The climate is delightful; it never rains; the sky is blue to a fault, and snow only falls sparingly in winter, though the climate is cold, being 10,000 feet (they say) above the sea. In boiling water the thermometer was only 188°. I never felt a more exhilarating air. That one week quite set me up, and I have been better ever since. The Llamas or monks, with their red cardinal's hats and crimson robes, look very imposing and monastic, quite a travesty of the regular clergy, and they blow just such trumpets as Fame does on monuments in country churches. Jolly friars they are, and fat to a man. From Leh we crossed the mountain ridge which separates the two streams of the Indus, and descended the northern (or right) stream to this place, the capital of Bultistan or Little Thibet. It is a genuine humbug. In the middle of a fine valley, some 6,000 feet above the sea, surrounded by sudden rising perpendicular mountains 6,000 feet higher, stands an isolated rock washed by the Indus, some two miles by three quarters: a little Gibraltar. The valley may be ten miles by three, partially cultivated, and inhabited by some 200 scattered houses. There's Iskardo. There _was_ a fort on the rock, but that is gone, and all, as usual in the East, bespeaks havoc; only nature is grand here. The people are Mussulmans, and not Bodhs, and are more human-looking, but not so well clad. It is warmer by far, much more so than it ought to be. The thermometer was at 92° in our tents to-day, a thing for which I cannot possibly account, since there is snow now on all sides of us. We go hence across the Steppe of Deo Sole towards Cashmere for four days' journey, and then strike westward to cross the Indus into Gilghit, whence we return to Cashmere by the end of September. We have been making very fast marches, varying from sixteen to thirty-two miles a day,--hard work in a country with such roads, and where you must take things with you. I enjoy it very much, however, and after a year's sickness, the feeling of returning health is refreshing. I shall return to work again by the 1st of December; but I propose paying a flying visit to Mr. Thomason in October, if possible; but the distances are so vast, and the means of locomotion so absent, that these things are difficult to achieve. I suppose I have seen more of the hill country now than ninety-nine men out of a hundred in India. Indeed, not above four Europeans have been here before. But travelling suits my restless spirit. Sir Henry and I get on famously together.