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113 flash of sunlight touched Kunchinjinga and ran along the line of peaks clear to the three white pinnacles that rise above the depression of Chola Pass. I had not expected Mount Everest to be merely one small finger-tip of snow one hundred and twenty miles away. It was hardly worth while to hold up field-glasses in that arctic wind to look at that trifling nodule on the far horizon. It did not look like the greatest mountain in the world, "the highest measured elevation on earth." Imagination could not invest it with any superiority—not while splendid Kunchinjinga was there before us, with snow streamers and pennants and rosy cloud-banners floating away from those storehouse peaks of gold, silver, gems, and grains, as the Tibetans describe the five summits.

"Why are the globe-trotters so bent on seeing Mount Everest?" asked a Geological Survey officer. "It is not the finest peak, if it is the highest. It is only megalomania that takes the tourists off to Tiger Hill to see the highest peak in the world. Everest is not to be compared for looks with Peak XIII and Peak D². Those are the finest arrangements in rock and snow in the Himalayas. And then. Mount Everest is not in British territory, you know, and until we annex Nepal, I object to its being made so much of."

When we had come down from the Himalayan heights to the commonplace level of the plains again, and recrossed the Ganges, we had to share the two-sofa compartment with a severely silent and resentful Anglo-Indian matron, who stared at us heart-