In order to bring before the reader a vivid picture of Tibet, and especially of the region around Mount Everest, a comparison between Tibet and other better-known countries is almost inevitable. The Expedition of 1922 took with them no official artist, or no doubt he would have been deputed to write this section of the book; there were, however, two people who tried to paint pictures of the country, Major Norton and myself; and though I realise how inadequate our efforts were, perhaps those of an official artist might have been almost as bad. However, as one who looks on the world with an eye for its beauty, although lacking the ability to transfer that beauty to canvas, one may perhaps be pardoned for endeavouring to describe certain general impressions of the scenery encountered by the Expedition. In the course of our journey we passed through a great variety of landscape; in Sikkim, for instance, we found a land of steep slopes and dense forests, while Tibet is almost a desert country. We experienced the clear air of the winter, and the mists and storm-clouds of the monsoon. While we were on the rolling plains of the Tibetan Plateau, 310only a few miles away were the snow-covered summits of the highest mountains in the world.
Sikkim is a country of deep valleys and of luxurious vegetation; the air is generally damp and the skies cloudy, and there is often a beautiful blue haze that gives atmosphere to the distance. Sikkim is not unlike the Italian side of the Alps, in many ways. True, its scale is larger, and it possesses some of the most beautiful and impressive peaks in the world (for no Alpine peak can vie with Siniolchum or Pandim for sheer beauty of form and surface), but on the whole the scenery of Sikkim is of the same general build as the valleys and peaks of Northern Italy. In this sense Sikkim did not offer to the new-comer anything entirely different from what he had seen before. But Tibet and Everest certainly did; and the difference between Sikkim and Tibet is twofold—first, Tibet is almost uniformly over 13,000 feet above sea-level, and therefore bears no trees at all; second, Tibet is almost free from rainfall and is, in consequence, a desert country. One’s eye travelled, for mile after mile, over red-brown sand and red-brown limestone hills, finally to rest on the blue and white of the distant snows. The air, before the monsoon commences, is almost always clear—clear to an extent unimagined by a European, clearer even than the air of an Alpine winter. So peaks and ridges 30 or 40 miles away are often almost in the same visual plane as the foreground of the landscape. In some extensive views, such as we had from the hills above Tinki Dzong, one came to look upon hills 30 miles away as 311the middle distance............