After walking for an hour up the valley in a thick fog, by luck I struck the right ridge, which proved a very steep climb. Glimpses of blue sky and white peaks, however, gave us hopes of better views higher up. It took me two and a half hours to climb 3,000 feet, which at last brought me above the mists. The top of the ridge was 19,500 feet high, and from it we had most superb views. Mount Everest was only 3 or 4 miles away from us. From it to the South-east swept a huge amphitheatre of mighty peaks culminating in a new and unsurveyed peak, 28,100 feet in height, to which we gave the name of Lhotse, which in Tibetan means the South Peak. From this side the mountain appeared quite unclimbable, as the cliffs were all topped with hanging glaciers, from which great masses of ice came thundering down into the valley below all the day long. Between Mount Everest and Makalu, on the watershed between Tibet and Nepal, there stands up a very curious conical peak, to which we gave the name of Pethangtse. On either side of it are two very steep, but not very high, passes into Nepal; both of them are, however, probably unclimbable. To the South-east towered up the immense cliffs of Makalu, far the more beautiful mountain of the two. The whole morning I spent on this ridge, taking photographs whenever opportunity offered. The clouds kept coming up and melting away again and were most annoying, but they occasionally afforded us the most beautiful glimpses and peeps of the snow and rock peaks by which we were surrounded. At a height of over 19,000 feet, I had a great chase after a new kind of rat; but it finally eluded me, and I was not able to add it to our already large collection. Even at these heights I found both yellow and white saxifrages and a blue gentian. From the top of this ridge I had been able to see Kanchenjunga and Jannu, though nearly 100 miles away, but their summits stood up out of the great sea of clouds which covered Nepal. [Illustration: CLIFFS OF CHOMOLOeNZO from camp at Pethang Ringmo.] On returning to camp in the afternoon, I found that Mallory and Bullock were there. They had climbed a snow peak on the North side of the Kama Valley, about 21,500 feet, and from this view point had been unable to discover a possible route up Mount Everest on the Eastern face; they thought, however, that there might be an alternative approach from the next valley to the North. They therefore intended returning to the Kharta Valley to follow that river to its source.