come on to me for assistance. He travelled up to Kashgar with astonishing rapidity, and wanted, after getting information and assistance from me, to start off back again the next day to tackle the Mustagh Pass once more. He was exactly like a bulldog—you could not get him off this pass. He had come out to get over, and it was hours before I could convince him that it was impossible to do so before September. But he had already had experience of the depth and rapidity of the rivers on the way to it, and he gradually saw that it was out of the question. I then asked him for an account of his adventures on the way to Kashgar. It appeared that he had been given two months' leave from his regiment. He had no time to get a proper map of the route he would have to follow ; but he pushed on as hard as he could through Kashmir and Ladak towards the Karakoram Pass, from which point he imagined that he would merely have to " turn to the left " and he would see a long distinct range of snow-mountains, with a gap in them, which would be the Mustagh Pass. He had little idea of the pathless labyrinth of mountain that actually shut in this remote pass ! Crossing his first pass between Kashmir and Ladak, he became snow-blind, and had to be carried across on a bed. At his second—beyond Leh—the Ladakis whom he had engaged struck work, and said the pass would not be open for ponies for weeks yet. But Davison, by measures more severe than diplomatic, managed to get both them and his ponies over. Then came the Karakoram Pass ; and the only way to traverse this in the month of May, when the snow on it was all soft and yielding, was by tediously laying down felts and blankets in front of the ponies for them to walk over, picking them up as the ponies had passed over them, and again laying them down in front—and so on for mile upon mile. Those who have themselves had experience of trudging through soft snow at an elevation of eighteen thousand feet, can best realize what this must have been to a man who had come straight up from the plains of
IIIFカラー高解像度
