We crouched under the barrier, European and native alike, and I wasn't long in seeing the point of lumping all our canvas together. Any one tent by itself would have gone whirling on the wings of the storm, but this reinforced wall, though the canvas bulged as if it would split and the poles bent like reeds in a current, held; and after withstanding its first fury, gathered strength from the storm itself. Snow and sand banked up against it, forming a drift some seven feet high, behind which, so long as the wind kept to the one quarter, we could laugh at it. The storm didn't rise. Nor did it abate. When once the thunder had passed, which was about an hour after the first squall, the wind settled down to blow steadily, gale-strong, through the night. And that was a night of horror. By what I judge to have been ten o'clock we were as near frozen to death as men can be and still live, for the canvas wall, though a capital bulwark against the wind, was of little efficacy against the cold. Our thickest blankets might have been summer muslins. Then once more we had reason to bless Philipson's uncanny foresight. He had insisted on adding the yak-hide to our gear, though I remember thinking at the time that it was folly to burden ourselves with a thing of such weight; now I knew that the foolishness had been mine. As soon as the storm burst we had given our one remaining pony the yak-hide for a rug. The poor beast whinnied pitifully when we took it off him, but it was his life or ours. Philipson, Poyning and myself got into the great woolly hide, turned inside out--it was ample to hold the three of us--and slept in fair warmth. At last there came a little lightening of the dense gloom, which having reckoned to be daybreak, we rose to take stock of our situation. The pony was dead, as we knew he must be, frozen stiff and hard as iron. The Chinese servants and the bearers all appeared to have survived the night without frostbite; they had pooled their sheepskins and rolled themselves into one composite knot of humanity, which, in the circumstances, was about the wisest thing they could have done. The storm was still blowing great guns, and even by that mirky light we could see an alarming change in the face of the mountain; nothing but lumpy drifts everywhere, and every crevasse filled with treacherous, powdery snow. Worst and crowning disaster, our chronometer and watches were ruined. The all-penetrating dust which had been swirling in eddies and back-washes behind our shelter all night had not only filled our eyes and ears and mouths; it had got into every piece of clockwork we possessed. In future we should be reduced to guessing time from the sun, if visible, and our position in a land as unmapped as the ocean, by the roughest of dead-reckoning from distance travelled.