Among the Tibetans | Page 7

and surges of the
wildest description. He kept his presence of mind, however, recovered
himself, and by a desperate effort got ashore lower down, with legs
scratched and bleeding and one horn of the saddle incurably bent.
Mr. Maconochie of the Panjab Civil Service, and Dr. E. Neve of the C.
M. S. Medical Mission in Kashmir, accompanied me from Sonamarg
over the pass, and that night Mr. M. talked seriously to Usman Shah on
the subject of his misconduct, and with such singular results that
thereafter I had little cause for complaint. He came to me and said, 'The
Commissioner Sahib thinks I give Mem Sahib a great deal of trouble;'
to which I replied in a cold tone, 'Take care you don't give me any
more.' The gist of the Sahib's words was the very pertinent suggestion
that it would eventually be more to his interest to serve me honestly
and faithfully than to cheat me.

Baltal lies at the feet of a precipitous range, the peaks of which exceed
Mont Blanc in height. Two gorges unite there. There is not a hut within
ten miles. Big camp-fires blazed. A few shepherds lay under the shelter
of a mat screen. The silence and solitude were most impressive under
the frosty stars and the great Central Asian barrier. Sunrise the
following morning saw us on the way up a huge gorge with nearly
perpendicular sides, and filled to a great depth with snow. Then came
the Zoji La, which, with the Namika La and the Fotu La, respectively
11,300, 13,000, and 13,500 feet, are the three great steps from Kashmir
to the Tibetan heights. The two latter passes present no difficulties. The
Zoji La is a thoroughly severe pass, the worst, with the exception
perhaps of the Sasir, on the Yarkand caravan route. The track, cut,
broken, and worn on the side of a wall of rock nearly 2,000 feet in
abrupt elevation, is a series of rough narrow zigzags, rarely, if ever,
wide enough for laden animals to pass each other, composed of broken
ledges often nearly breast high, and shelving surfaces of abraded rock,
up which animals have to leap and scramble as best they may.
Trees and trailers drooped over the path, ferns and lilies bloomed in
moist recesses, and among myriads of flowers a large blue and cream
columbine was conspicuous by its beauty and exquisite odour. The
charm of the detail tempted one to linger at every turn, and all the more
so because I knew that I should see nothing more of the grace and
bounteousness of Nature till my projected descent into Kulu in the late
autumn. The snow-filled gorge on whose abrupt side the path hangs,
the Zoji La (Pass), is geographically remarkable as being the lowest
depression in the great Himalayan range for 300 miles; and by it, in
spite of infamous bits of road on the Sind and Suru rivers, and
consequent losses of goods and animals, all the traffic of Kashmir,
Afghanistan, and the Western Panjab finds its way into Central Asia. It
was too early in the season, however, for more than a few enterprising
caravans to be on the road.
The last look upon Kashmir was a lingering one. Below, in shadow, lay
the Baltal camping-ground, a lonely deodar-belted flowery meadow,
noisy with the dash of icy torrents tumbling down from the snowfields
and glaciers upborne by the gigantic mountain range into which we had

penetrated by the Zoji Pass. The valley, lying in shadow at their base,
was a dream of beauty, green as an English lawn, starred with white
lilies, and dotted with clumps of trees which were festooned with red
and white roses, clematis, and white jasmine. Above the hardier
deciduous trees appeared the Pinus excelsa, the silver fir, and the
spruce; higher yet the stately grace of the deodar clothed the hillsides;
and above the forests rose the snow mountains of Tilail, pink in the
sunrise. High above the Zoji, itself 11,500 feet in altitude, a mass of
grey and red mountains, snow-slashed and snow- capped, rose in the
dewy rose-flushed atmosphere in peaks, walls, pinnacles, and jagged
ridges, above which towered yet loftier summits, bearing into the
heavenly blue sky fields of unsullied snow alone. The descent on the
Tibetan side is slight and gradual. The character of the scenery
undergoes an abrupt change. There are no more trees, and the large
shrubs which for a time take their place degenerate into thorny bushes,
and then disappear. There were mountains thinly clothed with grass
here and there, mountains of bare gravel and red rock, grey crags,
stretches of green turf, sunlit peaks with their snows, a deep,
snow-filled ravine, eastwards and beyond a long valley filled with a
snowfield fringed with pink primulas;