We passed a very cold night, chiefly owing to damp, the temperature falling to 24°. On the following morning we scrambled through the snow, reaching the summit after an hour’s very laborious ascent, and took up our quarters in a large wooden barn-like temple (_goompa_), built on a stone platform. The summit was very broad, but the depth of the snow prevented our exploring much, and the silver firs (_Abies Webbiana_) were so tall, that no view could be obtained, except from the temple. The great peak of Kinchinjunga is in part hidden by those of Pundim and Nursing, but the panorama of snowy mountains is very grand indeed. The effect is quite deceptive; the mountains assuming the appearance of a continued chain, the distant snowy peaks being seemingly at little further distance than the nearer ones. The whole range (about twenty-two miles nearer than at Dorjiling) appeared to rise uniformly and steeply out of black pine forests, which were succeeded by the russet-brown of the rhododendron shrubs, and that again by tremendous precipices and gulleys, into which descended mighty glaciers and perpetual snows. This excessive steepness is however only apparent, being due to foreshortening.
The upper 10,000 feet of Kinchin, and the tops of Pundim, Kubra, and Junnoo, are evidently of granite, and are rounded in outline: the lower peaks again, as those of Nursing, etc., present rugged pinnacles of black and red stratified rocks, in many cases resting on white granite, to which they present a remarkable contrast. The general appearance was as if Kinchin and the whole mass of mountains clustered around it, had been up-heaved by white granite, which still forms the loftiest summits, and has raised the black stratified rocks in some places to 20,000 feet in numerous peaks and ridges. One range presented on every summit a cap of black stratified rocks of uniform inclination and dip, striking north-west, with precipitous faces to the south-west: this was clear to the naked eye, and more evident with the telescope, the range in question being only fifteen miles distant, running between Pundim and Nursing. The fact of the granite forming the greatest elevation must not be hastily attributed to that igneous rock having burst through the stratified, and been protruded beyond the latter: it is much more probable that the upheaval of the granite took place at a vast depth, and beneath an enormous pressure of stratified rocks and perhaps of the ocean; since which period the elevation of the whole mountain chain, and the denudation of the stratified rocks, has been slowly proceeding.