Just below the summit was a complete bay of snow, girdled with two sharp peaks of red baked schists and gneiss, strangely contorted, and thrown up at all angles with no prevalent dip or strike, and permeated with veins of granite. The top itself, or boundary between Nepal and Tibet, is a low saddle between two rugged ridges of rock, with a cairn built on it, adorned with bits of stick and rag covered with Tibetan inscriptions. The view into Tibet was not at all distant, and was entirely of snowy mountains, piled ridge over ridge; three of these spurs must, it is said, be crossed before any descent can be made to the Chomachoo river (as the Arun is called in Tibet), on which is the frontier fort of the Tibetans, and which is reached in two or three days. There is no plain or level ground of any kind before reaching that river, of which the valley is said to be wide and flat.
Starting at 10 a.m., we did not reach the top till 3.30 p.m.; we had halted nowhere, but the last few miles had been most laborious, and the three of us who gained the summit were utterly knocked up. Fortunately I carried my own barometer; it indicated 16·206 inches, giving by comparative observations with Calcutta 16,764 feet, and with Dorjiling, 16,748 feet, as the height of the pass. The thermometer stood at 18°, and the sun being now hidden behind rocks, the south-east wind was bitterly cold. Hitherto the sun had appeared as a clearly defined sparkling globe, against a dark-blue sky; but the depth of the azure blue was not so striking as I had been led to suppose, by the accounts of previous travellers, in very lofty regions. The plants gathered near the top of the pass were species of _Compositæ,_ grass, and _Arenaria_; the most curious was _Saussurea gossypina,_ which forms great clubs of the softest white wool, six inches to a foot high, its flowers and leaves seeming uniformly clothed with the warmest fur that nature can devise. Generally speaking, the alpine plants of the Himalaya are quite unprovided with any special protection of this kind; it is the prevalence and conspicuous nature of the exceptions that mislead, and induce the careless observer to generalise hastily from solitary instances; for the prevailing alpine genera of the Himalaya, _Arenarias,_ primroses, saxifrages, fumitories, _Ranunculi,_ gentians, grasses, sedges, etc., have almost uniformly naked foliage.
