In the course of our journey we passed through a great variety of landscape; in Sikkim, for instance, we found a land of steep slopes and dense forests, while Tibet is almost a desert country. We experienced the clear air of the winter, and the mists and storm-clouds of the monsoon. While we were on the rolling plains of the Tibetan Plateau, only a few miles away were the snow-covered summits of the highest mountains in the world. Sikkim is a country of deep valleys and of luxurious vegetation; the air is generally damp and the skies cloudy, and there is often a beautiful blue haze that gives atmosphere to the distance. Sikkim is not unlike the Italian side of the Alps, in many ways. True, its scale is larger, and it possesses some of the most beautiful and impressive peaks in the world (for no Alpine peak can vie with Siniolchum or Pandim for sheer beauty of form and surface), but on the whole the scenery of Sikkim is of the same general build as the valleys and peaks of Northern Italy. In this sense Sikkim did not offer to the new-comer anything entirely different from what he had seen before. But Tibet and Everest certainly did; and the difference between Sikkim and Tibet is twofold—first, Tibet is almost uniformly over 13,000 feet above sea-level, and therefore bears no trees at all; second, Tibet is almost free from rainfall and is, in consequence, a desert country. One’s eye travelled, for mile after mile, over red-brown sand and red-brown limestone hills, finally to rest on the blue and white of the distant snows. The air, before the monsoon commences, is almost always clear—clear to an extent unimagined by a European, clearer even than the air of an Alpine winter. So peaks and ridges 30 or 40 miles away are often almost in the same visual plane as the foreground of the landscape. In some extensive views, such as we had from the hills above Tinki Dzong, one came to look upon hills 30 miles away as the middle distance of one’s picture, while the background was formed of mountains a hundred miles from the point of view. It is this lack of atmosphere which makes pictorial representation of these Tibetan scenes so very difficult; the pictures I made on the course of the Expedition have all had one criticism from many different people—“there is no atmosphere.” Many as are the demerits of these pictures, this is the one merit they have; and if they had an “atmosphere” they would cease to be truthful. In the Alps one has often seen mountains with extreme clearness at a great distance, but I never remember having viewed an Alpine landscape in which there was practically no effect of distance, and practicably no blueness of the more distant shadows. Yet that is precisely what obtains in Tibet before the month of June. And then, with startling suddenness, comes the monsoon, with its damp air; for some months the landscape is entirely altered, and also much beautified. The blue haze of the monsoon converts