thick hair hanging to his fetlocks, and his huge bushy tail.  He is usually black or tawny, but the tail is often white, and is the length of his long hair.  The nose is fine and has a look of breeding as well as power.  He only flourishes at altitudes exceeding 12,000 feet.  Even after generations of semi-domestication he is very wild, and can only be managed by being led with a rope attached to a ring in the nostrils.  He disdains the plough, but condescends to carry burdens, and numbers of the Ladak and Nubra people get their living by carrying goods for the traders on his broad back over the great passes.  His legs are very short, and he has a sensible way of measuring distance with his eyes and planting his feet, which enables him to carry loads where it might be supposed that only a goat could climb.  He picks up a living anyhow, in that respect resembling the camel.

He has an uncertain temper, and is not favourably disposed towards his rider.  Indeed, my experience was that just as one was about to mount him he usually made a lunge at one with his horns.  Some of my yak steeds shied, plunged, kicked, executed fantastic movements on the ledges of precipices, knocked down their leaders, bellowed defiance, and rushed madly down mountain sides, leaping from boulder to boulder, till they landed me among their fellows.  The rush of a herd of bellowing yaks at a wild gallop, waving their huge tails, is a grand sight.

My first yak was fairly quiet, and looked a noble steed, with my Mexican saddle and gay blanket among rather than upon his thick black locks.  His back seemed as broad as that of an elephant, and with his slow, sure, resolute step, he was like a mountain in motion.  We took five hours for the ascent of the Digar Pass, our loads and some of us on yaks, some walking, and those who suffered most from the ’pass-poison’ and could not sit on yaks were carried.  A number of Tibetans went up with us.  It was a new thing for a European lady to travel in Nubra, and they took a friendly interest in my getting through all right.  The dreary stretches of the ascent, though at first white with edelweiss, of which the people make their tinder, are surmounted for the most part by steep, short zigzags of broken stone.  The heavens were dark with snow-showers, the wind was high and the cold severe, and gasping horses, and men prostrate on their faces unable to move, suggested a considerable amount of suffering; but all safely reached the summit, 17,930 feet, where in a snowstorm the guides huzzaed, praised their gods, and tucked rag streamers into a cairn.

The loads were replaced on the horses, and over wastes of ice, across snowfields margined by broad splashes of rose-red primulas, down desert valleys and along irrigated hillsides, we descended 3,700 feet to the village of Digar in Nubra, where under a cloudless sky the mercury stood at 90 degrees!