under Dr. Robertson, left Gilgit. It consisted, besides Dr. Robertson, of Lieutenant Gordon and myself, and we had with us an escort of fifty Sikhs. To reach Chitral we had to cross the Shandur Pass, twelve thousand four hundred feet high, and it was now midwinter. Even near Gilgit snow fell frequently, and on the whole march of two hundred and twenty miles to Chitral it was only in very few places that the snow was not lying deep. At Ghiza, the last village at which we halted before crossing the pass, twenty-four miles from it, and situated at an elevation of ten thousand feet above sea-level, the thermometer was below zero, and the whole country, of course, deep in snow. Through this snow we made our way to the camping-ground of Langar, at the foot of the pass, where we spent the night before crossing it, the Sikh escort in some rough shelters which had been erected for them, and the officers in tents. We were fortunate in only having one or two frost-bites
in our party, and these Bruce at once tackled, rubbing the men's feet till they said they would much rather have the frost-bite than the rubbing. A lanky Indian cook of mine, who had never seen snow in his life before coming to this frontier, was the worst, and implored Bruce and me to let go of him, as we rubbed the skin off his feet. We were fortunate in having a cloudy night, and it was consequently less cold than it would have been had the sky been clear ; and the following day we plodded through the snow over the pass and down to Laspur, the first village on the Chitral side. Here we were met by the governor of the district and a number of notables, and two days later we reached the fort of Mastuj, where a year later I had to spend a dreary winter. Here we made our first halt, and even here the thermometer fell to three degrees below zero, and a bitter wind blew down the valley, which, like the valleys we had passed along the whole way from Gilgit, was narrow and hemmed in by lofty rocky mountains, now covered with snow, but generally bare and desolate looking. On January 25 we
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