welcome they are to travellers, had thoughtfully sent a box of cigars to await my arrival.
Only one day was given up for rest in Srinagar, and then I started on the last stage of my journey, that to Rawal Pindi ;
for I was anxious to accomplish my task in precisely the seven
months which I had said at Peking would be the time necessary for it. So I pushed on, and now at the end of a very
long journey I was feeling " fitter " than when I started, and able to cover the distance rapidly. After arriving at seven o'clock on the evening of November 2, I had my dinner, lay down for an hour or two, and then at twelve o'clock at night started again walking the first march of twelve miles ; then getting into an " ekka," or native cart, which conveyed me for three marches down the newly constructed cart-road. At the end of these three marches I rode another ten miles uphill towards Murree, and arrived at a dak bungalow at sunset. Here I rested, and at three o'clock in the morning started again, marching the ten miles into Murree on foot. From there I took a tonga, and drove rapidly down the hill the last thirty-nine miles into Rawal Pindi. The change was wonderful. I had thought riding a miserable little native pony luxury in comparison with the weary marching on foot. Then the trundling along at a jog-trot in a native cart on the Kashmir road had seemed the very essence of all that was comfortable in travelling. But now I was in a conveyance with a pair of ponies galloping down the hill, and with what seemed perfect rest to me I was covering every hour three or four times the distance I had been able to accomplish on foot, and, still better, I was freeing myself from the nightmare of the mountains, and, in place of the continual barrier after barrier of mountain ranges blocking the way and shutting me in, there was stretched out before me the wide plains of the Punjab. From the plains of Turkestan on the one side, I had made my way through the labyrinth of mountains, over one range after another, past each
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