Books: Himalayan Journals (Complete)

J >> J. D. Hooker >> Himalayan Journals (Complete)

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Towards the base of the peak, at about 14,000 feet, the scenery is
very grand; a great moraine rises suddenly to the north-west, under
the principal mass of snow and ice, and barren slopes of gravel
descend from it; on either side are rugged precipices; the ground is
bare and stony, with patches of brown grass: and, on looking back,
the valley appears very steep to the first shrubby vegetation, of
dark green rhododendrons, bristling with ugly stunted pines.

We followed a valley to the south-east, so as to turn the flank of
the peak; the path lying over beds of October snow at 14,000 feet,
and over plashy ground, from its melting. Sometimes our way lay close
to the black precipices on our right, under which the snow was deep;
and we dragged ourselves along, grasping every prominence of the rock
with our numbed fingers. Granite appeared in large veins in the
crumpled gneiss at a great elevation, in its most beautiful and
loosely-crystallised form, of pearly white prisms of felspar, glassy
quartz, and milk-white flat plates of mica, with occasionally large
crystals of tourmaline. Garnets were very frequent in the gneiss near
the granite veins. Small rushes, grasses, and sedges formed the
remaining vegetation, amongst which were the withered stalks of
gentians, _Sedum, Arenaria, Silene,_ and many Composite plants.

At a little below 15,000 feet, we reached enormous flat beds of snow,
which were said to be perpetual, but covered deeply with the October
fall. They were continuous, and like all the snow I saw at this
season, the surface was honeycombed into thin plates, dipping north
at a high angle; the intervening fissures were about six inches deep.
A thick mist here overtook us, and this, with the great difficulty
of picking our way, rendered the ascent very fatiguing.
Being sanguine about obtaining a good view, I found it almost
impossible to keep my temper under the aggravations of pain in the
forehead, lassitude, oppression of breathing, a dense drizzling fog,
a keen cold wind, a slippery footing, where I was stumbling at every
few steps, and icy-cold wet feet, hands, and eyelids; the latter, odd
as it sounds, I found a very disagreeable accompaniment of continued
raw cold wind.

After an hour and a half's toilsome ascent, during which we made but
little progress, we reached the crest, crossing a broad shelf of snow
between two rocky eminences; the ridge was unsnowed a little way down
the east flank; this was, in a great measure, due to the eastern
exposure being the more sunny, to the prevalence of the warm and
melting south-east winds that blow up the deep Kambachen valley, and
to the fact that the great snow-beds on the west side are drifted
accumulations.* [Such enormous beds of snow in depressions, or on
gentle slopes, are generally adopted as indicating the lower limit of
perpetual snow. They are, however, winter accumulations, due mainly
to eddies of wind, of far more snow than can be melted in the
following summer, being hence perennial in the ordinary sense of the
word. They pass into the state of glacier ice, and, obeying the laws
that govern the motions of a viscous fluid, so admirably elucidated
by Forbes ("Travels in the Alps"), they flow downwards. A careful
examination of those great beds of snow in the Alps, from whose
position the mean lower level of perpetual snow, in that latitude, is
deduced, has convinced me that these are mainly due to accumulations
of this kind, and that the true limit of perpetual snow, or that
point where all that falls melts, is much higher than it is usually
supposed to be.] The mist cleared off, and I had a partial, though
limited, view. To the north the blue ice-clad peak of Nango was still
2000 feet above us, its snowy mantle falling in great sweeps and
curves into glacier-bound valleys, over which the ice streamed out of
sight, bounded by black aiguilles of gneiss. The Yangma valley was
quite hidden, but to the eastward the view across the stupendous
gorge of the Kambachen, 5000 feet below, to the waste of snow, ice,
and rock, piled in confusion along the top of the range of Junnoo and
Choonjerma, parallel to this but higher, was very grand indeed: this
we were to cross in two days, and its appearance was such, that our
guide doubted the possibility of our doing it. A third and fourth
mountain mass (unseen) lay beyond this, between us and Sikkim,
divided by valleys as deep as those of Yangma and Kambachen.

Having hung up my instruments, I ascended a few hundred feet to some
naked rocks, to the northward; they were of much-crumpled and
dislocated gneiss, thrown up at a very high angle, and striking
north-west. Chlorite, schist, and quartz, in thin beds, alternated
with the gneiss, and veins of granite and quartz, were injected
through them.

It fell calm; when the distance to which the voice was carried was
very remarkable; I could distinctly hear every word spoken 300 to 400
yards off, and did not raise my voice when I asked one of the men to
bring me a hammer.

The few plants about were generally small tufted _Arenarias_ and
woolly _Compositae,_ with a thick-rooted Umbellifer that spread its
short, fleshy leaves and branches flat on the ground; the root was
very aromatic, but wedged close in the rock. The temperature at
4 p.m. was 23 degrees, and bitterly cold; the elevation, 15,770 feet;
dew-point, 16 degrees. The air was not very dry; saturation-point,
0.670°, whereas at Calcutta it was 0.498° at the same hour.

The descent was to a broad, open valley, into which the flank of
Nango dipped in tremendous precipices, which reared their heads in
splintered snowy peaks. At their bases were shoots of debris fully
700 feet high, sloping at a steep angle. Enormous masses of rock,
detached by the action of the frost and ice from the crags, were
scattered over the bottom of the valley; they had been precipitated
from above, and gaining impetus in their descent, bad been hurled to
almost inconceivable distances from the parent cliff. All were of a
very white, fine-grained crystallised granite, full of small veins of
the same rock still more finely crystallised. The weathered surface
of each block was black, and covered with moss and lichens; the
others beautifully white, with clean, sharp-fractured edges.
The material of which they were composed was so hard that I found it
difficult to detach a specimen.

Darkness had already come on, and the coolies being far behind, we
encamped by the light of the moon, shining through a thin fog, where
we first found dwarf-juniper for fuel, at 13,500 feet. A little sleet
fell during the night, which was tolerably fine, and not very cold;
the minimum thermometer indicating 14.5 degrees.

Having no tent-poles, I had some difficulty in getting my blankets
arranged as a shelter, which was done by making them slant from the
side of a boulder, on the top of which one end was kept by heavy
stones; under this roof I laid my bed, on a mass of rhododendron and
juniper-twigs. The men did the same against other boulders, and
lighting a huge fire opposite the mouth of my ground-nest, I sat
cross-legged on the bed to eat my supper; my face scorching, and my
back freezing. Rice, boiled with a few ounces of greasy _dindon aux
truffes_ was now my daily dinner, with chili-vinegar and tea, and I
used to relish it keenly: this finished, I smoked a cigar, and wrote
up my journal (in short intervals between warming myself) by the
light of the fire; took observations by means of a dark-lantern; and
when all this was accomplished, I went to roost.

_December_ 5.--On looking out this morning, it was with a feeling of
awe that I gazed at the stupendous ice-crowned precipices that shot
up to the summit of Nango, their flanks spotted white at the places
whence the gigantic masses with which I was surrounded had fallen;
thence my eye wandered down their black faces to the slope of debris
at the bottom, thus tracing the course which had probably been taken
by that rock under whose shelter I had passed the previous night.

Meepo, the Lepcha sent by the rajah, had snared a couple of beautiful
pheasants, one of which I skinned, and ate for breakfast; it is a
small bird, common above 12,000 feet, but very wild; the male has two
to five spurs on each of its legs, according to its age; the general
colour is greenish, with a broad scarlet patch surrounding the eye;
the Nepalese name is "Khalidge." The crop was distended with juniper
berries, of which the flesh tasted strongly, and it was the very
hardest, toughest bird I ever did eat.

We descended at first through rhododendron and juniper, then through
black silver-fir (_Abies Webbiana_), and below that, near the river,
we came to the Himalayan larch; a tree quite unknown, except from a
notice in the journals of Mr. Griffith, who found it in Bhotan. It is
a small tree, twenty to forty feet high, perfectly similar in general
characters to a European larch, but with larger cones, which are
erect upon the very long, pensile, whip-like branches; its
leaves,--now red--were falling, and covering the rocky ground on
which it grew, scattered amongst other trees. It is called "Saar" by
the Lepchas and Cis-himalayan Tibetans, and "Boarga-sella" by the
Nepalese, who say it is found as far west as the heads of the Cosi
river: it does not inhabit Central or West Nepal, nor the North-west
Himalaya. The distribution of the Himalayan pines is very remarkable.
The Deodar has not been seen east of Nepal, nor the _Pinus
Gerardiana, Cupressus torulosa,_ or _Juniperus communis._ On the
other hand, _Podocarpus_ is confined to the east of Katmandoo. _Abies
Brunoniana_ does not occur west of the Gogra, nor the larch west of
the Cosi, nor funereal cypress (an introduced plant, however) west of
the Teesta (in Sikkim). Of the twelve* [Juniper, 3; yew, _Abies
Webbiana, Brunoniana,_ and _Smithiana_: Larch, _Pinus excelsa,_ and
_longifolia,_ and _Podocarpus neriifolia._] Sikkim and Bhotan
_Coniferae_ (including yew, junipers, and _Podocarpus_) eight are
common to the North-west Himalaya (west of Nepal), and four* [Larch,
_Cupressus funebris, Podocarpus neriifolia, Abies Brunoniana._] are
not: of the thirteen natives of the north-west provinces, again, only
five* [A juniper (the European _communis_), Deodar (possibly only a
variety of the Cedar of Lebanon and of Mount Atlas), _Pinus
Gerardiana, P. excelsa,_ and _Crupressus torulosa._] are not found in
Sikkim, and I have given their names below, because they show how
European the absent ones are, either specifically or in affinity.
I have stated that the Deodar is possibly a variety of the Cedar of
Lebanon. This is now a prevalent opinion, which is strengthened by
the fact that so many more Himalayan plants are now ascertained to be
European than had been supposed before they were compared with
European specimens; such are the yew, _Juniperus communis, Berberis
vulgaris, Quercus Ballota, Populus alba_ and _Euphratica,_ etc.
The cones of the Deodar are identical with those of the Cedar of
Lebanon: the Deodar has, generally longer and more pale bluish leaves
and weeping branches,* [Since writing the above, I have seen, in the
magnificent Pinetum at Dropmore, noble cedars, with the length and
hue of leaf, and the pensile branches of the Deodar, and far more
beautiful than that is, and as unlike the common Lebanon Cedar as
possible. When it is considered from how very few wild trees (and
these said to be exactly alike) the many dissimilar varieties of the
_C. Libani_ have been derived; the probability of this, the Cedar of
Algiers, and of the Himalayas (Deodar) being all forms of one
species, is greatly increased. We cannot presume to judge from the
few cedars which still remain, what the habit and appearance of the
tree may have been, when it covered the slopes of Libanus, and seeing
how very variable _Coniferae_ are in habit, we may assume that its
surviving specimens give us no information on this head. Should all
three prove one, it will materially enlarge our ideas of the
distribution and variation of species. The botanist will insist that
the typical form of cedar is that which retains its characters best
over the greatest area, namely, the Deodar; in which case the
prejudice of the ignorant, and the preconceived ideas of the
naturalist, must yield to the fact that the old familiar Cedar of
Lebanon is an unusual variety of the Himalayan Deodar.] but these
characters seem to be unusually developed in our gardens; for several
gentlemen, well acquainted with the Deodar at Simla, when asked to
point it out in the Kew Gardens, have indicated the Cedar of Lebanon,
and when shown the Deodar, declare that they never saw that plant in
the Himalaya!

At the bottom of the valley we turned up the stream, and passing the
Tassichooding convents* [These were built by the Sikkim people, when
the eastern valleys of Nepal belonged to the Sikkim rajah.] and
temple, crossed the river--which was a furious torrent, about twelve
yards wide--to the village of Kambachen, on a flat terrace a few feet
above the stream. There were about a dozen houses of wood, plastered
with mud and dung, scattered over a grassy plain of a few acres,
fenced in, as were also a few fields, with stone dykes. The only
cultivation consists of radishes, potatos, and barley: no wheat is
grown, the climate being said to be too cold for it, by which is
probably meant that it is foggy,--the elevation (11,380 feet) being
2000 feet less than that of Yangma village, and the temperature
therefore 6 degrees to 7 degrees warmer; but of all the mountain
gorges I have ever visited, this is by far the wildest, grandest, and
most gloomy; and that man should hybernate here is indeed
extraordinary, for there is no route up the valley, and all
communication with Lelyp,* [Which I passed, on the Tambur, on the
21st Nov. See Chapter IX.] two marches down the river, is cut off in
winter, when the houses are buried in snow, and drifts fifteen feet
deep are said to be common. Standing on the little flat of Kambachen,
precipices, with inaccessible patches of pine wood, appeared to the
west, towering over head; while across the narrow valley wilder and
less wooded crags rose in broken ridges to the glaciers of Nango.
Up the valley, the view was cut off by bluff cliffs; whilst down it,
the scene was most remarkable: enormous black, round-backed moraines,
rose, tier above tier, from a flat lake-bed, apparently hemming in
the river between the lofty precipices on the east flank of the
valley. These had all been deposited at the mouth of a lateral
valley, opening just below the village, and descending from Junnoo, a
mountain of 25,312 feet elevation, and one of the grandest of the
Kinchinjunga group, whose top--though only five miles distant in a
straight line--rises 13,932 feet* [This is one of the most sudden
slopes in this part of the Himalaya, the angle between the top of
Junnoo and Kambachen being 2786 feet per mile, or 1 in 1.8. The slope
from the top of Mont Blanc to the Chamouni valley is 2464 feet per
mile, or 1 in 2.1. That from Monte Rosa top to Macugnaga greatly
exceeds either.] above the village. Few facts show more decidedly the
extraordinary steepness and depth of the Kambachen valley near the
village, which, though nearly 11,400 feet above the sea, lies between
two mountains only eight miles apart, the one 25,312 feet high, the
other (Nango), 19,000 feet.

The villagers received us very kindly, and furnished us with a guide
for the Choonjerma pass, leading to the Yalloong valley, the most
easterly in Nepal; but he recommended our not attempting any part of
the ascent till the morrow, as it was past 1 p.m., and we should find
no camping-ground for half the way up. The villagers gave us the leg
of a musk deer, and some red potatos, about as big as walnuts--all
they could spare from their winter-stock. With this scanty addition
to our stores we started down the valley, for a few miles alternately
along flat lake-beds and over moraines, till we crossed the stream
from the lateral valley, and ascending a little, camped on its bank,
at 11,400 feet elevation.

In the afternoon I botanized amongst the moraines, which were very
numerous, and had been thrown down at right-angles to the main
valley, which latter being here very narrow, and bounded by lofty
precipices, must have stopped the parent glaciers, and effected the
heaping of some of these moraines to at least 1000 feet above the
river. The general features were modifications of those seen in the
Yangma valley, but contracted into a much smaller space.

The moraines were all accumulated in a sort of delta, through which
the lateral river debouched into the Kambachen, and were all
deposited more or less parallel to the course of the lateral valley,
but curving outwards from its mouth. The village-flat, or terrace,
continued level to the first moraine, which had been thrown down on
the upper or north side of the lateral valley, on whose and curving
steep flanks it abutted, and curving outwards seemed to encircle the
village-flat on the south and west; where it dipped into the river.
This was crossed at the height of about 100 feet, by a stony path,
leading to the bed of the rapid torrent flowing through shingle and
boulders, beyond which was another moraine, 250 feet high, and
parallel to it a third gigantic one.

Ascending the great moraine at a place where it overhung the main
river, I had a good _coup-a'oeil_ of the whole. The view south-east
up the glacial valley--(represented in the accompanying cut)--to the
snowy peaks south of Junnoo, was particularly grand, and most
interesting from the precision with which one great distant existing
glacier was marked by two waving parallel lines of lateral moraines,
which formed, as it were, a vast raised gutter, or channel, ascending
from perhaps 16,000 feet elevation, till it was hidden behind a spur
in the valley. With a telescope I could descry many similar smaller
glaciers, with huge accumulations of shingle at their terminations;
but this great one was beautifully seen by the naked eye, and formed
a very curious feature in the landscape.

Illustration--ANCIENT MORAINES IN THE RAMBACHEN VALLEY.

Between the moraines, near my tent, the soil was perfectly level,
and consisted of little lake-beds strewn with gigantic boulders, and
covered with hard turf of grass and sedge, and little bushes of dwarf
rhododendron and prostrate juniper, as trim as if they had been
clipped. Altogether these formed the most picturesque little nooks it
was possible to conceive; and they exhibited the withered remains of
so many kinds of primrose, gentian, anemone, potentilla, orchis,
saxifrage, parnassia, campanula, and pedicularis, that in summer they
must be perfect gardens of wild flowers. Around each plot of a few
acres was the grand ice-transported girdle of stupendous rocks, many
from 50 to 100 feet long, crested with black tabular-branched silver
firs, conical deep green tree-junipers, and feathery larches; whilst
amongst the blocks grew a profusion of round masses of evergreen
rhododendron bushes. Beyond were stupendous frowning cliffs, beneath
which the river roared like thunder; and looking up the glacial
valley, the setting sun was bathing the expanse of snow in the most
delicate changing tints, pink, amber, and gold.

The boulders forming the moraine were so enormous and angular, that I
had great difficulty in ascending it. I saw some pheasants feeding on
the black berries of the juniper, but where the large rhododendrons
grew amongst the rocks I found it impossible to penetrate.
The largest of the moraines is piled to upwards of 1000 feet against
the south flank of the lateral valley, and stretched far up it beyond
my camp, which was in a grove of silver firs. A large flock of sheep
and goats, laden with salt, overtook us here on their route from
Wallanchoon to Yalloong. The sheep I observed to feed on the
_Rhododendron Thomsoni_ and _campylocarpum. On the roots of one of
the latter species a parasitical Broom-rape (_Orobanche_) grew
abundantly; and about the moraines were more mosses, lichens, etc.,
than I have elsewhere seen in the loftier Himalaya, encouraged no
doubt by the dampness of this grand mountain gorge, which is so
hemmed in that the sun never reaches it until four or five hours
after it has gilded the overhanging peaks.

_December_ 5.--The morning was bright and clear, and we left early
for the Choonjerma pass. I had hoped the route would be up the
magnificent glacier-girdled valley in which we had encamped; but it
lay up another, considerably south of it, and to which we crossed,
ascending the rocky moraine, in the clefts of which grew abundance of
a common Scotch fern, _Cryptogramma crispa_!

The clouds early commenced gathering, and it was curious to watch
their rapid formation in coalescing streaks, which became first
cirrhi, and then stratus, being apparently continually added to from
below by the moisture-bringing southerly wind. Ascending a lofty
spur, 1000 feet above the valley, against which the moraine was
banked, I found it to be a distinct anticlinal axis. The pass,
bearing north-west, and the valley we had descended on the previous
day, rose immediately over the curved strata of quartz, topped by the
glacier-crowned mountain of Nango, with four glaciers descending from
its perpetual snows. The stupendous cliffs on its flanks, under which
I had camped on the previous night, were very grand, but not more so
than those which dipped into the chasm of the Kambachen below.
Looking up the valley of the latter, was another wilderness of ice
full of enormous moraines, round the bases of which the river wound.

Ascending, we reached an open grassy valley, and overtook the
Tibetans who had preceded us, and who had halted here to feed their
sheep. A good-looking girl of the party came to ask me for medicine
for her husband's eyes, which had suffered from snow-blindness: she
brought me a present of snuff, and carried a little child, stark
naked, yet warm from the powerful rays of the sun, at nearly 14,000
feet elevation, in December! I prescribed for the man, and gave the
mother a bright farthing to hang round the child's neck, which
delighted the party. My watch was only wondered at; but a little
spring measuring-tape that rolled itself up, struck them dumb, and
when I threw it on the ground with the tape out, the mother shrieked
and ran away, while the little savage howled after her.

Above, the path up the ascent was blocked with snowbeds, and for
several miles we alternately scrambled among rocks and over slippery
slopes, to the top of the first ridge, there being two to cross.
The first consisted of a ridge of rocks running east and west from a
superb sweep of snowy mountains to the north-west, which presented a
chaotic scene of blue glacial ice and white snow, through which
splintered rocks and beetling crags thrust their black heads.
The view into the Kambachen gorge was magnificent, though it did not
reveal the very bottom of the valley and its moraines: the black
precipices of its opposite flank seemed to rise to the glaciers of
Nango, fore-shortened into snow-capped precipices 5000 feet high,
amongst which lay the Kambachen pass, bearing north-west by north.
Lower down the valley, appeared a broad flat, called Jubla, a
halting-place one stage below the village of Kambachen, on the road
to Lelyp on the Tambur: it must be a remarkable geological as well as
natural feature, fao it appeared to jut abruptly and quite
horizontally from the black cliffs of the valley.

Looking north, the conical head of Junnoo was just scattering the
mists from its snowy shoulders, and standing forth to view, the most
magnificent spectacle I ever beheld. It was quite close to me,
bearing north-east by east, and subtending an angle of 12 degrees 23,
and is much the steepest and most conical of all the peaks of these
regions. From whichever side it is viewed, it rises 9000 feet above
the general mountain mass of 16,000 feet elevation, towering like a
blunt cone, with a short saddle on one side, that dips in a steep
cliff: it appeared as if uniformly snowed, from its rocks above
20,000 feet (like those of Kinchinjunga) being of white granite, and
not contrasting with the snow. Whether the top is stratified or not,
I cannot tell, but waving parallel lines are very conspicuous near
it, as shown in the accompanying view.* [The appearance of Mont
Cervin, from the Riffelberg, much reminded me of that of Junnoo, from
the Choonjerma pass, the former bearing the same relation to Monte
Rosa that the latter does to Kinchinjunga. Junnoo, though
incomparably the more stupendous mass, not only rising 10,000 feat
higher above the sea, but towering 4000 feet higher above the ridge
on which it is supported, is not nearly so remarkable in outline, so
sharp, or so peaked as is Mount Cervin: it is a very much grander,
but far less picturesque object. The whiteness of the sides of Junnoo
adds also greatly to its apparent altitude; while the strong relief
in which the black cliffs of Mont Cervin protrude through its snowy
mantle greatly diminish both its apparent height and distance.]