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.
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