the distant shadows from their crude purple-brown to the most magnificent and sometimes brilliant blue. Once or twice one looked in vain on one’s palette for a blue of sufficient brilliance and intensity to reproduce the colour of the shadows 20 or 30 miles away. Then the monsoon brings clouds and rain-storms, all of which tend to give variety to the scene, and to endue the distant peaks with that effect of mystery which renders them so alluring and so beautiful. As far as the scenery among the higher mountains is concerned, the comparison of photographs of the Everest group of peaks with those of the Alps will give one more idea of the differences between the two districts than can a mere verbal description, save in the matter of scale and colour. In colour, the Alps are more varied and the rock is, as a rule, a darker brown; the snow-shadows are more blue and the outlines less clear; while Alpine foregrounds so often contain trees which are totally absent from the foregrounds of Tibet. There both rocks and stones, scree and valley-bed are of a light reddish-brown, almost uniform in tone from near foreground to extreme distance; Makalu, for example, is a colossal rock-pyramid of quite a light ochre colour; the rocks of Everest are of a light amber brown relieved in the neighbourhood of 27,000 feet by a lighter yellowish band of quartzite. The snow of the range on its northern side resembles that of Alpine peaks, but on the southern face the festoons and grooves of ice, so well known to many from photographs of Himalayan mountains, decorate the much steeper and more uncompromising slopes. Most of the higher peaks are swept by continual gusts of wind which whirl clouds of snow from the topmost ridges into the sky. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER XIV TIBETAN CULTURE The Tibetans are a very simple folk, though not without a very definite civilisation of their own. Art and music exist in all nations, if the art be merely the fashioning of utensils, and the music be the crudest of rhythms played on a tom-tom. Yet in Tibet the rudimentary music and art associated with so many Eastern races is carried a stage farther, and what is in wilder people merely natural instinct has become in Tibet a definite culture. For I presume that culture is merely organised art, and certainly on that criterion the Tibetan is to some extent cultured.