rats, birds, lizards, beetles, or fish which they had collected for him. The local people would not make any attempt to collect these animals, as they said it was against their religion. On June 26 I started out to the South and camped the first night at Sharto, a small village about 9 miles across the plain to the South of Tingri. On the way we passed numbers of bees that seemed to be coming up out of the ground and swarming. These were all of a very light brown colour. Sharto is only a small village, but there are no other houses between it and Kyetrak, so that it was necessary to stop there. As the wind always blows with great strength here, the tents were pitched within some sheltering walls. In every place that we went to now we managed to get some kind of green food which was turned into spinach; a small kind of weed that grows in the barley fields was generally thus used. At other times we tried turnip leaves, or again, when we were higher and above the limits of cultivation, the young shoots of the nettle which grows up to 17,000 feet, and is really very good. I had taken with me this time a Tibetan whom we had picked up on the way. He was called Poo, and he turned out to be an excellent cook who could make any of the Tibetan dishes. As he was a sensible fellow, and very seldom drunk, I made a good deal of use of him. He accompanied me in all my wanderings, and I could not have found a more useful servant when travelling, as he never seemed to mind the cold or the height and could always produce a fire of some kind, even though he had forgotten to bring any matches. That evening at Sharto there was a curious false sunset in the East with rays of light in the deep purple of the sky. All the hills stood out with wonderful sharpness, and the colours were very beautiful. Towards nightfall we saw a number of kiang, which came quite close up to the camp and started feeding on the barley fields in spite of the pillars of stones and the strings which are put round the fields to keep both them and the hares away from the crops. The next morning I started off early as I intended to climb a hill 17,700 feet, on the way to Kyetrak. This hill, however, proved further off than I anticipated, and we had some difficulty in crossing a glacier stream, so that I did not get up to the top till 9 a.m., by which time the clouds had hidden a great part of the mountains to the South of us. The view, nevertheless, was extraordinarily fine. The top of Everest just showed above a great icy range to the East of us, and South-east was that great group of mountains of which Cho-Uyo, 26,800 feet, is the highest. Immense granite precipices descended sheer for several thousand feet until they reached great winding glaciers, while from over the Khombu Pass long wisps of cloud came sailing round these peaks and eventually hid them from our view. To the North the view extended right up to the watershed of the Brahmaputra, 80 to 100 miles distant.