'It was, indeed. At first, of course, I thought I had merely stumbled on one of those conventional monuments of piety, put up by some pilgrim on his way to Lhassa from the north and no more distinctive than a roadside crucifix in Italy. But then it struck me that this was well off the route that any pilgrim would be likely to take. There is no recognised track, of course, in those wild regions, but there are long grooves between the ranges of heights, and it is to these enormous gutters that the traveller keeps if he values his life. Even here progress is arduous in the extreme, for the surface is terribly rough even when free from ice-crusts, and many of the grooves run for hundreds of miles at an altitude never less than sixteen thousand feet, with the accompaniment of constant hailstorms and snowstorms and terrific cold. The _obo_ I found was not in one of these gutters. It stood on a small patch of level rock at the end of a pass, in the midst of a waste of rugged peaks looking for all the world like monstrous frozen waves of the sea. 'I saw beside the monument what appeared to be bleached sticks of wood, but I discovered my mistake as I came nearer. They were human bones--the skeleton of one man. Now thoroughly curious, I examined the inscription on the plaques of slate, and you may picture my excitement when I found it was not the usual text, but a longish legend scratched on the surface with, apparently, some sharp splinter of rock. I at once made an exact copy of the whole--no easy task, I may say, for the scratches had been very feebly made. At that time I did not know Tibetan well, but I knew enough to realise that this inscription had been written by the dead man--and not long before his death, to judge by the quavering way the letters were formed--for the purpose of leaving some message behind him. But what the message was, neither I nor any man of my party could fathom. 'That expedition was the most disastrous I ever knew. We had abominable luck with the weather and everything else; snowstorms beleaguered us in the mountains so long that our supplies ran out, and we were reduced to living on steaks--raw for the most part--hacked from the ponies as they dropped dead one by one. My bearers treacherously deserted me, and when at last I, the only white man of the party, staggered down into the Tsaidam marsh country with one faithful usbeg who had accompanied me from Kashgar, the pair of us were much nearer dead than alive.