66

ALPS ON ALPS ARISE."

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ravines, and eternal snows, intersected in a thousand ways.

"I had advanced far enough in a northerly direction," continues Jacquemont, "to leave behind me, at a sufficiently great distance, the snowy chain of the Indian Himalaya; and yet the country continually rose before me. I questioned the pilgrims whom I met returning from Lake Mansarover, and the merchants who had made a three-months' march from the north and east of Tchini. Their reports agreed too well not to be entirely trustworthy. They all represented the land they had left in that direction as exactly like that I have attempted to describe-that is to say, bristling with mountains, all strung together without apparent order or method, ramified by chance, or running in intersecting chains. The Himalayan range, whose eternal snows form so grand a spectacle from the Gangetic plains, is, after all, but a humble and modest preface of the Thibetan Alps."

Twenty-five years after the publication of Jacquemont's lively and learned work, certain erudite Germans and Englishmen, sent upon an expedition to follow up the track of the intrepid French traveller, recognised the justice of his observations and the enlargement of his views. The three brothers Schlagintweit, the youngest of whom fell, like Jacquemont, a martyr to his zeal in the cause of science, established that the mean height of the defiles or passes leading from the Gangetic plains to the depressed and confined basin of the Tarim Gol, varies

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LOFTY ENCAMPMENT.

from 16,300 to 20,500 feet in the Himalayas, from 18,250 to 19,000 on the crest of Karakorum, and does not go lower than 16,000 feet on the uppermost part of the Koenluns. Further, it was demonstrated, that on the two first of these parallel chains, united as they are by a net-work of sharp spurs and intersecting links, there exist no fewer than forty-five summits of a greater altitude than the highest point of the Andes.

During their minute exploration, in August 1855, of the glaciers of the Ibi Gamin, which feed, to the south, the sources of the Ganges, the party encamped for ten nights at a height of nearly 20,000 feet, and upon one occasion they passed through a gorge 22,000 feet high. On the 19th of August they came upon the slopes of the Ibi Gamin itself, 22,300 feet above the level of the sea, -the highest point ever yet attained by mortal man, excepting, perhaps, in a balloon. There they overtopped by some 800 feet the apex of Chimborazo, which, since the year 1820, had always been considered the culminating point of our planet.

In this order of ideas, and in these proportions, there is poetry in figures and eloquence in mensuration.

THE KINCHINJUNGA.

THE district of Sikkim, which is situated at the base of the Kinchinjunga, between Nepaul, Bootan, and the plains of Bengal, is really one of the most beautiful parts

DORJEELING STATION.

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Assembled within a very

of the Himalayas proper. narrow space we find the most magnificent phenomena, and the most startling contrast between the climate of the mountains and that of tropical regions; glaciers to which those of the Alps are not to be compared; torrents more potent than the greatest rivers, precipitating themselves in cascades from inaccessible heights of marvellous steepness through primitive groves of rhododendrons and magnolias; azure lakes bathing green pastures, at a greater elevation than the level of the Alps; wild, deep, and gloomy ravines, such as were never dreamt of by Salvator Rosa; picturesque and fertile valleys, which recall the descriptions of the ancient poets; salubrious table-lands, where the sick from Bengal come to breathe health and life; and, amidst all, a pastoral population called Lepkas, vigorous mountaineers, honest and gentle as the Swiss were before they became guides to sightseers and speculative innkeepers.

In this charming locality we have landscapes, fringed with the snowy range, which are without a parallel in the Himalayas, perhaps in the whole known world. One of the most beautiful of these is that which is enjoyed from the terrace of the sanitary station of Dorjeeling, elevated about 6500 feet above the Bay of Bengal. The Kinchinjunga, 140 miles distant, is the principal feature in the landscape. Rising 20,000 feet above the Alpine level on which the spectator is situated, this enormous mass appears to be reposing on a wavy sea of woody mountains; and as the eye follows its blanched sides to