The valley of eyes unseen
And now we experienced for the first time the full thrill of our
discovery. We were at the gates of an unknown land, a valley in this
tremendous upheaved region of Asia which had remained hidden from
the rest of the world all down through the ages. From where we stood
outside our tent we could see the whole depression in a wonderful
bird's eye view; above us, stupendous peaks towering into the sky,
snow-clad and dazzling and looking not a musket-shot away; below, a
long even expanse of snow running straight down to the line where snow
left off and green vegetation began; farther down still, the cup of
the valley, ringed round completely by mountain slopes like the one we
stood on, a smiling green hollow, with a large lake in the middle of it
and evident signs of human habitation. We could see through the glasses
that the buildings of the city were uniformly white, but we were as yet
too far away to descry anything more definite about them.
Poyning was vastly the better for his long sleep, and as eager to
push on as I was, and though Philipson maintained outwardly the
business-like air of reserve that had never entirely left him, I could
see he was in a tremendous exultation. As he might well be. To have
brought us safely over that journey from Nanking to the spot where we
now stood was a feat bordering on the miraculous, and if there was
another man on this earth that could have done it, I had not heard of
that man.
'Breakfast first,' he said, smiling. 'None of us can afford to take
liberties with himself after what we have been through. Then we will go
down and explore, but we will load the rifles first. After all, we know
little of these people. Who can predict what kind of welcome they will
give us?'
After-events showed that we couldn't. Little did we dream how we were
to be received by the folk of the valley, or even how we were to get
over the last lap of our tremendous journey.
We made a meal of yak beef--the leathery stuff seemed much tastier
now--packed up the two tents, and set out. Philipson's plan was that
we should stalk the strange people very circumspectly, so that if they
seemed hostile, we could at least beat a retreat up the mountain side
as Sbrang Chikya had done; in which case it would be well not to have
scrapped our gear. The stuff was a boon to us, later on, but by no
means in the way we had expected.
We had been marching down the steep slant for about an hour when
Philipson halted and looked from one side to the other with an air of
considerable uneasiness. We asked him what was awry.
He continued halted and looking, and then: '_That!_' he cried,
stretching an arm out over the great expanse of snow.
At first I could see no reason for alarm, but after a minute or two I
became aware that something was happening to the snow. A broad patch
at about a hundred yards to our left moved. It slid downward for a
few feet, then halted; and I remember having at the moment a sort of
fantastic impression that the snow was gifted with sense and stopped
because we were looking at it. I had had many fancies, wilder even than
that, during the past few days, and I make no doubt the others had too.
But what Philipson now saw alarming in a little shifting snow, I hardly
understood. It looked harmless enough to me.
'I have noticed that once or twice since we started this morning,' he
said, 'and I do not like it. There has been an unusually heavy fall--no
doubt it came with the blizzard the other night. The mountains are
top-heavy. There it is again!'
This time it looked more pronounced, and a lot less innocent. Almost up
to where we stood the snow began to slide slowly and gently downward,
a few feet at a time, then halting, but always resuming its curious
motion at shorter intervals. Looking all round us, we saw that the
slide was becoming more and more general; as far as the eye could
reach, the great white mantle was sliding and stopping, sliding and
stopping, rucking up here and there over a rise in the ground, with an
effect like a gentle swell of the sea. Then at last my fuddled wits
began to grasp what was really happening. There were millions of tons
of snow on that vast mountain side. The layers next the earth were
melting, causing the great mass to lose its grip. It would all slide
soon. There would be an avalanche.
'Quick!' cried Philipson. 'If we have something to keep us afloat we
may have a chance--otherwise none. Take off your packs!'
We opened out the two rolled tents and folded them flat, into a sort
of raft about five feet square, ribbing this with the tent-poles and
rifles laid crosswise on the under side and lashing the whole tightly
with guy ropes. There was barely time to complete the work before the
rush was upon us, swirling round us thigh-deep for all the world like
the urge of a strong current sweeping in over flat sands. We flung
ourselves on to the raft, which immediately started to ride down on the
shifting snow. For perhaps a minute the motion was pleasantly gentle.
Philipson took advantage of this breather to allot us positions: he
himself sat forward, holding the stoutest of the tent-poles, which
he had kept out, in his hands like a paddle; Poyning and I were just
behind him, gripping the ropes with one hand and Philipson's sheepskin
with the other; while the two Chinese servants squatted behind us,
their orders being to hang on like leeches themselves and catch any man
who might be jolted out of his seat and swept backwards.
It was a good move, turning our gear into this queer, toboggan-like
contraption: without it, we should have sunk into the rapidly
deepening, down-sliding mass, and been smothered in an instant. As
it was, our raft for a time rode the avalanche to admiration, being
too broad to sink in, and checked by the rib-like poles and ropes
that went under it from adding the speed of sliding to the pace
already given it by the moving snow. Soon, however, matters changed
considerably for the worse. The avalanche was gaining force and volume,
but with a decrease in the slant of the mountain side the resistance
was increasing, so that there became more and more evident a tendency
for the surface snow to roll on over that deeper down. Three times
we were struck by a heavy wave from behind and well nigh "pooped."
More than once, grazing it by inches, we shot past a sharp snag of
upstanding rock, against which the snow was breaking and spouting into
the air in a high cascade.
It couldn't last. I imagine the avalanche had now reached a slope
of the mountain not normally covered at all, and as the deep surge
shallowed out, its surface broke, like rapids of a river. The gentle
rustle of the snow when it started to move had now risen to a hoarse
roar, like the roar of the sea but with a strange muffled note in it
more terrible than the crash and boom of surf. Philipson stuck doggedly
to his steering pole, but there was no steering our crazy craft in that
awful race. Jolt after jolt shook us, and at each one I saw Poyning and
Philipson swing to and from me, as if we were on elastic. The ribs were
clearly fetched adrift; there was no longer anything to stop the raft
doubling up and being submerged. At last, with a fearful jerk, we were
shot clean into the air. The shock of pitching threw me backwards, but
I felt nobody behind me. Ah Sing and Lo Eng were gone.
'She will smash up now,' yelled Philipson over his shoulder. 'When it
comes, keep your limbs stretched out stiff!'
The crash came almost as he spoke. The raft heaved up, then plunged,
and I found myself whirled down in a tremendous roaring, suffocating
mass of snow, with nothing in my hand but a fretted rope's end. I
spread-eagled myself and stiffened my arms and legs, and I imagine it
was to that I owed my life; for though I was often submerged to the
point of stifling, I remained near the surface for the most part, and
could get a deep breath now and again when some sudden upheaval of the
snow-torrent threw me to the top. Once my heel struck something hard,
and the leg became numb and dead from that instant on. Had I been
rolling in a ball it might have been my head, in which case I should
certainly not be putting this record on paper now.
I felt myself sink suddenly deeper. The snow rushed over me, I was
madly fighting for breath, with a bewildered sense of plunging into the
very bowels of the sea, at frightful speed. Then came a blinding flash
of light in front of my eyes....
I must have lain unconscious for an hour, for that's the time Poyning
said it took him to find me. He had been much luckier. When the raft
broke up the main portion of it remained, apparently, under his body
and kept him riding afloat for fully a minute after the rest of us had
disappeared. Philipson he lost sight of just after me, but he himself
had been supported by the canvas to the end, until, with a blow that
winded him but did nothing worse, he was brought up sharp in a hollow
far down the mountain side.
The place where I lay was about two feet deep, but the snow was fast
sagging and melting. I must have rolled here after the avalanche had
knocked the senses out of me. I lay on my back in the soggy snow while
Poyning opened my sheepskin and felt me all over for broken bones.
Wherever his fingers pressed I ached and throbbed; the ankle I had
struck in my descent was hurting abominably, and for some minutes I
thought I should never rise from my back again. Poyning took off the
boot and gaiter and wrapped round a rough-and-ready cold compress made
out of a handkerchief and a handful of snow, which was a wonderful
relief; and after a bit, with his help and using as a crutch the rifle
he had picked up from the wreck of the raft, I found I could stand and
just hobble.
The change from higher up the mountain was little short of astounding.
In those few minutes we had passed from the arctic zone to the
temperate, and farther down still there appeared to be yet greater
transitions. Even here the air was oppressively hot to the lips after
the icy heights we had crossed. The point we stood on was plainly a
grassy slope well below the snow line, where the descending avalanche,
thinning over some miles of snowless ground, had petered out by sheer
force of distance. It was well nigh impossible, looking at this regular
scarp, to realise the tremendous ruggedness and cold and rarified air
of the mountain above, though the snow-clad pinnacles which ringed
round the valley still looked deceptively near. Below us stretched the
valley, broad, fertile, watered by the intensely blue lake plumb in
the middle, and to judge by the warmth where we stood far above it, at
least sub-tropical in climate. The white-walled city on the fringes of
the lake was now much more distinct, and beyond this we saw, rising out
of the grassy plain, several of the gigantic birds we had sighted from
the gully last night.
Our first concern was to find what had happened to Philipson and the
Chinese servants. From where we stood we scanned the slope in all
directions, but could see no sign of any one of them. We then began
a methodical search, binding together our two cast sheepskins and
standing them up sheaf-wise for a landmark on the hillside, and working
slowly up and down the slant at about thirty yards apart. I've said
the mountain here was regular, which it was in the main, though there
were any number of shallow basins in which an army of men could have
concealed themselves by lying flat; but as we searched dip after dip
and drew blank, lower and lower fell my hopes. Our comrades must have
sunk into deep snow as soon as they fell off the raft, and even had
they escaped death by battering in the avalanche, they must have met
it quickly by suffocation. Somewhere under that great white cloak on