... We punctiliously obeyed these
instructions during the rest of our journey until we reached the
PETAK convent, which stands upon an isolated rock beside an abandoned
garrison or fort, with its two towers looking like ant hills beside
the majestic mountain that rises ten thousand feet above our resting
place.... This mountain is the sentinel that protects our entrance
into Thibet.... Six miles away is LEH, elevated eleven thousand
feet above the lowlands and around whose shadowy convents rise those
immense granite pinnacles to an elevation of eighteen thousand feet,
where their frosty crests are enshrouded in the fezzes of eternal
snows!...
"... Leh, with its circlet of stubby aspen trees, its succession of
terraces, its old fort and the palace of its forgotten Moguls, has its
arms outstretched for us.... The mystic word has been passed along our
route and BEHOLD we are encamped in a well-furnished three-story white
bungalow with odors oozing from the kitchen that promise a night of
security and content!..."
48. The next entry gives a glimpse of the country through which our
party passed:
"Traveling toward the east we have passed through a number of villages
of neat two-story houses in these narrow walled-in valleys.... The
inhabitants are, clearly, of a Mongolian race,--the homeliest I have
ever seen!... They cultivate but little patches of the land, sit
around all day and gain their hollow cheeks and shrunken chests and
wrinkled foreheads by squinting at the sun.
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