My way lay through Kapap over the Jalap-Là, and down through Langram and Rinchingong, and thence to Chumbi. The _pièce de résistance_ was the part between Kapap and Langram. There is an easy uninteresting pass between Gnatong and Kapap. Kapap itself looked a bleak dismal spot, lying all in the clouds at the end of a long dark lake. From here you rise to the top of the Jalap-Là, which is about 14,900 feet high. The suffix 'Là' denotes a 'pass.' There was snow on the pass which covered the road in some places. I got into a small drift once, my pony flopping down suddenly till his girths were in the snow. He knew nothing about snow in those days, and must have been very much astonished. One's first acquaintance with so high an altitude impresses one greatly. There is something so strange about the atmosphere that one feels as though one were in another planet. The effect of the atmosphere on distances is most curious. You see the details of a hill in the distance so clearly that it seems far nearer than it is. Distance-judging by eye for military purposes in high altitudes is an art governed by rules entirely different from those that govern it at an ordinary elevation. I was a bit weak after my attack of mountain sickness, and stuck to my pony's back the whole way. I felt a natural anxiety with regard to the native followers who accompanied me--an orderly, a syce, and a bearer. They were all three plainsmen. Hills of any size whatever were quite strange to them. Whether they would live at the height of Mont Blanc was a question of some moment. I expected at any time to see one or other of them lying down gasping like a freshly caught fish. I think they all died in imagination many times before they reached the top of the pass. They turned wild eyes of anguish and reproach towards me whenever I waited to see how they were getting on. Eventually I found it best to leave them to themselves, and only know that they arrived down the far side alive, but expressing a poor opinion of Tibet as a country (for we now were in Tibet).