It is a place of such wildness and beauty as no other scenery in the
world affords. The granite terrace which runs round the four sides
of the low block of laboratories looks out in every direction upon
mountains. Far below in the hidden depths of a shadowy blue cleft, the
river pours down in its tumultuous passage to the swarming plains of
India. No sound of its roaring haste comes up to those serenities.
Beyond that blue gulf, in which whole forests of giant deodars seem no
more than small patches of moss, rise vast precipices of many-coloured
rock, fretted above, lined by snowfalls, and jagged into pinnacles.
These are the northward wall of a towering wilderness of ice and snow
which clambers southward higher and wilder and vaster to the culminating
summits of our globe, to Dhaulagiri and Everest. Here are cliffs of
which no other land can show the like, and deep chasms in which Mt.
Blanc might be plunged and hidden. Here are icefields as big as inland
seas on which the tumbled boulders lie so thickly that strange little
flowers can bloom among them under the untempered sunshine. To the
northward, and blocking out any vision of the uplands of Thibet, rises
that citadel of porcelain, that gothic pile, the Lio Porgyul, walls,
towers, and peaks, a clear twelve thousand feet of veined and splintered
rock above the river.
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