmergeier, vulture though it is, is one of the noblest birds in flight that may be seen: hardly a day passes in the high mountains without one or more swooping down to look at you, sometimes so near that you can see his beard and gleaming eye; but to see one on the ground is rare indeed. The long-tailed aeroplane at a very great height resembles the Laemmergeier more than any other bird. We struggled up the glacier, inches deep in soft new snow, crossed crevasses by means of rotten planks which gravely offended our mountaineering sense, and came through dense fog to our pass at its head. Here began the sacred mountain of Lapche Kang, and on the rocks beside the pass, and on many of the pinnacles high up above the pass as well, were cairns of stones supporting little reed-stemmed flags of prayers. Some of our party had brought up from below such little flags, which they planted where their fancy prompted. As we went down on the other side we came to countless little "chortens," miniature temples, and, where the ground was level for a space, to long walls of stones, each one inscribed with the universal Buddhist prayer OM MANI PADME HUM. Yaks are most satisfactory beasts of burden; if their pace is slow--it is seldom more than two miles an hour--they go with hardly a halt, cropping a tuft of grass here and there, until daylight fails. But the Tibetan coolie is of quite another nature; he (or she) starts off gaily enough in the morning, but very soon he is glad to stop for a gossip or to alter the trim of his load, and then it is time to drink tea, and again at every convenient halting-place more tea, not the liquid that we are accustomed to drink, but a curious mixture of powdered brick-tea, salt, soda and butter, of a better taste than one would suppose. So on this occasion it was long after noon when we had crossed the pass, and when the day began to fade in a drenching cloud of rain, the Tibetans found shelter in some caves, and persuaded us to camp. An uneven space among rocks just held our tents; we dined off the fragrant smoke of green rhododendron and soaking juniper, and we slept (if at all) to the roar of boulders rolling in the torrent-bed a few feet from where we lay.