They crossed a snowy pass in cold moonlight, when the lama, mildly chaffing Kim, went through up to his knees, like a Bactrian camel — the snow-bred, shag-haired sort that came into the Kashmir Serai.  They dipped across beds of light snow and snow-powdered shale, where they took refuge from a gale in a camp of Tibetans hurrying down tiny sheep, each laden with a bag of borax.  They came out upon grassy shoulders still snow-speckled, and through forest, to grass anew.  For all their marchings, Kedarnath and Badrinath were not impressed; and it was only after days of travel that Kim, uplifted upon some insignificant ten-thousand-foot hummock, could see that a shoulder-knot or horn of the two great lords had — ever so slightly - changed outline.

At last they entered a world within a world — a valley of leagues where the high hills were fashioned of a mere rubble and refuse from off the knees of the mountains.  Here one day’s march carried them no farther, it seemed, than a dreamer’s clogged pace bears him in a nightmare.  They skirted a shoulder painfully for hours, and, behold, it was but an outlying boss in an outlying buttress of the main pile!  A rounded meadow revealed itself, when they had reached it, for a vast tableland running far into the valley.  Three days later, it was a dim fold in the earth to southward.

‘Surely the Gods live here!’ said Kim, beaten down by the silence and the appalling sweep and dispersal of the cloud-shadows after rain.  ‘This is no place for men!’

‘Long and long ago,’ said the lama, as to himself, ’it was asked of the Lord whether the world were everlasting.  On this the Excellent One returned no answer ...  When I was in Ceylon, a wise Seeker confirmed that from the gospel which is written in Pali.  Certainly, since we know the way to Freedom, the question were unprofitable, but — look, and know illusion, chela!  These — are the true Hills!  They are like my hills by Suchzen.  Never were such hills!’

Above them, still enormously above them, earth towered away towards the snow-line, where from east to west across hundreds of miles, ruled as with a ruler, the last of the bold birches stopped.  Above that, in scarps and blocks upheaved, the rocks strove to fight their heads above the white smother.  Above these again, changeless since the world’s beginning, but changing to every mood of sun and cloud, lay out the eternal snow.  They could see blots and blurs on its face where storm and wandering wullie-wa got up to dance.  Below them, as they stood, the forest slid away in a sheet of blue-green for mile upon mile; below the forest was a village in its sprinkle of terraced fields and steep grazing-grounds.  Below the village they knew, though a thunderstorm worried and growled there for the moment, a pitch of twelve or fifteen hundred feet gave to the moist valley where the streams gather that are the mothers of young Sutluj.