It is of course impossible to go up and down feet without some climbing, in the popular sense of that word. But in the technical Alpine sense we had far too little mountaineering for my taste. Rope and ice-axe played but a very subordinate part in our journey. This was our mis fortune rather than our fault. The tremendous rainstorm of September 1899, after devastating Darjiling and its tea-gardens, swept across Kangchenjunga into Tibet in the form of a premature snowfall, lowering the snow-level nearly 4000 feet and practically closing the highest region.