The Snowfield Extended For
Five Miles, From Ten To Seventy Feet Deep, Much Crevassed, And
Encumbered With Avalanches.
In it the Dras, truly 'snow-born,'
appeared, issuing from a chasm under a blue arch of ice and snow,
afterwards to rage down the valley, to be forded many times or
crossed on snow bridges.
After walking for some time, and getting a
bad fall down an avalanche slope, I mounted Gyalpo, and the clever,
plucky fellow frolicked over the snow, smelt and leapt crevasses
which were too wide to be stepped over, put his forelegs together and
slid down slopes like a Swiss mule, and, though carried off his feet
in a ford by the fierce surges of the Dras, struggled gamely to
shore. Steep grassy hills, and peaks with gorges cleft by the
thundering Dras, and stretches of rolling grass succeeded each other.
Then came a wide valley mostly covered with stones brought down by
torrents, a few plots of miserable barley grown by irrigation, and
among them two buildings of round stones and mud, about six feet
high, with flat mud roofs, one of which might be called the village,
and the other the caravanserai. On the village roof were stacks of
twigs and of the dried dung of animals, which is used for fuel, and
the whole female population, adult and juvenile, engaged in picking
wool. The people of this village of Matayan are Kashmiris. As I had
an hour to wait for my tent, the women descended and sat in a circle
round me with a concentrated stare.
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