This fellow is 5,600m up on the Khardong pass in Ladakh. He is seated on a dzo. It is about 1925.
What draws him here? "The sight of distant high snows is a call that seems to penetrate right into one's very soul," he says.
If you love the high places, you will appreciate his story which is about seeking the mountains, sleeping under the stars and taking your dogs.
The adventurer has walked more than 200 miles, over rocky cliffs and passes to the higher reaches of the Indus valley, camping along the way and passing caravans of traders, like those who have been plying these ancient routes for hundreds of years.
He is known as Ganpat. He is stationed near the North West Frontier and hikes across the hills into little-visited lands whenever he can. He has a sideline in writing best-selling novels about lost peoples and derring-do up on the high snows.
What is a dzo? It is a cross between a yak and an ox and stronger than either.
Ganpat, a relation of mine, clearly loves his dogs and they are with him on this trip. Below you can see his two month old terrier puppies, Vixen and Vagrant. They travel in style in a wicker box on one of the ponies which is supposed to be carrying the expedition's supplies. Bill, his Fox Terrier, has to trot along beside.
Ganpat started from Srinagar, taking a boat down the Jhelum and up the Sind rivers, disembarking before the Sind turned into a rock-strew torrent and marching up an old path up through the passes towards Ladakh. He recounts the journey in a book "The Road to Lamaland" published in 1926.
He is Martin Gompertz, an officer in the Indian Army. But his soldiers could not get their tongues around Gompertz, so they gave him the nickname of Ganpat after the elephant-headed Hindu god of good fortune.
The aim is to reach Leh, the capital of what he calls Western Thibet or sometimes Little Thibet, which we know as Ladakh.
He tops the Zoji La pass, visits the settlement of Kargil, then crosses Namiki La and Photu La at over 4,100m. The words conjure up a fantasy world, but of course they are just common or garden place names if you live there.
Lamayuru, above, is one of many mud-built villages along the way, perched high up on the rocks and surrounding a Buddhist monastery.
Often there is a rudimentary guest house for travellers, but Ganpat prefers to sleep in a tent or out in the open.
"I love sleeping out under the stars, " he writes, "I once did it for four years, with very few nights' break when the rains were on. There is something magic about the night which one loses altogether when one has to sleep under a roof, even in the very minor degree of a tent roof.
"I don't know what the magic is is that makes you wake in the morning fresh and clear-eyed and all alive with the sheer joy of living. It may be the stars or the great distances of the night sky which soothe the over-wearied heart and brain."
Clearly he does not suffer from night-time chills or an aching back. Plus, of course, you have to take into account that he has several paid staff with him, including a cook, all working to keep him well fed and comfortable.
One of them, Sidika (below), is looking after Dog Bill, who has run out of puff.
Like many Brits of the time, Ganpat has archaic ideas about race and gender, and about the supposed benefits of the British Empire. However, he is scrupulously fair with his team and makes them ride the ponies while he walks.
What he really cares about is being in the mountains: "Just the same wonderful hills which lie everywhere about the Indus all the way up from Sind, right along the Indian frontier and so up here in Little Thibet - hills of naked rock and stone that minute by minute, hour by hour, and day after day, are perpetually changing in colour - gold of dawn; shimmering blue haze of midday; mauve and violet and indigo under the rose and maroon of snow at sunset - wild hills with a fascination all their own for those to whom they call, for such of us as for some hidden reason love them at first sight and for ever after."
You can drive along the route now, but in Ganpat's time they are rough tracks, punctuated by spectacular villages, including Moulbek, below. Dotted around are clusters of Buddhist monuments, called Chortens.
It looks desolate, yet Ganpat meets plenty of people on the road, like this group (below) near Lamayuru and later, on the climb to Khardong, a caravan seemingly from another age.
"We passed the leading men and ponies of a big caravan from Yarkand, who had crossed the pass the evening before, great big ponies with bells at their necks, carrying enormous bales of the rugs and numdahs and felts of Yarkand, Kashgar, and Khotan, and ridden by burly, fair-skinned men with curious felt leg-wrappings and broad-brimmed felt hats."
Ganpat reaches the picturesque mini-city of Leh where he stays long enough to dine with the resident Europeans and visit the monastery stacked up on the hillside.
What strikes him is a painting of the wheel of life showing people suffering in a hell of cold, rather than of flames and heat.
"The cold hells were really terrific. To a people living at an altitude of sixteen thousand feet a cold hell is something very easily visualised...to those of the high mountains the tortures of cold, which can be so intense, are doubtless more convincing, for I don't suppose any Thibetan understands excess of heat."
From Leh he sets off on a one day trip to the Khardong Pass which leads to Yarkand in the north and is now one of the highest drivable roads in the world.
As usual, he puts the others on the ponies and only mounts the dzo for the snap at the summit. Behind some shelter, the cook prepares some tea and boiled eggs while they savour "in the blue distance the great snow peaks of the Karakorum that I had so longed to see" and the view back to the white-topped Ladakh Range.
Ganpat wants to go further but is due back at his office in Murree in the Punjab.
"There before us lay spread out the hills which are the beginning of the true heart of Asia, and to me it was very bitter to have to turn my back on them and not to be able to go forward.
"I wanted to see my string of ponies sliding down that long snow incline in front, our faces set to the old historic highway that goes on and on, through the deserts of the Tarim and the Takla Makan, on and on through the Gobi until you come to the old forgotten ruins of the Great Chinese Wall, traversing countries that have been the birthplace of the oldest civilisations, civilisations that have been sand-buried these thousand years or more."
So he turns around for a forced march of 8 days over those over the hills and passes back to Srinagar, retracing nearly 200 miles, to be back in time for another trip into the mountains.
One puzzle remains, which makes him appear a little blinkered in pursuing his quests. He has a wife, Beryl, and two children who are never mentioned in the book and are, one presumes, waiting back in Muree or in England.
The dogs get to go, but not them. He is a very single-minded man.
He is my great grandfather.