We hoped not to draw blank at the next halt, for here we came to the village Pete, surmounted by Pete-jong, an important landmark on our route. But now we began to discover that some one had stolen a march on us, and was looting ahead of us. It appeared that, of the army that had opposed us at the Karo-Là, one portion had disappeared over the glacier, but that another was in retreat towards Lhassa, and was feeding itself somewhat ruthlessly on the country as it went. From reports that reached us, it appeared also that the paymasters of the Tibetan army regarded their duties lightly, and that the force in front of us, consisting mainly of mercenaries, had no compunction in looting not only the bare means of subsistence, but also any supplementary stores which by a generous calculation might seem equivalent in value to the arrears of their pay. Even so it was not so much what they took that spoilt our chance of finding stores to purchase, as the fact that each act of looting on their part at once became known in all the villages ahead, with the result that stores of all kinds, but especially grain and tsampa, were being hidden away from the reach of either the Tibetan army or ourselves with the utmost possible despatch. Hence our prospects again became far from rosy. There was fortunately some grazing at Pete-jong for the animals, but both grain and tsampa were growing short. A day or two more, without some addition of these articles, would see us depleted. Pete-jong, a fine square-topped fort, built on a rock, overtopped by high mountains on one side, and overlooking the blue waters of Lake Palti on the other, looked magnificent, and more than ever reminded one of that drop-scene in the theatre. 'What a shame,' my wife says, 'to draw such horrid comparisons!' But I tell her they are not horrid really. In fact, a short sojourn in Tibet, a country freed from the obscurities of a thick atmosphere, and full of great dense mountains and lakes, and of startlingly crude contrasts of bright colours, quite revolutionises for the time being one's ideas of landscape art. In one of those diffident modern impressionist pictures, in which the artist is afraid to make his sky or water really blue, or his snow really white, or his mountain-tops really lofty or distinct, one finds nothing that appeals to one's sense of vivid truth. But in that drop-scene above alluded to, lit up as it would be by glaring footlights, or in that glorious wealth of colour that is daubed by machinery on to even so low a thing as a tradesman's almanac, or, again, in that magic lantern slide reflected on a sheet, which gave to one as a child such romantic ideas of nature rampant in Switzerland or the Holy Land, there is more that represents the clear form and crude colour of the uplands of Tibet than would ever be found in the works of any up-to-date Royal Academician. As memory fades, and one becomes used again to denser atmospheres and to