The place where I lay was about two feet deep, but the snow was fast sagging and melting. I must have rolled here after the avalanche had knocked the senses out of me. I lay on my back in the soggy snow while Poyning opened my sheepskin and felt me all over for broken bones. Wherever his fingers pressed I ached and throbbed; the ankle I had struck in my descent was hurting abominably, and for some minutes I thought I should never rise from my back again. Poyning took off the boot and gaiter and wrapped round a rough-and-ready cold compress made out of a handkerchief and a handful of snow, which was a wonderful relief; and after a bit, with his help and using as a crutch the rifle he had picked up from the wreck of the raft, I found I could stand and just hobble. The change from higher up the mountain was little short of astounding. In those few minutes we had passed from the arctic zone to the temperate, and farther down still there appeared to be yet greater transitions. Even here the air was oppressively hot to the lips after the icy heights we had crossed. The point we stood on was plainly a grassy slope well below the snow line, where the descending avalanche, thinning over some miles of snowless ground, had petered out by sheer force of distance. It was well nigh impossible, looking at this regular scarp, to realise the tremendous ruggedness and cold and rarified air of the mountain above, though the snow-clad pinnacles which ringed round the valley still looked deceptively near. Below us stretched the valley, broad, fertile, watered by the intensely blue lake plumb in the middle, and to judge by the warmth where we stood far above it, at least sub-tropical in climate. The white-walled city on the fringes of the lake was now much more distinct, and beyond this we saw, rising out of the grassy plain, several of the gigantic birds we had sighted from the gully last night.