Among the Tibetans | Page 6

darkened into a stifling night we made fast to a reed bed,
not reaching Ganderbal till late the next morning, where my horse and
caravan awaited me under a splendid plane-tree.
For the next five days we marched up the Sind Valley, one of the most
beautiful in Kashmir from its grandeur and variety. Beginning among
quiet rice-fields and brown agricultural villages at an altitude of 5,000
feet, the track, usually bad and sometimes steep and perilous, passes
through flower-gemmed alpine meadows, along dark gorges above the
booming and rushing Sind, through woods matted with the sweet white
jasmine, the lower hem of the pine and deodar forests which ascend the
mountains to a considerable altitude, past rifts giving glimpses of
dazzling snow-peaks, over grassy slopes dotted with villages, houses,

and shrines embosomed in walnut groves, in sight of the frowning
crags of Haramuk, through wooded lanes and park-like country over
which farms are thinly scattered, over unrailed and shaky bridges, and
across avalanche slopes, till it reaches Gagangair, a dream of lonely
beauty, with a camping-ground of velvety sward under noble
plane-trees. Above this place the valley closes in between walls of
precipices and crags, which rise almost abruptly from the Sind to
heights of 8,000 and 10,000 feet. The road in many places is only a
series of steep and shelving ledges above the raging river, natural rock
smoothed and polished into riskiness by the passage for centuries of the
trade into Central Asia from Western India, Kashmir, and Afghanistan.
Its precariousness for animals was emphasised to me by five serious
accidents which occurred in the week of my journey, one of them
involving the loss of the money, clothing, and sporting kit of an English
officer bound for Ladakh for three months. Above this tremendous
gorge the mountains open out, and after crossing to the left bank of the
Sind a sharp ascent brought me to the beautiful alpine meadow of
Sonamarg, bright with spring flowers, gleaming with crystal streams,
and fringed on all sides by deciduous and coniferous trees, above and
among which are great glaciers and the snowy peaks of Tilail. Fashion
has deserted Sonamarg, rough of access, for Gulmarg, a caprice
indicated by the ruins of several huts and of a church. The pure bracing
air, magnificent views, the proximity and accessibility of glaciers, and
the presence of a kind friend who was 'hutted' there for the summer,
made Sonamarg a very pleasant halt before entering upon the supposed
seventies of the journey to Lesser Tibet.
The five days' march, though propitious and full of the charm of
magnificent scenery, had opened my eyes to certain unpleasantnesses. I
found that Usman Shah maltreated the villagers, and not only robbed
them of their best fowls, but requisitioned all manner of things in my
name, though I scrupulously and personally paid for everything,
beating the people with his scabbarded sword if they showed any
intention of standing upon their rights. Then I found that my clever
factotum, not content with the legitimate 'squeeze' of ten per cent., was
charging me double price for everything and paying the sellers only
half the actual price, this legerdemain being perpetrated in my presence.

He also by threats got back from the coolies half their day's wages after
I had paid them, received money for barley for Gyalpo, and never
bought it, a fact brought to light by the growing feebleness of the horse,
and cheated in all sorts of mean and plausible ways, though I paid him
exceptionally high wages, and was prepared to 'wink' at a moderate
amount of dishonesty, so long as it affected only myself. It has a
lowering influence upon one to live in a fog of lies and fraud, and the
attempt to checkmate a fraudulent Asiatic ends in extreme
discomfiture.
I left Sonamarg late on a lovely afternoon for a short march through
forest-skirted alpine meadows to Baltal, the last camping-ground in
Kashmir, a grassy valley at the foot of the Zoji La, the first of three
gigantic steps by which the lofty plateaux of Central Asia are attained.
On the road a large affluent of the Sind, which tumbles down a
pine-hung gorge in broad sheets of foam, has to be crossed. My seis, a
rogue, was either half-witted or pretended to be so, and, in spite of
orders to the contrary, led Gyalpo upon a bridge at a considerable
height, formed of two poles with flat pieces of stone laid loosely over
them not more than a foot broad. As the horse reached the middle, the
structure gave a sort of turn, there was a vision of hoofs in air and a
gleam of scarlet, and Gyalpo, the hope of the next four months, after
rolling over more than once, vanished among rocks