Hari Ram was a pundit who explored the region around Mount Everest in 1871-1872. At first he was not allowed to enter Tibet, but his luck changed when he met a district official whose wife was ill. He examined her, checked his medical book for a disease with similar symptoms, and gave her some pills. To his own surprise, the woman recovered, and from then he found relatively little difficulty in travelling on. He gave a frightening account of his trip along the Bhote Koshi river: