From Gyantse to Ralung is a steady upward incline, and took us three days. It rained most of the time, both day and night; it was difficult to get dry again when once you were wet, and there was a good deal of discomfort experienced in all quarters. One camping ground was particularly unpleasant, which for the most part consisted of ploughed land that was not only soaking with the rain, but had recently been irrigated. As we had risen considerably higher than the Gyantse plain, the crops on this and similar ground had hardly begun to show. In fact, from here onwards for many days to come, there seemed very little chance of obtaining any grazing for our animals. We had taken all the transport we could, and loaded it with as many supplies as possible, all selected according to our known needs on the one hand, and the possible but unknown resources of the country on the other; but even so our prospects were not rosy. The mule, for instance, cannot live on grain alone: he must have fodder, and one mule in a very few days will consume as much fodder as is equivalent in weight to his own authorised load. Hence, if you provide a mule with a reserve of fodder to last him that number of days and make him carry it, you might just as well leave him behind, since he will then be able to carry nothing else except his own fodder. This, in a country where fodder is not locally procurable, is, at any rate in the case of the pack mule, one of the great problems of army transport, and we were brought face to face with it more than once during this march. Grain too is heavy stuff, or, in other words, gets quickly consumed. We used over two hundred maunds a day, or more than a hundred mule loads, and so could not start our march with many days' supply in reserve without excluding other things that also had to be carried. The next heaviest item was tsampa (the Tibetan barley flour which we were now using as a substitute for the 'áta' or coarsely ground wheat flour usually consumed by natives). Of this we used seventy maunds daily, and so had only a few days in reserve. Meat, though a large item, is much more tractable stuff, for it walks on its four feet till you kill it. It can even be of use in carrying other things. For instance, we had made up our minds that, if sheep and cows ran short, we would eat each yak that, on account of the depletion of supplies, had no longer a load to carry! The other items of food, though many of them costly and highly essential, were none of them very bulky, and of these we had been able to bring along some weeks' reserve.