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; and that was CENTRAL ASIA.
We halted for breakfast, iced our cold tea in the snow, Mr. M. gave a
final charge to the Afghan, who swore by his Prophet to be faithful,
and I parted from my kind escorts with much reluctance, and started
on my Tibetan journey, with but a slender stock of Hindustani, and
two men who spoke not a word of English. On that day's march of
fourteen miles there is not a single hut. 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. They asked if I were dumb, and
why I wore no earrings or necklace, their own persons being loaded
with heavy ornaments.
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