AMONG THE HIMALAYAN GLACIERS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLVI, Issue 14223, 20 November 1909, Page 5 (Supplement)

AMONG THE HIMALAYAN GLACIERS.

As ■ excellent paper on exploring the glaciers of the Himalayas is contributed to the October number of Harper's Magazine, by Mrs. Fanny B. Workman. The authoress is an enthusiastic climber,'who has already explored three or four of Asia's longest, most Arctic glaciers. On the present occasion she had a very rough experience, being taken ill on the highest ranges of the wonderful Indian barrier mountains, and reaching civilisation with considerable difficulty, yet such. is the fascination of mountaineering that no sooner had she regained the comfortable lowlands than we find her sighing for more heights to conquer. Wild blasts shook the tents all night, nearly wrenching them from their pegs, and the cold, 10 degrees Fahr. above zero, driven into them by the wind, was felt as it had never been at more sheltered camps, Between the cold and the disturbed night I caught a chill, and felt very ill by the time camp was struck at.5.30. I managed,'how-' ever, to keep on down the glacier for several hours, until the first bits of soil . on a mountain flank were met with," where we camped. There was no fuel, as-we were still a day's march above the smallest bush growth. While I was laid up here for 48 hours with fever and severe pain in .the chest, the new ' lambardar, led by some coolies, arrived, nearly snow-blind, as he had come over ; the pass without glareglasses. " Then, the day before reaching the desolate vale of Askole coolie food ran short, and the men were -put on half rations. "Here we ended our.splendid snow campaign, during which for fifty days we had not stepped off glaciers and mountains, and for forty had camped and lived at between 15,000 and 20,000 feet.

" Another 200 miles of tramping over mountains and through arid and rough valleys brought us back to Srinagar, where the sickly charms of hotel and house-boat life prevail, and the glorious untrammelled one of high Himalaya can only be treasured in memory.., '